Idols or idiots? Why sporting stars cannot bear the weight we place on them

Why it’s wise to know their place, and ours, in the universe.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A professional footballer wearign a red top stands proudly beneath a white and black banner.

Marcus Rashford's Who I Really Am video.

The Players' Tribune.

I wouldn’t know, being a fairly average but enthusiastic player of many sports - but the life of a top footballer must be one of extremes. There are the physical sacrifices to be made in hours in the gym, honing skills in daily training, pushing your body towards fitness, maintaining the tuning of your body so it peaks just at the right time on match day. On the other hand, there is the boredom of afternoons after training with little to do but play FIFA 23 on the X Box, or finding ways to spend the vast amounts of money that comes to the average Premier League footballer.

But perhaps even more, there is the way the public treats you. You swing between idol or idiot pretty quickly. Take Marcus Rashford. Last season, he could not stop scoring - 30 goals in 56 games for Manchester United & England, including three at the World Cup. Confidence was sky high, he was making the runs and finding the positions that enabled him to rack up the goals. This season, it has all changed. He seems listless, lacking in confidence. At the time of writing he has only scored five goals all season, (Erling Haaland has scored 17, Mo Salah 15). Every move or sign of body language is dissected by pundits or on social media, and he is no longer a sure starter for his club – an unheard of possibility last season. And there was the famous bender that he went on in a night out in Belfast a few weeks ago - a sign that something somewhere is wrong.

We have always tried to turn sports stars into idols. George Best was perhaps the first truly global, fully marketed star with a public image, idolised by both football fans and women (at the time, the two groups were much more distinct than they are today). Until, that is, his spectacular fall from grace. Soon after he reached the pinnacle of winning the European Cup with Manchester United in 1968, the descent began. He went out too much, lost his focus, made bad choices, left United and after various haphazard spells with a slew of clubs across the world including Fulham, Stockport County and the San Jose Earthquakes (yes, even them), he become a professional playboy, unable to control his alcoholism, appearing drunk on TV chat shows, being jailed for drunk driving until his tragic early death aged just 59 in 2005.

None of us are capable of taking on the worship of others, because we will always disappoint in the end.

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The ability to do things we ordinary mortals cannot do inevitably leads us to idolise such people. Crowds perform the lowering of outstretched arms in semi-mock worship. Encomiums are written in the media on the extraordinary talent on display. Hopes are invested that this person will lead their club or country to sporting immortality.

Yet at other times, they are vilified as idiots. The David Beckham Netflix documentary series is a salutary reminder of the astonishingly vindictive public treatment he received after getting sent off playing for England in the World Cup Quarter Final against Argentina in 1998. Perhaps now, with our increased awareness of mental health, the reaction would not be so vile, but the treatment of the England players who missed penalties in the Final of the Euros in 2020 warns us against too much complacency.

If you’ve ever met a sports star in the flesh and spent any time talking to them (I’ve met a few) what strikes you is how ordinary they are. They may be shy, awkward, embarrassed - a bit like the rest of us, They may be able to perform physical feats that you can’t do, but I bet there are things you can do that they can’t, and that they wish they could do. Your talents may not be so much in demand and not attract as much financial reward, but just like you, they have their fears, anxieties, weaknesses and quirks. As we learnt from Netflix, David Beckham can’t go to bed without cleaning every surface in the kitchen and having his shirts lined up in colour co-ordinated rows.

Sports stars are neither idols nor idiots. They are people. People who enjoy praise, so that it can go to their heads, but get hurt when they read vile things said about them. None of us are capable of taking on the worship of others, because we will always disappoint in the end. It is why Christian faith is so insistent on the danger of idolatry in all forms – taking something created by God and making it into a god. Theologian James KA Smith warns of the danger for a culture that has given up on God: "it is precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you are most prone to absolutize the temporal." As St Augustine put it, paganised cultures tend to take created things and turn them into idols, and idols always disappoint, or even worse enslave.

A vital part of Christian wisdom has always been to know our place within the universe – that we are called to the dignity of taking responsibility for, exercising a kind of benign dominion over the rest of creation, looking after it and caring for it on behalf of the Creator. Yet at the same time, we are ‘a little lower than the angels’ and certainly less than God. We are not self-created, free to rise as high as we can, aiming for the stars.

