Soccer can be thought of as the sourdough of the rest of team sports. All of them are variations of football carried out by people who did not like football, did not have the physical skills to play it or found it boring. From all those proposals – let’s make baskets, let’s play with our hands, in the water or with a net in the middle – rules and ways of being elegant, fair, civilized and fun were distilled. They were thought of as sports from the first minute. Not football.
It was much more difficult for football to be thought of as a sport because football was war, how to kill oneself without really dying. The primitive, the guerrilla war or by crushing, anything goes, the flags and the insults, the traps, what has been said, the total and hand-to-hand battle, the pack of hunters shooting at the defenseless beast that, in the form of a goalkeeper, she defends the desperate, with hands and feet, only she. The crowd insulting and encouraging the execution of the opponent, the judge, the general or their own soldiers who have fallen in disgrace in the public square. It smells like liniment and napalm: it smells like football.
We have no longer killed each other between neighborhoods, clans, social classes and countries for football. That is its merit. In it we have been rude, cruel, racist, unfair, angels and demons, and thanks to English hooliganism we can put on expensive tracksuits as a suit to go to the supermarket or wait for the dealer on duty. We have been absurd and vehement as in a war, whether we lost it or won, mutinied against Agamemnon or asked for the return of King Arthur. Opponents who are enemies, traitors and pigheads, murderers who have gone so far as to kill just for wearing the opposite shirt. Football, beyond those who play it and turn it into our epic and balm, is that septic tank. That’s where Rubiales comes from, holding his balls with both hands next to the Queen, and the tears of Vinícius – a great player, a bad athlete, a good cause. From that pit come suspicious players due to the fact that they know how to speak or think well and the acceptance of those who only know how to say commonplaces, urgent school reinforcement modality, or muttering foul words to encourage and cheer themselves up. World champions until they open their mouths.
In that detritus live the ultras and the parents of the children’s parties, the representatives, the directors and the presidents who are gossips, whoremongers, always lazy and thieves. Hence Saudi Arabia, the talk shows that reek of shit and cocaine, the World Cup in Qatar and bribes. Football has reluctantly pretended to be a sport. The only possible redemption in a world in real war – Ukraine, Gaza, Drug Trafficking – is for football to be rescued by athletes and the State, and forced to be a sport and we will find other ways of being primitive, vulgar, tacky, cheap and aggressive. Shit always floats. Let’s not worry about that.
