The night after I finished my high school exams, I stayed up till dawn celebrating and then caught a plane to Munich. It was June 25, 1988, and the Netherlands were playing the U.S.S.R. in the European Championship final. I am not Dutch, but I had grown up football-mad in a small Dutch town. My parents paid for my flight as a graduation present, and that afternoon, on no sleep, I was among tens of thousands of orange-clad Dutchmen striding toward the Olympic Stadium through an otherwise deserted Munich. Absurd as it sounds, we experienced the day — and that whole glorious European Championship — as a symbolic reversal of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. This time an orange army was invading Germany and subjugating the natives. Four days earlier, the Dutch had beaten West Germany in the semifinal. People chanted: In 1940 they came In 1988 we came Holadiay, holadio.

The Netherlands duly dismissed the Soviets, as we thought of them then, 2-0. With only a couple of minutes left to play, green-clad German military policemen stationed themselves on the athletic track, glaring up at us. This was standard procedure: they were there to prevent us from invading the pitch on the final whistle. Yet if you were Dutch in the Olympic Stadium that day, these were the bogeymen of the past. Tens of thousands of people forgot the match — the first championship the Netherlands had ever won — and jeered the poor policemen. It was the sort of passionate communal spirit that you rarely experience these days outside of football grounds.

When the match ended, I hugged a Dutchman behind me, and then went off to sleep on the floor of Munich train station. It was my first foreign football pilgrimage. I have since traveled tens of thousands of miles to attend hundreds of football matches all over the world.

But that's nothing. There is a whole tribe of North European men, known as "groundhoppers," generally recognizable by their gray shorts, white legs and knee socks, who spend their holidays visiting little grounds around Europe and arguing about how they compare with, say, a favorite provincial Finnish stadium first spotted in 1971. There are fans who arrange to have their ashes scattered in their club's stadium after they die. Others visit stadiums even when there is no match. In Munich, they still come by the thousands each year just to gaze at the empty Olympic Stadium. The Barcelona Football Club's museum — not even counting the adjoining Nou Camp stadium, with its almost 100,000 capacity — attracts more visitors than any of the city's other museums.

In the flowery language of the sporting press, football grounds are "temples," "cathedrals" or "meccas." Comparing football to religion is a soft-headed cliché. The truth is more extreme: Western Europe may have reached the point where football passion outstrips religion, class warfare, nationalism, even ethnic hatred. It now just borrows some of the language to make matches more fun.

Both stadiums and cathedrals are edifices where crowds gather to glimpse a higher beauty, to feel part of something larger than themselves. But for many West Europeans — most of whom don't follow any religion — it is the stadium that arouses more passion. While the stadium is often overflowing with fans, Europe's churches are emptying and being converted into bingo halls and mosques. The stadium cheers, chants, even cries. The congregations in many European churches are often silent, or mumble prayers and hymns without discernible feeling. True religious spirit may be deeper and more sustaining than anything available at the stadium — you'd have to ask someone else about that — but the pitch is where many find otherworldly contemporary beauty (a lob by Ronaldinho, a dribble by Zidane). The cathedral, in contrast, seems the aesthetic of a bygone era. And the stadium has even replaced the cathedral as the home of civic pride: week by week, Barcelona gets more global coverage and admiration for its football club than for Gaudí's Sagrada Família.