On my regular journey into London some while ago, I used to pass a primary school that promised prospective parents that with the help of their teachers, there was ‘no limit to what your child can achieve’. It’s that kind of empty rhetoric that is so dangerous – it is bound to lead to a sense of disappointment when your beloved offspring doesn’t become a hot-shot lawyer, a brain surgeon, a wealthy banker or a sporting hero, but ends up serving behind a till in Tescos, or nursing the sick in a hospital, even though these jobs are just as valuable and essential for society as the better-paid ones. However gifted we are, there are things we cannot do, and will never do. All of us are frail vessels, with remarkable abilities, whether physical, social or intellectual, with the capacity for extraordinary acts of love and compassion, yet also liable to give into temptation to lie, cheat, or steal, as likely to let down our friends as much as to be loyal to them.

Knowing our place in the world would stop us exalting our sporting heroes too high, or lambasting them as so low – raising them to heaven, or sending them to hell – that was never our job but God’s. It would restore them as not idols or idiots but people – loved sinners if you like – with a high calling and remarkable abilities, yet with moral frailties and feebleness at the same time – just like us.

Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A Nigerian man looks up towards the camera, behind him is dusty ground

Manga survived an attempted beheading.

Open Doors.

This article contains distressing content.

Something is happening. And nobody is talking about it.

Nigeria, the big and beautiful ‘Giant of Africa’, is becoming a place of increasing terror for the hundred million Christians who call it home. Since 2000, 62,000 people have been killed for having a Christian faith. Eight-thousand people were killed in 2023 alone. These staggering numbers mean that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria than in every other country combined.

The violence is as extreme as it gets. And yet, very few of us know that it’s happening.

When it comes to the Nigerian government and media, the relentlessly brutal attacks are seemingly hidden in plain sight; undeniable and yet somehow unstoppable. While, in the UK, we appear to be entirely unaware. This violence is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. The reasons why are admittedly complex, as outlined by Chris Wadibia. Nevertheless, the violence being carried out toward the Nigerian people, particularly those living in the Northern states, surely deserves our attention.

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Northern Nigeria. While I was there, I got to know a group of people who had endured unimaginable trauma, largely because of their Christian faith. Every day, they would bravely tell their stories – who they were and what they had experienced. Every day, I looked into the faces of children who had lost parents, parents who had lost children, husbands who had lost wives, and wives who had lost husbands. All of a sudden, the bewildering statistics were people before me – people who were having to live with the images of their loved ones being ‘butchered’ before their very eyes. Their villages being burnt down. Their lives being turned upside down by militants with assault rifles and machetes.

The only reference I had for stories such as the ones I was hearing were apocalyptic movies. But these things happened. They happened to the people sitting across from me. This violence is not the stuff of gruesome fiction, it’s the stuff of reality.

As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety...

I met one woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.

There was another woman, she was strong and defiantly compassionate. Her story is laced with horror. She studied at a university – the discrimination she experienced there meant that a course that was supposed to be four years long, took her eight years to complete. In 2014, Boko Haram attacked the university – while she was trying to escape, her friend was shot and ‘hacked at’ while he refused to deny his Christian faith. She recalls how his last words were ‘I’m happy. I’ve saved lives today. And I have Jesus’.

He died and she continued to run. As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety, as she did so, she heard the mother being shot behind her.

She ran those twins to Cameroon, leaving them in safety, and now lives in a rural Nigerian village where she teaches the local children. Her Christian identity is no secret, and so faces continual danger. Her crops were burnt to the ground and destroyed, twice. And the villagers have tried, repeatedly, to get her to leave. One night, she came face to face with young men with bats and machetes who threatened her life – she told them – ‘you can’t scare me. I have seen the Lord’.

And they left. Remarkably, that village is still her home.

One heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.

This is what is happening. This is what we are not seeing.

While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

Since my return, I have met with a man who bears the physical scars of his trauma. He thought his house was being pillaged by armed robbers - it was only when they led him, his brother and his father outside, made them kneel with their hands tied behind their backs, and demanded that they denounce their Christian faith that he realised he was being attacked by Boko Haram. It was a regular evening, he was putting together a lesson plan for his class the following day, and now he was kneeling before an executioner. His father refused their demand, and they beheaded him. His brother also refused, and they took a blade to him, too. Then it was his turn, and while his mind was filled with thoughts of death and how much this was about to hurt, he also prayed that these men would be forgiven for what they were doing. Taking after Jesus, who forgave his executioners mid-execution, this man continued to pray as he felt the blade in his neck.

Left to bleed to death, miraculously, both him and his brother survived. Now, his scar tells an astonishing story.

This epidemic of violence seems to reside under our radar. It’s not quite catching our eye, is it? And, as a result, is not quite receiving the force of our outrage nor benefiting from the depths of our compassion. So many of the people that I met expressed a feeling of being neglected – like they’re suffering in deafening silence. While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

What’s happening in Nigeria is a crisis, one that we must acknowledge.