Football: The beautiful game
Football: The world’s best-known sport. People see it as a religion, some as a passion, while others see it only as a simple game.
But there is much more than a physical aspect in the beautiful game of football. In the eyes of many refugees, football is the key to happiness, something to make a person feel light even when the rest of the world seems very dark.
Milad Abazid of Syria and Mohammad Hashim from Afghanistan belong to the football team at the Association Pierre Claver in Paris. These two men fled their countries to escape violence, and are now even more united by their fervor for football.
In the eyes of Abazid and Shahab, football is not just a sport. It is a key to a successful life and most probably the key to happiness.
They conveyed their love for what is sometimes called "the king of sports" in written answers to my questions, which I emailed to them a few weeks ago, after ASP and Claver's first-ever match-up at the Stade de la Marche in Vaucresson on Oct. 17.
When asked what football meant to him, Hashim said, “To play football is to live a successful life with many difficulties, joylessness and sadness that’s always guided us. By doing sports like playing football we will forget those sad moments and continue a normal life.”
Hashim explained that football was a lesson of life: “From football we learn how to compete, how to be disciplined, how to work hard, and how to lead and follow.”
Abazid saw football as more of a game, though a universal one.
“Football is the best way to make connections between people all over the world,” he wrote. “It has its own language.”
In fact, for many refugees, football can be seen as a key to integration.
When they came to Paris, many refugees at Claver started with nothing. Only a few of them spoke English, and in most cases, they did not have a way to communicate with the people of France, their new country.
They had nothing left but football.
With this fervor, Abazid and Hashim joined the Association Pierre Claver, created a football team, and step by step, integrated themselves into a new home.
The video that they sent to The American School of Paris before our football match on Oct. 17 showed us that football is the international language in this world. (Editor's note: The video is being withheld to protect the safety of one of the players shown in the video.)
Indeed, as the Claver and ASP players met on the pitch, no words were needed, just the signs and sounds of players running after the ball, a conversation of strength and dexterity.
One might call it not a verbal dialect, but more of a mutual and physical set of expressions, which every person present on a field understands. In this dialogue, nationalities and differences fall to the side. The football takes over.
In the lives of many people, football is a symbol of hope, of light. A passion that, as Hashim said, makes people forget about their difficulties of the past and make them focus on the future move that will lead to a new goal.
The field is not just grass and two goals — it is a huge house, where everyone is welcomed by the warm universal family that is football.
—Soccer poster by Lucas Lippman/American School of Paris
