His predecessor loved Mozart, but Pope Francis’s passion was football. For him, it was the “most beautiful game” and also a vehicle to educate and spread peace.

By Argentinean compatriots Lionel Messi and the late Diego Maradona in Zlatan Ibrahimovic AND Buffon GianluigiFrancis took the biggest football stars in the Vatican, signing dozens of shirts and balls from all over the world.

He often confessed to play as a young man on the streets of Buenos Aires, using a ball made of rags.

While admitting he was “Not among the best” and that “He had two left -handed feet”He often played as a goalkeeper, whom he said was a good way to learn how to answer “The risks that can reach from anywhere.”

His love for football was inseparable from his loyalty to San Lorenzo The club in Buenos Aires, where he went to watch matches with his father and his brothers.

“Was romantic football,” he recalled.

He kept his membership even after the Pope became and caused a little riot when he received a membership card from rivals Boca Juniors as part of an educational partnership in the Vatican.

Francis continued with the progress of the club thanks to one of the Swiss Vatican guards, which would leave the results and league tables on his table.

‘Beyond the individual interest’

Football is often compared to a religion for its fans, and Francis held many giant measures in football stadiums on travel abroad.

French bishop Emmanuel Gobilliard, the Vatican delegate for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, said he understood the essential role played by football.

“Whether you are an amateur or professional footballer, whether you like watching it on television, there is no difference: this sport is part of people’s lives,” he said AFP.

But it was not only a goal in itself – Francis, a Argentine Jesuit, also saw football as a way to spread peace and education, despite money and corruption in some of its management.

In 2014, the Olympic Stadium in Rome hosted an “inter-religious match” for peace at its initiative.

“Many say football is the most beautiful game in the world. I think too,” Francis declared in 2019.

As early as 2013, addressing the Italian and Argentine teams, Francis reminded the players for their “social responsibilities” and warned against the “business” football surpluses.

As with religion, the goal in football is to “put the collective first, go beyond the individual interest,” Gobilliard said.

“We are in the service of something greater than ourselves, which transcends us collectively and personally.”

Pele with a ‘big heart’

Pontiff’s love for the game inspired a scene in Netflix’s hit film ‘The Two Popes’, in which former Pope Benedict XVI and the then cardiac Jorge Bergoglio look at the 2014 World Cup final between their two countries, Germany and Argentina.

It was a pure fabrication, as Francis who would soon give up on watching television in 1990 – the year that the then Western Germany defeated Argentina in the Italian -organized World Cup final – while his predecessor preferred classical music and reading.

Francis never mentioned the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, which took place in the midst of a dictatorship when he was a provincial leader of the Jesuits.

But he devoted an entire chapter in his 2024 autobiography Maradona, whose famous ‘hand’ purpose of which helped Argentina defeat England in their 1986 World Cup clash.

“When, like Pope, I took Maradona to the Vatican a few years ago … I joked,” so what is the hand of guilt? “” He said in 2024.

While his connection to San Lorenzo was dressed in the sleeve, he otherwise tried to avoid taking members.

In 2022, before the World Cup final between France and Argentina in Qatar, he called on the winner to celebrate the victory with “humility”.

And he once asked who was the greatest player of the game, Maradona or Messi, Pope defended his bets.

“Maradona, as a player, was great. But as a man, he failed,” Francis said, referring to his decades of dependent on the fight against cocaine and alcohol.

He described Messi as a “sir”, but added that he would choose a third, Pele, “a man with a heart”.