“Football isn’t a game, nor a sport: it’s a religion” as Maradona — for it was he — once explained, a man whose hand was once compared to that of the Almighty himself. Later Micky would be invited back to Maradona’s nightclub. “Deus!” the clubbers all cried, as if the messiah came among his people. If they had had palms, I expect they would have waved them. Christianity has 2.2 billion followers worldwide. Football has three billion.

Many labour under a fantasy about how our deepest commitments are formed. That fantasy is often described as “being rational” — and it assumes that there is, or should be, a line of logic that can be followed from shared first principles all the way through to the things we believe in and commit too. It’s not true, of course. Many of the things we commit to, we do so because they exist prior to a line of reasoning. Our love of country, our religious faith. And nowhere is this more true than when it comes to football.

How it came to be is lost to memory, but I remember even as a child having posters of my heroes on the bedroom wall: Peter Osgood, Peter Bonetti. And my children have had the same. Didier Drogba for my eldest. Christian Pulisic — “Captain America” — for another. My youngest child is just two. When I ask him what team he supports, he answers correctly.

Chelsea is owned by a Russian oligarch and former Putin confidant, Roman Abramovich. He may or may not have made his billions through dodgy dealings in the wild east of post-Soviet Russia. But — and here is the thing — I don’t really care. Some of the players I have lauded in the past may have been little better than thugs. I even have a top with John Terry’s name on the back. He may not have been the most morally commendable of chaps. But — I don’t really care. I am slightly ashamed to admit it, but there is something about my football commitments that precede even my moral ones. When Chelsea got itself involved with the ill-fated Super League idea, I tweeted out that if they went through with it, I would abandon them. But I suspect I wouldn’t have. Some commitments just run too deep.

This is what scares liberals about the holy trinity of football, faith and nation. They are tribal. And our continued pre-rational allegiance to such things threatens the whole liberal/Enlightenment idea that rationality must form the basis for our fundamental take on the things.

There are converts, of course. People who come to faith later in life, after having thought about it. But it’s hard road to travel. If you ever reach the stage where you ask yourself “what football team should I support?” — as if supporting a team were the potential outcome of some act of rational comparison — then you will probably never come to support one at all. Some things don’t exist as choices in this way. They are givens, things that the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “horizons of significance”.

These basic givens do have a moral purpose, of course, despite their obvious moral blind spots. They are the basis for a shared, common life. In football, faith and nation, I have a kind of solidarity with others — both friends and strangers, people who are like me, people who are not like me — that cannot be achieved by rational decision making alone. Walking past a stranger on the street, I see their Chelsea top and I nod in recognition. They know why and smile back. We have a bond.

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The theological way of expressing this is that belonging precedes believing. Generally speaking, people don’t decide to believe in God and then come to church. They start coming to church where, after a while, they find the God stuff starts to make a different kind of sense. Suddenly the words carry a weight of meaning that they didn’t previously have. In time, the convert is not on the outside looking in, but on the inside looking out. This will infuriate Alice Roberts and her fellow rationalists. But their spiky dismissal of faith as irrational just bounces off most believers. You can’t be reasoned out of something you were never reasoned into. Just as I won’t be reasoned out of following Chelsea “over land and sea, and Leicester” as the song goes. And no, I can’t remember the historic rivalry (I think it was something in the Seventies) that singles out one small Midlands town for special mention.

Inevitably, of course, the problem with these basic expressions of solidarity is that having a sense of “us” is inevitably linked to a sense of “them”. And the relationship between us and them can often become antagonistic, violent even. That’s why football fans and religious believers can come to blows with each other. And these blows are often used to justify the liberal case for rational rather than pre-rational commitments. But rational solidarity is often a thin and bloodless connection, a theoretical bond without passion.

The antagonistic relationship between us and them, though, is often considerably overdrawn — sometimes deliberately. In the next few weeks, European nations will fly their flags, play their anthems, and compete with each other on the football field. I will cheer for England, but I know we probably won’t win. This is important. My commitment to the English team, like my commitment to the place of my birth, is not based on any sort of belief that we are better than others. Patriotism doesn’t have to be infused with a sense of superiority. There are better teams out there.

