The baton dance begins that will culminate in the month of May in the election of a new president of the Spanish Football Federation after the professional death of Luis Rubiales, the man who will go down in history to perish for two theoretically incompatible causes each other: suicide and murder.
These elections always end up being an auction to the highest bidder of the supports that candidates need to get into office. You don’t have to promise everything and everyone, like in political elections. It is enough to successfully transact multiple particular interests until the sum of acquired wills is sufficient. It’s always like this when a president is elected by an assembly of “notables” (the quotes are just to emphasize that you don’t have to take these nouns literally).
There are a lot of rabbits calculating whether they should come out of the hole to run for the presidency. And the first to resolve the doubts was the journalist Carlos Herrera. What seemed like a joke from the star announcer of Cope is now a fact. And with no time to lose the man is already walking around the media explaining the central ideas of his project.
Beyond the real possibilities of the candidate, his irruption is the most interesting from a discursive point of view. And Herrera has decided that his campaign is against the “caste” that has made football a private business. And he assumes the mission, if elected, of returning the football to its rightful owner: anyone who knows what a ball is. Carlos Herrera cloning, saving the distances and objectives, the terminology of Podemos. Life never ceases to surprise.
The picture that the journalist paints is that of a pure fan, an outsider of the web of economic interests woven around the football wheel who aims to inject the air of popular sport back into the ball in opposition to the industry of the show that only thinks about money and the salary of its executives.
Since the character arouses philias and phobias through his vehement radio homilies, it is complicated for the fan to make a clean reading of his candidacy that does not include a prioriisms and prejudices. But beyond everyone’s opinion, the most symptomatic thing is that the first voice that is heard in this electoral race is with a markedly critical accent on the weight that pure and hard business should have and what concessions are acceptable in favor of the growing demand to make more and more boxes.
Apart from its success or failure, its irruption announces without saying it the arrival also in football of a very fashionable word throughout the West: protectionism. As people say, he has come to stay and not only in economic or border matters. There is a growing demand for the preservation of the original meaning of everything that is understood to be blurred by excesses of all kinds. Also in football, the echoes of the same drums are beginning to be heard, although with less force. Herrera, the fan who now wants to be president, as an example. At least verbally.
