ALEX Ferguson says he's only prayed once to win a football match. "I think there's many things you quite rightly pray for," explains the Man Utd boss.

"I do it every night for my family and friends and people who are ill - that's where you feel your prayers are hopefully answered."

But is football the new religion? As church attendances fall, the beautiful game has never enjoyed so many passionate followers.

Hallowed Be Thy Game (Channel 4, Sunday Jan 30, 8pm) looks at the central role soccer now occupies in our society. It's written, presented and directed by former Dominican friar and lifelong Manchester United fan Mark Dowd, who wonders if devotion to football is now filling a space once occupied by conventional religious belief.

He was in the Nou Camp stadium in Barcelona on the night his team "miraculously" saved themselves in the 1999 European Champions' League Final, scoring two goals in stoppage time to triumph in one of sport's greatest ever comebacks.

Mark recalls: "For 31 years I'd been longing, aching, for Manchester United to win the European Cup. And here we were, a minute from disaster.

"I'm slightly embarrassed now to say it, but I began to pray. It wasn't, 'God, please give us a goal.' It was almost like being in a trance. Looking at the pitch, I knew that everyone I loved and cared for in the world was staring at what was happening to that white piece of leather."

After reaching the "promised land" in one of the world's great "cathedrals" of sport, the Spanish press headline the next day read: "God saved Manchester."

Many would argue that Ferguson's substitutions had more to do with the victory than any divine intervention. "It left me with a lot of unanswered questions," confesses Mark. "Was I right to pray in a football match - and are people right to refer to football as a modern day religion?"

The United manager tells the documentary that he didn't pray for victory that night but he did pray once when in charge at Aberdeen. "I remember being in a final and Aberdeen were playing Rangers in a final and it came to the end of the game and we were 1-0. And I prayed.

Terry Scott

"My old assistant Terry Scott says you never pray to win football matches. He was dead right, and I've never done it again." Rangers scored two goals in stoppage time and won the final 2-1. "Just what we did in Barcelona," muses Fergie.

He adds: "The great thing about football is that it can attract that sort of emotion and passion. It becomes almost like religion in people's minds, this is the only thing in their life."

Mark visits football grounds where the ashes of the deceased are scattered and attends an Islamic wedding at Burnley FC. He also talks to top soccer stars, worshipped as idols, as well as religious figures, including Old Trafford chaplain John Boyers, who maintains: "I don't pray for victories, I'm not a witch doctor."

In the wake of tragedies like Hillsborough, Mark asks how anyone can really believe football is more important than life and death and sees how, like all false gods, the game is unable to provide the answers we need.

That epic night in Barcelona taught him a lesson. All of life's ills weren't cured. He's found what he's looking for elsewhere.

"Sometimes after a football match, there's an amazing sense, whether you're in a taxi queue talking to a stranger, or you're on a bus talking to someone, maybe from the opposite team. No-one's a stranger any more. For that hour or two after the game, all the divisions disappear. We're all connected.

"And I think if there is a life after death, if we can talk of something called the Kingdom of God, that's my vision of what that will be like - football doesn't just tell us who we are, it offers a glimpse of who we might yet become."


Hallowed Be Thy Game screened C4, Sunday, January 30, 8pm.