From the Gospel according to football

It wasn’t much of a strike. No backlift. No power. No whip. Just a gentle nudge of a football at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. But in that nakedly beautiful moment last May, the man once known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio turned the ordinary into something sacred.

The crowd cheered, more out of reverence than excitement. On the touchline, Gianluigi Buffon stood with a grin that knew the gravity of the moment. Children spilled onto the pitch, chasing the ball like it was a comet falling to Earth. The frail frame of Pope Francis meanwhile leaned back in his chair and watched. It was a small gesture on a large stage, and a reminder that not all sacred moments echo through cathedrals.

This wasn’t a publicity stunt. It wasn’t a novelty act to placate the masses. It was an 87-year-old man - goalkeeper by childhood trade, pope by vocation - doing what came naturally to him: using football to speak a language the world could understand.

The occasion was World Children’s Day, a Vatican initiative to celebrate the dignity and dreams of children everywhere. Retired Italian greats joined hundreds of kids at the stadium for a day that was filled with colour and noise and laughter, but it was the image of Pope Francis nudging the ball into play that lingered longest.

Before the white robes and the balcony in St. Peter’s Square, and before the sermons and synods and encyclicals, the former head of the Catholic Church was just a boy in Buenos Aires with a love for football and a stubborn loyalty to San Lorenzo. And in the working class neighbourhood of Flores, the future pope stood between makeshift posts as goalkeeper. Other kids called him “El Pata Dura” - The Hard Foot - not for the power of his shots, but for his apparent lack of skill. In his autobiography he admitted as much, claiming that he usually stood in goal as he wasn’t exactly the most technically gifted footballer in his neighbourhood.

But in Argentina, football wasn’t just about glory - it was about belonging. It was about how you stitch yourself into the fabric of a place, how you learned about defeat and resilience, how you figured out when to take the blame and when to lift others. All lessons that, with time and reflection, would come to sound like theology in disguise.

San Lorenzo became his team, and his devotion never drifted. He held onto that club like it was a piece of his soul - he attended games as a boy and followed the club through lean years, even carrying his membership card with him into the papacy. And when the club rose again, they came to Rome to visit their most famous fan. Twice.

In 2013, the club visited him after winning the Argentine league title. The players brought him a replica trophy and one of the gloves their goalkeeper wore during the game that secured them the title. He smiled and said they belonged in a Vatican museum. The following year, the club returned again with the Copa Libertadores, the greatest prize in South American football. During a public audience, he said: “They are part of my cultural identity.” So, to understand the late Pope’s relationship with football, you have to start there - not in Rome, but on the cracked pavements of Flores, where a boy found grace in muddy saves and scraped knees.

To him, football was never just a game. It was a way to teach values too often lost in politics and on pulpits. He once called it a “school of virtue”. That belief found its purest expression in 2014, when he summoned the game’s greats - Diego Maradona, Roberto Baggio and Javier Zanetti among others to the Stadio Olimpico for the Interreligious Match for Peace. Players of different faiths and creeds came together not to compete, but to symbolise something bigger - that sport, when stripped of its tribalism, could be a bridge between people who otherwise might never speak.

The Pope didn’t lace up, but his fingerprints were all over the event. He knew that a football match could move hearts as powerfully as a homily - and that somewhere in the roar of the crowd was the faint murmur of unity.

But he also saw what the game was becoming - and he didn’t always care for its evolution. In his quiet, deliberate way, he reminded football of its soul.

“Sport is harmony,” he said. “But if money and success prevail as the aim, this harmony crumbles."

For all his talk of football as an instrument for bridge-building, the pontiff never lost sight of the players themselves - the flawed, yet brilliant humans at the heart of the game.

When Diego Maradona died, Francis prayed for him quietly. They had met in Rome during that Match for Peace, two Argentine icons shaped by different worlds but united by football’s magic. Indeed, in reference to the Hand of God goal at the 1986 World Cup, he joked with the Argentinian legend: “So, which is the guilty hand?” His admiration for Messi was gentler. Asked if Messi was divine, the pope replied: “He’s great to watch - but he’s not God.” Although he admired brilliance, he never confused it for meaning. He was able to recognise something in the game stats could never measure.

He never managed a team. He never scored a famous goal. But from the streets of Buenos Aires to the Chair of Saint Peter, Pope Francis saw football clearly - not as spectacle, but as spirit. He understood that the game’s beauty lived not in transfer fees or highlight reels, but in loyalty, humility and the quiet ways it stitched people together across the globe.

In a sport so often sold to the highest bidder, he was a rare thing: a romantic who never stopped believing in what football could be. And maybe, just maybe, he understood its soul better than anyone who ever laced up a boot.