Sport — football in particular — is undoubtedly one of the last collective spaces where emotion is expressed openly, without filters or restraint. In stadiums, bodies rise, voices break, nerves give way. Joy is sudden, almost uncontrollable; frustration is brutal and immediate; the feeling of injustice, when it arises, can become visceral, almost intimate. Everything is allowed — or nearly so — because sport is a theatre in its own right, a ritualized space where excess is not only tolerated but expected. Fervour, exaggeration and emotional intensity are its raw material. Without them, the spectacle would be emptied of substance.
Yet precisely because emotion reigns supreme, it must remain confined to that space. Sport cannot be an extension of political, diplomatic or social life; it is a parenthesis, a suspended moment. The emotion it generates only makes sense if it remains within the arena where it was born. This is the fragile balance of sport: allowing feelings to explode without letting them overflow into other spheres of collective life.
If one were to add up all the hostilities born of sporting defeats perceived as unjust, measure their accumulated emotional charge over generations, and transpose that intensity into the political arena, the world would be in a state of permanent conflagration. Sport concentrates, amplifies and dramatizes emotions that society, outside this codified framework, could not absorb without cracking. It thus plays a paradoxical yet essential role: that of a collective outlet, a space where tensions are expressed in order to dissipate.
This is why the end of the match must mark the end of tension. The final whistle does not merely close a score or a competition; it closes an emotional parenthesis sometimes opened weeks or even months earlier. What was expressed — anger, disappointment, exaltation, sometimes rage — must fade with the competition itself. Failing that, sport ceases to be a game, a space of sublimation, and becomes a seed of lasting division.
Football is not a metaphor for war, despite the easy rhetoric that dresses it in martial language. On the contrary, it is its civilized antithesis. Where war opposes without rules or end, football organizes confrontation within strict, time-bound rules accepted by all. The clash is symbolic, precisely to prevent it from becoming real. We confront one another in order to continue coexisting, to compete without breaking ties, to measure strength without denying that of the other.
The Morocco–Senegal final offered a striking illustration of this. Its chaotic outcome and the frustrations it generated crystallized tensions that did not immediately dissipate. Yet this tension stands in stark contrast to the deep reality of relations between the two countries — solid political ties, dynamic economic cooperation, and dense, fraternal human exchanges. The gap between the sporting incident and the strength of the real partnership reveals the danger of allowing sporting emotion to spill beyond its frame.
Sport must therefore be restored to its rightful place. It cannot and must not contaminate other fields of human relations. Stadiums are places of passion, emotion and sometimes anger, but they cannot become factories of lasting resentment. Football unites far more than it divides, provided its true nature is recognized: an intense collective experience, deeply emotional, but fundamentally ephemeral.
Beyond the score and the trophy, the ultimate purpose of sport remains the rapprochement of peoples. Whether victory favours one side or the other ultimately matters little, as long as the encounter has allowed meeting, exchange and mutual recognition. Competing without hatred, feeling without tearing apart, celebrating without breaking ties — such is the deep promise of sport when its visible and invisible rules are respected.
Sport truly wins only when the emotion it arouses ends where it began, dissolving into a return to calm and giving way to reason, shared memory and mutual respect. The necessary return to common sense comes at this price.
