Football cannot heal the pain but Manchester United's Europa League triumph is a small gesture of defiance

The juxtaposition of tragedy and sport is never a comfortable one. Grand and unsustainable claims are often made, complex and incoherent symbolisms constructed. Football may be the most popular sport in the world, may even be the world’s most widely practised cultural mode, but it is only football: there is a limit to the burden it can bear.

There will be those who cast Manchester United’s victory in the Europa League on Wednesday as some kind of symbolic redemption, a gesture of Mancunian self-assertion following the tragedy at the Ariana Grande concert on Monday.

Perhaps at some visceral level it was. United’s players had spoken of the desire for a performance that would offer some kind of tribute to the victims of the atrocity

But the danger then is that Ajax are miscast in the role of villains. There is the complication that what United do is a matter of indifference to those who follow City; the club may be Manchester’s most recognisable export but it is not the only one. And then there is the starker fact that for those suffering or grieving, United’s performance is an utter irrelevance. Football cannot salve the pain, nor should it be expected to. As Carlo Ancelotti so sagely noted, football is merely the most important of the least important things in life.

Mourinho seemed sceptical of how much value a footballing victory can really have, emphasising the insignificance of his team’s success beside the events of Monday. “Does this Cup make the city of Manchester a little bit happier?” he asked. “Maybe.” But he seemed unconvinced.

But what football can do, and what it did, is offer a vehicle for the expression of civic pride, become a means for a group of people to declare their togetherness – and there is perhaps some comfort in that. The minute’s silence, in truth, was a bit of a mess. The players took their positions around the centre-circle and bowed their heads and crowd slowly shushed itself. For about 30 seconds there was silence, the profound, poignant silence of 50,000 people saying nothing simultaneously. But then came a Uefa announcement that the silence would begin when the referee, the Slovenian Damir Skomina, blew his whistle. As soon as he did, though, there was a general ripple of applause and then, movingly, a chant of “Manchester, Manchester” from the United fans behind the goal their team defended in the first half. The words have been heard often enough, but rarely can they have had such resonance as they did here.

There had been more raucous, more controversial expressions of defiance earlier in the day. In the Gamla Stan a group of United fans shouted about just where they’d like to stick Isis. A Northern Irish flag bearing Monday’s date announced they were “United against terror”. And there is a sense that just by going ahead, this final acted as a form of defiance.

Stockholm suffered its own Isis-related horror last month as a lorry was hijacked and driven through pedestrians into a department store, killing five people. And anybody going to football now does so in the knowledge that the sport is a target for terror of varying sources. In 2010, the Togo team bus was attacked driving into the Angolan exclave of Cabinda before the Cup of Nations, killing two. In November 2015 suicide bombers targeted a friendly between France and Germany in Paris. And only last month the Borussia Dortmund defender Marc Bartra was hospitalised with an arm injury after a bomb attack before the Champions League quarter-final against Monaco.

Football is a soft target. Fans will have to accept increasingly thorough bag searches on their way into stadiums – even then Ajax fans were able to smuggle numerous flares into the Friends Arena. And there is, anyway, no realistic way of policing the streets or the public transport routes to games with absolute security. In that context, perhaps, there is a small gesture of defiance in turning up, in getting on with life, in engaging in a truly global phenomenon.