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What rationalists don’t understand is that pre-rational believers or supporters, even if they have a different faith or a different team, have more in common with each other than they do with those who seek to distribute their commitments in the court of reason. Lord Glasman and I will go for a drink, I will have fun trash talking Spurs, and he will trash talk Chelsea, and we will have a thoroughly good time. We are more respectful of our different faiths, but we acknowledge our differences, and respect each other for having them. It’s an ecumenical matter, as Fr Ted put it.

Football is a world faith not because it seeks to eradicate all differences in some kind of meaningless Esperanto of togetherness, but precisely because it allows our differences to be celebrated. Here are the tribes of the world, little platoons of togetherness, all worshiping their different gods, but brought together in a festival of talent and beauty. The theological term for this is henotheism: the worship of the one true god — a god that wears blue, obviously — that does not deny the existence of other gods.

Argentina is the utopian dream that never quite came to pass. In Radiografía de la pampa, written in 1933 in response to the first of the coups, the poet and essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote of the pain of being an exile, depicting an Argentina that was forever European but not Europe. That sense of dislocation has become a common theme: after the massacres of its indigenous population throughout the 19th century, Argentina became, for theorists at least, a tabula rasa.

That encouraged a utopianism, a sense that this was a land in which a new, better society could be created, unhindered by pre-existing structures and traditions. Argentina is a land of myth, where messiahs have always had their place. The first Europeans who went there were dreaming of El Dorado. Juan Perón, the arch-populist, all things to all men, and Evita perhaps even more so, inspired a faith far beyond what was justified.

By the 1920s, there was a wave of nostalgia for an idealised version of the life of the gaucho, whose unflinching self-reliance, alone on the pampas, was seen as embodying the soul of Argentina. In the pages of El Gráfico, the hugely influential sports magazine, it was argued that in a rapidly urbanising world that spirit was best represented in the pibe, the kid from the streets. Everything was in opposition to the British, whose wire fencing had undermined the political power of the gaúchos, leading for a time to a quasi-colonial relationship.

Football had come to Argentina through the British, through sailors and merchants, propagated through the British schools that catered to the elite. Their game, played on wide grassy pitches, was based on running and power; the Argentinian game grew from mass games on the uneven ground of the potreras, the vacant lots of the burgeoning city, where close control and streetwiseness were essential

In 1928, Borocotó, the great editor of El Gráfico, described a putative statue to the soul of Argentinian football. It would depict, he wrote, a mischievous urchin, tough and skilful, with a mass of untamed hair, who had learned the game on the streets. Half a century before the fact, he describes Maradona.

El Diego arrived with the force of prophecy behind him. He was celebrated and indulged. Exam results were fixed, his excesses and occasional tantrums ignored. Laws and conventions did not apply to him, either metaphorically on the pitch, or actually, off it. Nobody inspired such faith. In Mexico in 1986, he was recovering from hepatitis and injury, he was doubted on all sides, he had been sent off in the previous tournament, and yet he won them the World Cup. His talent was otherworldly; he was not a man to whom the usual rules applied. In crisis, turn to the Messiah.

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But Maradona by then was in a crisis far worse than that of eight years earlier. His time at Napoli, the team he inspired to the only two Serie A titles in their history, had come to an end when in March 1991 he tested positive for cocaine. The player had became a regular user after his move to Barcelona in 1982, but during his time in Naples he became increasingly dependent.

His body shape changed; between the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 he went from a stocky but lithe athlete to something approaching a more bloated figure. His relationship with the Camorra deteriorated. That he failed the drugs test was itself revealing: the protection he had once enjoyed, using a plastic penis to deliver somebody else’s urine for analysis, had been removed. Although he subsequently admitted he was an addict, he raged at the positive test. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that it was Italy’s vendetta because Argentina knocked them out of the World Cup.”

Banned, he returned to Argentina. Within a month, he’d been arrested for possession of cocaine. That August, police raided his chauffeur’s apartment and found Maradona passed out after a day of heavy drinking and cocaine abuse. Finally, he accepted that he needed help. He began a radical detox programme, eating only fruit and vegetables and drinking only water. He started going to a gym regularly and jogging round the boating lake in the Plaza Holanda. A psychotherapist encouraged him to cut the bad influences from his life.

