"What should we do with them when they're not working?"

This article by Terry Eagleton's does not do for football ("[It] offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy") what Roland Barthes' famous essay did for professional wrestling ("Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters"), but it does contain one important insight:

The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game's history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht's theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.

This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique.

Indeed, it is a troubling contrast.