Ancient hunter gatherer peoples worked together to bring about the strengths of one another in order to survive. Standing in the middle of a frozen plain, looking at a pack of mastadons, there is naught but scarcity for your average upright standing homosabien. Therefore the idea of unity became imperative almost as soon as they could grasp the idea of it. Now they could organise, they could talk amongst themselves and they could come up with a plan or a kind of coordinated structure that could isolate one of the mastadons, and get the thing outnumbered and harvest it. and then it would be happy times, they could bring the mastadon carcass back to their little gang of frozen plain hunter/gatherers and they could use every last inch of the thing the had conquered. We are a species that love a cooperative effort.
When one tribe would come up against another tribe out on the contested terriorty, between the unarticulated spaces between the two groups, it was only reasonable that they would use the same principles that brought success in the mastadon hunt; organize yourselves, put yourself in places that you can get the advantage and take what was up for grabs. If one group was better at contesting for the spaces and territories, they got them. If the two groups found themselves to be essentially equal, there would be an approximate middle ground and the space could be reasonably and respecitvely shared.
This idea of contesting between two groups was so effective and existed so early that we’ve probably been holding some version of these contests for hundreds of thousands of years. In development of the contest, it becomes impractical to erradicate all possible opponents, both on a logistical level and and broader, more macro level. The groups needed some stablility of agreement between themselves in order to hold the territory they stood. The known, but stalemated enemy is always safer than the unknown, unforeseen predator. So why repeatedly march your best warriors, or hunters, or tribes into slaughter when you can establish rules of engagement and have a mutual agreement of what the spoils will be for a victor in not war, not a hunt, but a competition. Instead of having everyone bring their own martial weapons what if there was just one weapon alloted for the entire group? A single weapon contested for possesion by both sides. A game within the game. And for good measure, why don’t we make the point of having the weapon to be able to charge down the proverbial mastadon the other side is simultaneously attempting to protect? Now we are stacking multiple layers of strategy and motive on top of each other while we’re doing one single thing; competing for a multifaceted claim to superiority, within the framework of the rules of engagement. It’s a lot more logistically stable for your tribe, and the other tribes, and it still allows for a very helpful output of structuring a macro level social hierarchy in your tribe, and amongst all the other tribes in this competition. Now instead of bloodshed and annihilation we have strategy and sustainability over time. It is now no longer literally life or death but we can still treat it as such, that slakes the thirst of our inner hunter/warrior but without the costs to the greater tribe and the entire population of the frozen plain.
There are those who don’t understand where the passion and dedication comes from. Why people are so excitable and so caught up in a game that can bring out the worst in ourselves. There are moments that transcend rationale and are so evocative and so overwelming that they are only experienced as slipstream unadulterated unintellible emotion. This game, for better or worse, goes right down into the roots of human beings. Deep down in to the parts of our brain that have been around for as long as we have been able to walk as a species, perhaps longer.
When you can overlay the evolutionary perspective over the mundane and even toxic landscape of the beautiful game, you can begin to understand why these strange, wonderful, agonizing, glorious, heart-wrenching moments mean so much to the people that expereience them in real time. You can begin to understand why we love this game.