I came across this sentence and I guess the 'spirit' here means ghosts.
Am I guessing it right?
You will be in the company of the spirit of soccer itself.
I don't have a full context(sorry for that) but tried to remember it after reading your answers and comments. Here's the situation; two boys were practicing soccer in a historic soccer field and one complained that the practice was not going well. Then the other said that a lot of famous soccer players(some are dead) played games in this field, so even though these boys were doing poorly at the moment, they might be in the company of the spirit of soccer itself. So I thought of 'ghosts' because of famous but 'dead' soccer players and 'historic' soccer place mentioned in their conversation. Does it make sense?