October, 1957. Parc de Prince Stadium. Racing Club de Paris vs. AS Monaco. Caught off- guard by a deflected cross, Racing goalkeeper Andre Pivois got beat at his near post as the ball bounced slowly into the back of his net. As the crowd cheered tumultuously, a journalist asked Albert Camus about the goalkeeper’s performance. Camus asked us not to blame him. This was no ordinary interview though. Camus had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but for the first time in history, a prize recipient was interviewed not in a comfortable studio but at a soccer game. 

As countless others have quoted him, “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of men I owe to [soccer].” So, one of the greatest thinkers in human history fervently loved a game usually associated with physicality and vulgarity. Why? The reason, perhaps, lies in the fact that soccer fits neatly into his philosophy of the human condition. As it were, he found consolation in the beautiful game. 

Camus’ love for soccer began long before he started writing philosophy. As an orphan growing up in an Algerian slum, he was often reproached by his grandmother for damaging his shoes while playing, but he was undeterred. Some suspect that a desire to minimize the damage to his shoes but still get away with playing inspired Camus to choose to play as goalkeeper. In his unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man, the protagonist Jacques, who echoes the young self of Camus, regards the soccer field as his kingdom. As a young boy, Jacques cannot reconcile the guilt of stealing two francs to watch a soccer game. Soccer is the motivator for both Camus and Jacques to disobey the constraints of a higher authority and the preordained moral standards of society. It is clear, therefore, that soccer helped shape Camus’ view on morality and the human freedom to act, as he explained in his famous dictum. 

How that is so can only be understood by examining his bitter rivalry with Jean-Paul Sartre. As the leader of the French communist party, Sartre thought the ideals of social justice were worth the casualties of innocent people. He advocated for radical means of progress, such as using bombs to terminate French rule in Algeria, which Camus, on the other hand, thought succeeded only in putting convoluted theories before actual human beings. He sought to avoid bloodshed by establishing a simpler morality composed of solidarity and integrity among groups with an understanding of our mutual humanity. His ideas, however, distanced him from the French intellectuals. He became, like the goalkeeper he once was, the outsider.

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov described the goalkeeper as the “lone eagle.” They wear a different kit; they follow different rules; they spend much of their time cut off from the rest of the team. The power of soccer for Camus, however, lies in its ability to help the goalkeeper find commonality with the team, the shared desire to win and feel love for the game. It proves that one can embrace one’s isolation and still be part of a collective. In his novel The Outsider, the main character, Mersault, cannot find any emotional connection with society, yet he is moved by a tram of cheering soccer fans. Soccer provides us authentic connections and commonality. The potency of this force can be illustrated by real examples. Perhaps most memorably, the legendary Pele once interrupted a civil war in Nigeria. Recently, after a game of Atalanta, Russian player Ruslan Miranchuk embraced his Ukrainian teammate Aleksey Malinovsky. This spirit of togetherness was what Camus thought is missing from the complex system of Sartrean morality even though it is palpable in soccer. It is therefore significant that Jean-Baptiste Clemence, in Camus’ The Fall, claims the soccer field is the only place where he feels truly innocent. 

The failure of Sartre, for Camus, is clear. The worshipping of reason can make us less aware of the humans who exist right in front of us. He further challenges rationalism by arguing that when one takes reason to extremes by philosophically examining everything, one must inevitably arrive at the question of “to be or not to be,” or what the meaning of life is, before the inevitability of death appears. As he puts it succinctly and boldly in The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” The central idea of Camus’ philosophy is that existence itself is absurd. Humans constantly search for meaning, only for the universe to remain unsympathetically silent. This tension is what Camus calls the Absurd. The Absurd renders humans desperate and empty, as humans come to the realization that all human actions will be made meaningless by the universe. Camus asks: Is suicide a solution for the Absurd? Camus believes it is merely an evasion. Our only consolation lies in keeping our heads high by revolting relentlessly against the Absurd — focusing on our freedom to act and maintaining this tension fundamental to the human experience. This involves refusing to hope for consolation from higher powers and  unflinchingly accepting the futility of existence. In this way, we are bound by no inherent principles or grand teleology and the Absurd becomes liberating by allowing us to focus on the present. 

This view of the world is, to a large extent, consistent with the foundations of soccer. Soccer is, in essence, 22 people chasing a spherical piece of inflated leather rolling on a field of grass. In any form of rational analysis, it would be ridiculous to experience passionate euphoria simply because a ball crossed a line. Therefore, soccer is ultimately pointless and absurd. However, that is the case for all human strife, be it caused by pursuit of knowledge, social justice, or happiness. The universe will one day render all human actions pointless. We must therefore approach the world with more than cold reason, for it is not reason from which meaning stems, but active human pursuit of the things we viscerally love “not with [our] mind, not with logic, but with [our] insides, [our] guts,” as Dostoevsky puts it. Like Sisyphus, who rolls a boulder up a hill just for it to roll back down again, by pursuing soccer, we too commit to a hopeless investment. We acknowledge that the sport is just a game; when a pandemic or air disaster takes place, for instance, we relegate sport to the back burner and postpone our games. But that by no means diminishes our ardor, and we continue to wave our fists at the sky. By continuing to run for the ball and embrace the game, we dance in celebration of the absurd and appreciate the pointless, which for existentialists, is appreciation of presence itself. When we play, watch and wholeheartedly indulge in soccer, it feels as if time stops. That is because we experience concentrated presence and become more embedded in the world by making the fullest out of our mundane experience, which for Camus, is the ultimate consolation to the Absurd. 

A few years from now, nature will deprive Messi and Ronaldo of their ability to rule the football pitch. In the grand scheme of things, whatever happens in the stadium will one day be forgotten. When a bicycle kick scores, when a magical pass soars past, a clean and courageous tackle is nailed, or a flying save is made, we don’t escape our plight, but as great players stun us with their skills, they negate the limits of the human physiology and temporarily defy the predictability of the physical world. In this way, we witness moments of ephemeral beauty and transient transcendence. Beauty, for Camus, is not something of timeless value but, as he puts it, glimpses of “eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” It is that which prompts the attitude to revolt against the Absurd. For every piece of soccer well played, the stadium is ignited as fans around the world immerse in celebration. The celebration of this pointless piece of play is our rebellion against the Absurd prompted by great players. Soccer, for Camus, is the search for beauty in the face of our absurd predicament. As Sisyphus strives endlessly to the summit, Camus tells us that “it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy.” Indeed, with soccer, we are very happy. 

Camus always was. Though he was forced to hang up his gloves and retire at 18 due to tuberculosis, throughout the rest of his life, he diligently followed the sports press and frequently attended games. When he moved to Lourmarin, he socialized with village players and enjoyed coffee with them after games. At his funeral, the village players carried his coffin. Shortly before he died, his friend Charles Poncet asked him if he would prefer soccer or theatre. “Soccer without hesitation,” he answered. At that moment, he must have thought of the beautiful game as a manifestation of his absurdist philosophy, a paradigm for his more candid morality of camaraderie. Perhaps he saw it as an unabashed pursuit of constructed meaning dashed with moments of transitory beauty in a defiant rebellion against the absurdity of the universe: a consolation for the political and existential confusions of society that escaped the prison of rationality to emphasize the concrete reality of existence. Just a game, just an absurdly beautiful game.