The 2023-2024 football league started this weekend. I find with astonishment that all the certainties that underpinned my childhood have been abolished. It’s hard to believe, but when those of my generation joined the conscious life on Mondays, no newspapers were published, to the point where there was a substitute header with such an unequivocal name as La Hoja del Lunes, the TV closed at night with an anthem without lyrics that ended in an ineffable blind that we called Carta de Ajuste, the school holidays lasted from Saint John to La Mercè and, above all, the football league did not start to be played until mid-September and ended before Saint George , in mid-April.
Now all these costume details look like they were taken from a dystopian series on Netflix. Even the Mare de Déu d’Agost, glorious day of the Assumption, has had to assume that the football league will pass her by. I already take it upon myself that the show (business) must go on, but I find it delirious that today the calendar still indicates August 14, the regular football league is already underway and the political course is as it is. When should the trading card albums be printed?
To top it all off, last season we had to taste the bitter aftertaste of Messi’s World Cup in Qatar, held in the middle of winter, and this split the northern hemisphere leagues in two, as if all of Europe had suffered a big snowfall Another victory for climate change.
We have been living in bad weather for years. out of time It happens in all areas. Stations fall apart, elections are constantly moved forward, news leaks, deals fluctuate, commercials replace acts, and schools, even though the start of the school year has only moved forward a week, are working with ‘so-called live enrolment, which implies having to welcome new students at any time, even if it is in the third term.
The agenda is the new donkey of blows. Time was time, the calendar was untouchable. Without going any further, Franco’s government broadcast football on TV every May 1 so that the workers would stay at home and not go to any demonstrations. You see we don’t meet again, now on a paid channel.