Xavi defined tomorrow’s match as a “football war”. It is perhaps an ill-timed comparison, given the current moment, but it is part of a tradition of warlike analogies that have exorcised conflict through sporting rivalries. If only most bloody conflicts could be solved by playing football. The significance of tomorrow’s game against the infamous PSG is, indeed, exceptional. Santiago Segurola spoke yesterday of “unexpected optimism” to define part of the atmosphere generated by the game and Barça’s results in recent weeks. Thanks to the complexity of the human soul, unexpected optimism does not exclude sublayers of preemptive fatalism and levels of intermittent anxiety that neither Jung nor Freud could explain. Culers are like Schrödinger’s cat: we experience the qualifiers with an ambivalent intensity that allows us to be, at the same time, alive and dead.
The other difference between real war and football is the reliability of expectations. The real war enhances moods that, suddenly, impose themselves as a trend that no one can stop. The football war, on the other hand, lives in a state of ostentatious informational waste and blissfully irrational entertainment. More and more media are mobilized to offer their interpretation of what has not yet happened (and will not happen). Before the game in Cadiz, rotations were proposed which, luckily, allowed us to win the game. Today and tomorrow we will invest a lot of energy in, forcing the chronological logic, to anticipate with predictions that will act as a placebo to entertain the wait.
Neither the technological means to ensure that the application of the regulations is minimally fair have served to avoid arbitration discussions, nor the multiplication of experts’ and analysts’ points of view has helped us understand why players who until four days ago they seemed like a catastrophe, today they seem like crashes. We know, of course, that in moments of maximum tension football continues to have the opioid power to escape us. And that, against the effort to control each ingredient, football always manages to preserve the level of uncertainty that defines it and gives it meaning. Unfortunately, there are times when real wars interfere so much with most people’s lives and the health of the world that keeping up the shows is considered treasonous or frivolous. Or that the secondary effects of war find in the sounding board of football the opportunity to amplify slogans.
For tomorrow, Xavi’s slogan is resounding and he will get a quorum in Montjuïc that will prevent, in the twelfth minute, anyone from starting to make waves. In recent weeks, the improbable factor has once again broken the predictable dynamics of decline. The coach and the players have found a way to improve their performance and the balance between commitment and effectiveness. The public that, militantly, has accompanied the team since the move to Montjuïc has always been there. But tomorrow players will notice levels of care and support that hopefully won’t be interrupted by the delirious, self-destructive impacts of real wars.
