FOOTBALL IS FREEDOM

Recently, while scrolling through my Insta reels—an algorithmic cocktail of dogs, vintage football videos, goalkeeping tips and scrumptious food — I stumbled across Bob Marley’s throw-away line: “Football is freedom.”

As a child I didn’t fully understand the actual meaning. I took it for a postcard slogan, the kind you paste on a school bag next to Manchester United’s crest. It sounded nice, like something adults said when they didn’t want to explain too much.

As a teenager, though, the phrase started to make sense. Back then, I thought it meant that football offered an escape from economic hardship. After all, wasn’t that the story we kept hearing? The boy who polished shoes in Tres Corações before becoming Pele, the king of the beautiful game. The boy from Madeira, Cristiano Ronaldo, who grew up in a house so small it barely had a roof but who worked relentlessly until he owned stadiums under his name. Lionel Messi, injected with hormones so he could grow taller, now carrying the hopes of a nation that worships his left foot. Ronaldinho, who dribbled away the shadows of poverty with a smile so wide it made the world forget the hardship behind it. And George Weah, the only African to win the Ballon d’Or, who swapped Monrovia’s dust for Parisian lights and then returned home to rebuild his country as its president. Five different individuals, four different nationalities, one shared narrative: the rags were real, the riches were the epilogue, and every kid with boots suddenly had a believable plotline.

But now, as I am about to complete four decades on this planet, I realise that football is more than an escape. It offers solace. It becomes the place you return to, not because you want to get out of somewhere but because you need to steady yourself within.

The game doesn’t hand out certificates for potential; it keeps score of who turned up after the bell rang. And yes, you will fall.

I once let a timid shot slip under my body in the latter half of the match – lost us the inter-house Cup. Team Bezbaruah in Yellow, whom I represented, against Team Bordoloi in Green. The silence that followed was so dense you could’ve cut it with a katana. My teammates didn’t say a word; they simply pointed to the centre circle. Translation: get up, the game is still on.

That lesson ships free with every football: failure is an event, not an identity. Choose not to fail and the scoreboard resets in ninety seconds. I have used that line in college, in boardrooms, in hospital waiting areas – the clock is still running, jog back.

We love to print traits on glossy paper – visionary, leader, game-changer. Football shrugs. Until you trap the ball under floodlights with a man on your back, the adjectives are just Scrabble tiles. I have seen CEOs in studded boots hide behind a centre-half because the pass asked for courage they hadn’t practiced. Conversely, I have watched the quietest accountant in our group pull a Cruyff turn that dropped several jaws. The turf is a truth serum; it outs you.

The dressing room is the only place where a general manager, an intern and the college kid who works part time with delivery companies sit shoulder-to-shoulder and argue about the same offside call. We speak in different tongues until the ball starts rolling; then syntax is replaced by a through-ball.

The game doesn’t do favours. Your family can be the club sponsor or even the owner; if you can’t be an asset for the team then you’re on the bench. Talent is the most democratic thing we have left.

Of late, the world has become a stadium where every stand boos. News cycles are just extra-time without a whistle. So I find myself lacing up more often, not to stay fit but to stay sane. When the play sprouts, the mind empties like a sand-timer flipped upside down. The only border is the touchline, the only passport is a pair of shin-guards. Bills, ageing parents, the creeping realisation that the hairline is receding faster than my dive speed – all of it pauses. But when the ball spins, and for that instant the planet is perfectly round again.

Freedom, then, is not the final whistle; it is the space between two touches, when nothing else can barge in. Football does not promise you a contract, a mansion, or a World Cup. It promises you a breather. And sometimes—when the night is heavy, when the headlines won’t shut up—that breather is enough to let the next breath in.

So I keep an old pair of boots in the car boot. Not because I expect a scout to whisper “You still got it,” but because every so often I need to remember that ninety minutes can still feel like ninety pages of peace. Bob Marley was right - Football is freedom – it is the quiet cerebral room where the world cannot follow.