The fools are us. You, me, Messi, the Holy Spirit. Fools of unpleasant solemnity. They have fooled us all. It is the “Model.” The eternal “Model” that has had an almost perfect correlate in the last half century. The economy is an arrhythmic genre, impossible to dance, a sudden pandemonium that when a crisis arrives, and it always does, causes a zigzag even in the field of ideas.
From innocence they sold the Messi case to us as an aseptic operation, with no room for maneuver, of controlled debt. Today we can know -by certain indications- that it was a rain of claws between oligarchs, under the fog, with a clean machete, opening the way in the unstoppable neoliberal model of privatizing football. A “cock” fight. For the gallery. As recommended by the “Model”.
They do it with health, with education. A public hospital is not privatized in ten minutes. First it deteriorates, it wears out. The original breeding ground is created: an immense and imaginary waiting list for surgical interventions, a few neglected minimal services, a few overwhelmed physicians, an enslaved staff, some patients neatly diverted to private health, some operating rooms operating part-time, and a budget line thinned by rickets.
It is the “Model.” The books say so. A public hospital must be rendered inefficient, agonizing, drooling. Like a terminally ill person. Only then – and with the wind in the face – without remorse and with serene elegance, was it privatized. It is the doctrine. Today Barcelona is an immense public hospital to be privatized. He drools. It won’t be today or tomorrow, but it will. It is the bitter feeling that the Messi case has left. Everything is ready. The emotional scalpel, the pockets turned out, the best kept secrets, and the riotous turmoil of a tormented hobby. The wear has already arrived. It’s here. It smells.
There is little to believe in this staging. Messi was taken away at dawn, in five minutes, with an unchanging Barcelona, without shedding a tear, a plea, a sigh. The Employer took it from the Employer. Without anesthesia. Without addressing any possible alternative. Nobody believes it. A simple “no is no” would have been enough.
Every poor cause is a poor cause. You need a story. Messi and Laporta used each other. I read without knowing it. It suited him well. He wanted to go. Actually, he was already gone. He deserves it for talent, history, and greatness. He left us, without intending to, (and that’s where Laporta enters) the false and stark message that the best football, the most beautiful, the most competitive, the one that keeps you an eternal place in the world, is going through privatization today. He was, unintentionally, the useful fool of a “Model.” Like all of us.
These are bad times for the lyric. Today the path has cleared more than ever. In the collective imagination of the “culé” that disgustingly rich “Sheik” already rides, in need of quick laundering, determined to wash away the penalties and absorb the debts. The wet dream of ceasing to “be” to remain. This is how the “Model” is made. Florentino Pérez, Joan Laporta, and the venture capital fund CVC Capital Partners know it. They are working well. They tried it with the ill-born Superliga. They are not in a hurry. “Slowly, slowly”, as the song says, they are taking away our great and tiny freedoms. You already know that form of helplessness. It is the end of innocence that is biting the back of our heads. This was a trick. Trick and Treat. A trick for fools. It’s in the books. It is the “Model.”
Former Velez player, Tokyo 1979 World Champion.
Paris saint germain