Obstacle to asset: how Christianity’s perception flipped within football

The nickname back then was not intended as a compliment. Graham Daniels had for a while wondered if he might be the only Christian in football. The culture of the game, as he experienced it during his playing days in the 1980s, did not seem to allow for faith. It was, he said, unapologetically “macho”, hard-drinking, hard-living, governed by a “what goes on tour, stays on tour” omertà.

It had been a relief then to discover a couple of like-minded team-mates at Cambridge United. Daniels, David Moyes and Alan Comfort discussed scripture, read the Bible. It did not always meet with the approval of the rest of the squad. In his autobiography, Roy McDonough confessed to needling them by sticking “lurid tabloid stories” on the wall. They were called, witheringly, the God Squad.

Tone, though, is everything. Before Arsenal games, about 10 players – including Bukayo Saka, Noni Madueke and Jurriën Timber, who is known as the Pastor – hold a regular prayer circle. They conduct Bible study groups on away trips. Gabriel Jesus carries his copy on the team bus. Eberechi Eze, among others, has spoken openly about the importance of his faith. They are known, inside the club, as the Bible Brothers. Forty years on, it is said with affection, rather than disdain.

Daniels, now the general director of Christians in Sport, regards that change as evidence of a “cultural shift” within football that is both profound and somehow tacit. This month’s cover of Premier Christianity magazine, for example, features the headline “The Triumph of the Cross”. The main image is of Eze, his fingers forming the sign of the cross; behind him, Calvin Bassey and Saka are pictured with their hands lifted to the sky.

More secular elements of both the print and broadcast media, though, seem to have been a little more reticent to acknowledge it. When they have, it has either been as a source of controversy – such as when Marc Guéhi wrote “Jesus Loves You” on the rainbow armband he had been given for the Premier League’s Pride game – or as a phenomenon specific to Arsenal.

It has been treated as an exception, when it is increasingly a rule: in the past few years, visible displays of Christian faith have become an ever-more frequent feature of the English game.

Alisson Becker reads the Bible in the Liverpool dressing room. His team-mate Cody Gakpo has revealed a vest reading “I Belong To Jesus” after scoring. Taiwo Awoniyi, the Nottingham Forest forward, has the symbol of the cross on his shinpads. Fulham’s Alex Iwobi has played with it taped to his wrist. Ben Gannon-Doak, the Bournemouth winger, has Bible verses inscribed on his strappings. Others, including Gabriel Jesus, also have them on their undershirts.

The scale of the transformation is difficult to overstate. “We’ve been doing a piece of quantitative research over the last few months, speaking to clubs across the top six tiers of English football,” Daniels said. It will be published later this month; the headline finding, though, is that 75% of teams reported having players “who professed Christian faith in their first-team squads”.

More than 60 backroom staff attend the weekly online meetings that Daniels runs through Christians in Sport. More populous still are the daily 7am prayer meetings and weekly study groups – in three languages – by Ballers in God, an organisation established in 2015 by the former Crystal Palace and Tottenham midfielder John Bostock. The first session had just four players.

It now has more than 600 members, as well as a ministry for players’ partners, a merchandise line – including Awoniyi’s shinpads – and an annual retreat, at which Bostock told the evangelist minister J.John that some players have experienced “healings, signs, miracles, and encounters with the Holy Spirit”. The group’s motto is “souls before goals”.

“Some of that change is down to pioneers like Linvoy Primus and Darren Moore,” said Omar Beckles. The 34-year-old, by his own admission, wears “many hats”. He is a defender for Gillingham and Grenada; he is the chair of the Professional Footballers’ Association; and he is a member of Christians in Sport, Ballers in God and F3 (Football, Faith, Fellowship); he is also speaking at this month’s Thy Kingdom Come conference. “That generation had to endure a lot of obvious discrimination, but they paved the way.”

That is not, though, the only factor. Daniels points to the dawn of the Premier League, and the subsequent influx of players from different Christian traditions, but all from countries in which overt displays of faith are less exceptional, less unusual, than they might be, or might have been, in Britain. “That range of cultures had a huge impact,” he said.

That has combined, Beckles said, with the rise of a generation of British players of African or Caribbean descent and raised in communities that have a church at their centre. “You’d be surprised at the numbers who have parents who were a pastor, or a priest, or who served a church,” he said. “But it’s not a Black or white thing: I’ve met a lot of players who can trace their faith to the Welsh revival.”

The biggest difference, though, may well be the nature of the environment that they are joining, rather than the one they have come from. “Football is much more inclusive now,” Beckles said. “That applies to all sorts of things, whether it’s race or gender or sexuality, but faith is part of that. It mirrors society in that sense. It is now a space where people can be confident about talking about their beliefs.”

The fact that players feel so comfortable performing their faith in public, Daniels said, can be read as a measure of the game’s maturity. “When I was playing, the assumption was that it was an obstacle,” he said. Team spirit, his generation believed, was found at the bottom of a bottle. The assumption was that religion stood at odds with that. “You had two paths, really: you would be bullied or isolated,” he said.

As that culture has evaporated – the high life replaced by high performance – those players who are religious have been empowered to express their faith more openly. “It has changed completely,” Daniels said. “The cultural norms have shifted, away from a very narrow worldview of what it is to be a player. It has become more accepting of Christian faith.”

Photograph by Julian Finney/Getty Images