Near his death, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel ironized: “The ideal would be to be able to rise from the grave every ten years, buy the newspaper, watch a news program, find out the latest gossip, drink a Martini and return to the cemetery.” If Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu raised his head, he would not come out of the grave. Soccer is to blame. What capacity of this sport to entangle, twist, unravel and twist again. It is still a territory for amazement: there is always something new to discover: an incident, a gesture, a regret.
It is not difficult to discern when this sport speaks to you from the brain, from the liver or from lawfare. Good football always ends up breaking through: a gambeta, a dodge, a start, an imputation. What envy to be the novelist of your own football. Choose the times, the spaces, the players of your team, those of the adversary, designate the goalkeeper, carry the ball (otherwise you do not play), jump the fence of your house and access the adjoining paddock to play an unexpected “picadito” with a group of prosecutors and judges passing by. That fragrant life as a commuter repertoire. All this Mauricio Macri could afford. He who does not live the spirit of the age of him lives all the miseries of him. The president of the FIFA Foundation has football in his gut as a passion. Curiously, the word passion derives from the Latin verb to suffer. Poisoned similarities. In reality, what it is about is that the “players” have no more power than the citizens are willing to grant them. Sometimes the human being suffers from the delusion of believing himself to be eternal.
Football is a spell that hooks, spreads, captivates. Much more playing it than seeing it. In a “picadito” one can go from a modest life to experience the sensation of being famous. One needs these games, the body demands it, to let go of the legs, to feel alive and go to sleep with the body loose. The “picaditos” of the former president were focused – as head of the FIFA Foundation – on raising funds for the development of sports infrastructure in the third world. Today we know that some of them, in addition to letting go of his legs, relieved some of his judicial contractures and oiled other procedures and accusations. It is what football has, it gathers wills. Between pipes, rabonas, free throws, a precautionary, a barbecue, a confession, the country has been made. That ancestral impunity of powerful men.
In “The Spirit of the Laws” (1748), Montesquieu introduced the separation of powers inspired by English parliamentarism. Soccer was born later, also in British territory, although some historians maintain that its origin is Chinese. Hence, the eyes of Xi Jinping, president of the Asian country, spun like marbles when Macri showed him the video of his free kick goal against the team of the prosecutor and the judges. Everyone has the right to commit suicide in his own way.
This extremely toxic, throwaway, “buddy” football represents the human underpinnings of a hierarchically unpunished model that focuses on persistent historical domination. This is how the “dynasties” are nurtured, in that institutionalization of the social structures that maintain their privileges.
The football of “making friends” has been left in the dark, so much so as to leave us blind.