In 2019, the former Manchester United captain Eric Cantona collected an award recognising his contributions to the game. Dressed casually, he gave a brief address that baffled the assembled players and journalists. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INiT1cA_Eqk > As flies to wanton boys, we are for the Gods. They kill us for the sport. > Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will be... will fix the cells, to the state. And so we become... eternal. > Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us. But unfortunately, crimes, and wars, will multiply. > I love football. Thank you. What did he mean by this? A lot of people online seem to think this was a swipe at football's governing bodies. It's an easy analysis, with a simple leap of analogy: FIFA and UEFA are Gods, they kill players for "their" sport, which is to say, the literal sport of football. The profit motive, corruption, and capital require ever more out of players, breaking their bodies to sell replica shirts. Very tidy. But this is in fact unsatisfactory, not least because it does not especially coincide with the discussion of mortality in the face of medical advances. The true meaning of Cantona's opening quote from King Lear is that the Gods, be they actual or rhetorical, are capricious; that there is no karmic justice, that bad things happen to good people. Innocents are killed by drunk drivers while murderers die in their own beds at 93. These injustices become only more horrifying as the possibility of immortality looms. To die fifty years before your time is an awful tragedy, but to die with a thousand, or ten thousand years left on the clock is too terrible to comprehend. Then why the need for sport; why the need for football? Because it is tractable and because it is bounded. It is a physical contest, and a tribal conflict, which makes it in a very loose sense an analogue of warfare. But in every instance it ends after about ninety minutes, and no-one gets killed doing it. (When rare deaths do occur on a sports field, it is more loathsome to us than a car accident or a bar fight. Is this because we insist that sport be a form of violence with a bounded capacity for harm?) The joys of winning are material, but finite, as are the pains of losing. Sports fans will happily claim that their enthusiasm for the game is all-consuming, but it is never existentially threatening. People don't kill themselves because their team lost the league. Why does Eric Cantona love football? Because it provides a venue for feelings and for experiences that are strong and actual, and yet at the same time limited, while our broader existence is increasingly defined by emotions that brim over, and losses that tend towards the infinite.