But what he actually needed, he decided, was football. When the judge Amelia Berraz de Vidal asked him what drugs he’d dealt in, he replied, “The only thing that I’ve dealt in my life is football.” He started playing again for a local side and in charity games. When his ban expired, he moved to Spain to play for Sevilla, but his 26 league games there were overshadowed by scandal. He was arrested for driving a Porsche at 200km/h, was involved in a brawl outside a nightclub where he’d been denied entry for wearing trainers, and was blamed for an incident that ended in a magazine exposé of the whole team going to a brothel. When he was substituted in the following game, he raged at the “betrayal” and never played for the club again.

He returned to Argentina and started using again. When his daughter Djalma caught him snorting a line in the bathroom, he returned to his father’s home village of Esquina, up the Paraná River from Buenos Aires, to dry out. That October, a month after Colombia’s 5-0 win, he signed for Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario (at half-time on his debut, a six-year-old boy performed tricks with a ball to entertain the crowd: Lionel Messi).

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The following month, he was recalled to the national side for a World Cup qualifying play-off against Australia. He set up a goal in the first leg as Argentina scraped through 2-1 on aggregate. By February, after just seven games for them, frustrated at the training schedule, he quit Newell’s.

Nobody knew what that meant for the World Cup. Could he go to the US if he didn’t have a club? Later that month, a group of journalists seeking to find out gathered outside his country house in Moreno, where he was relaxing with his father, uncle and a number of friends. Maradona asked them to leave. They said they would if he gave them a brief statement, which he refused to do. One of his friends sprayed the journalists with a garden hose. Another pretended to masturbate. Maradona then took an air rifle, leant on the roof of a car and shot at the journalists, injuring four. They sued. Two accepted an out-of-court settlement but the other two pressed on.

The public mood was broadly supportive of Maradona. Heroes were heroes, each flaw seemingly heightening the appeal; of course the pibe got up to mischief — how could he not? If, as the sociologist Sergio Levinsky argued, the veneration of the pibe was at some level rooted in a desire for him not to grow up, to remain childlike, then how could he be expected to take responsibility?

As the case proceeded, Maradona announced he was willing to captain the national side at the World Cup. The public reaction was euphoric. He was unfit, had no club, was fighting legal action in two countries and was battling drug addiction, but the Messiah was available. The national coach Alfio Basile had no option but to select him for a game against Brazil in March 1994. He was overweight, out-of-sorts and substituted at half-time.

Three months later, as the World Cup began, Maradona looked sleek. His explosive pace may have gone, but he was still sharp enough to orchestrate a 4-0 win, scoring the third goal after a couple of smart one-twos and a precise shot from the edge of the box. His celebration would become notorious as he raced to a television camera and roared. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than the relief of a man delighted to be back, the release of something deep within him. It soon drew more sinister interpretations.

Argentina beat Nigeria 2-1 in their next game, in Foxborough, after which Maradona was chosen for a random drugs test, which he gave blithely enough. The footage of him being led off the pitch by a nurse, cheerily waving to the crowd is poignant in its banality; this was the last the international game would see of him. The test was positive for substances aimed at suppressing the appetite and increasing endurance. Maradona was withdrawn from the World Cup and subsequently given a fifteen-month ban from football. “I killed myself training and now they do this to me!” Maradona complained, as though his effort somehow outweighed the fact he had broken the rules. He then broke down in tears.

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In Buenos Aires, there was an astonishing public outpouring of grief, comparable only to that at Perón’s funeral — the link between the events strengthened by the fact that the positive drug test arrived on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Perón.

Maradona insisted this was a conspiracy, claiming Fifa, with its Brazilian president João Havelange, had been out to get him since he had pretty much single-handedly eliminated Brazil from the previous World Cup. The truth was far less complex: he’d been taking drugs — recreational if not necessarily performance-enhancing — for years and had finally been caught. There were no plastic penises in Foxborough. He’d dropped 20kg in around six months, something he put down to hard work. He claimed the US version of a particular supplement had contained ephedrine, while the one available in Argentina didn’t, but even if that is true the regulations are clear: the responsibility was his and his guilt was undeniable.

But Maradona couldn’t take responsibility. That was his tragedy. Pibes can never grow up, and messiahs can never be blamed — until the time comes for their crucifixion.

Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina, is published by Orion