1. Let me start with what’s not.
2. I haven’t seen either of the two celebratory films yet. I will see them, morally and intellectually obliged, but I have no expectations – none at all: I cannot imagine what there could be beyond predictable statements and infinite repetitions of what has already been repeated.
A World Cup is also this: merchandising. Flag, hat and headband; the shirt with the three stars bought from the Cameroonians in Eleven; the book; the supplement; the Netflix series; the movie; the movies. This same note could be thought of as another mere celebratory merchandise.
Also, just before the World Cup started, in 2022, I saw Be eternal: champions of Americathe Netflix documentary dedicated to the 2021 Copa América. I almost became a fan of Senegal. It’s so bad, but so bad, that it makes others feel a little embarrassed.: and, frankly, it filled me with fear for these ones that have just been released.
Football has a lot of cinema, but very little good. It is still Heroes over there, the one that we all went to see in 1987: I don’t know if you know that, in reality, the original title in English was Hero, that is, “Hero”, one, the only one.
That one was good, if only because Seeing Maradona on the big screen scoring the second goal against Belgium on June 25, 1986 with a song by Valeria Lynch deserved an Oscar (which they didn’t give him).
3. Definitely, football does not reflect society. We should already know that that phrase is bullshit which only reveals how little the person who utters it knows about both things: neither about football nor about society. A nonsense.
Soccer is the simplest game; A society is a very complex, changing mechanism, full of conflicts and tears. Well now that I think about it Football is also a very complex, changing game, full of conflicts. and tears. But other conflicts and heartbreaks: Mbappé’s second goal in the final, for example.
That is a conflict of the game, of that dynamic of the unthinkable that Dante Panzeri explained so well in 1967. Social conflicts and divisions are of another type: classes, genders, ethnicities, territories, hierarchy, power, oppression.
There is no way, no way, for football to “reflect” all of that. I add an obvious fact: it is about men’s football, and the claim that a modern society is reflected by thirty guys between the ages of twenty and thirty-six, very well trained, all millionaires married to stunning women whose relationship with the real world passes through Instagramis, without a doubt, machirula nonsense.
(I add: women’s football does not reflect anything either, but at least it allows us to see the gender conflict in our society; it allows us to witness the tenacious resistance of the males sheltered in a macho fortress nicknamed AFA.)
Hence any metaphor or analogy is impossible. It is different to use soccer metaphors or phraseologies for anecdotes about everyday life or in art: “The soul is in orsai”, for example, is irreplaceable. Calling an unexpected event “a half-court goal” is not entirely wrong.
But you should never say: “We are all together behind the same passion. Hopefully we can have a union similar to what is achieved in the World Cup for our country, to move Argentina forward. That is my dream and I hope we can maintain this spirit to all work together.”
Horacio Rodríguez Larreta said it. A few months later, it was the most resounding electoral failure in memory in this country since the defeat of Chamizo-Ondarts in 1973 (gugleen).
Former President Macri went, a few days ago, down the same path: “This marks that a change of era is coming in Argentina (…). For the values with which it was won. The time of Maradona (…) is over (…).
We move on to a world championship won by Argentina with the best player in the world, but there was a team and each one fulfilled their task, they accompanied him. And Messi, a totally positive, pro-family leader, his wife and his children have an impressive place.
Humble, the most beloved guy in the world, a model that the Argentine began to value. May we not have the live transgressor as an idol (sic).”
Moral: using football analogies to try to explain the world, society, politics and infinity serves no purpose, except to demonstrate stubbornness in error. And not to explain anything, of course, in the same movement.
4. Because, furthermore, Football – not even this ultimate gesture of winning a World Cup – does not change daily life one bit. of societies, nor of their economy, their politics, their culture –except, as we said, their production of series and films, albums and supplements–.
Someone once argued that the GDP of the winning country increased slightly due to an increase in consumption. It’s false: it doesn’t change anything. Suffering from the same evils as politicians – not knowing how to differentiate reality from fiction – some colleagues affirmed, in 1998, that the success of the selected French multicultural team (that team hated by the extreme right, full of children from the African, Asian and American colonies) It meant the democratic reconciliation of French society.
Watch the series The Blues, another story from Franceon Netflix, because it is good, but not because, as the propaganda says, “its ups and downs reflect those suffered by the society of its country.”
It does not reflect anything, of course: nor does it reconcile anyone with anything. Shortly after the success of 1998, and again after that of 2018, the French continued to happily kill each other over their very deep ethnic, racial, economic and class cleavages.
May the neo-Algerian Zidane or the post-Cameroonian Mbappé be world stars does not change in the slightest the structure of a society torn by racismdiscrimination and postcolonialism.
On the other hand, in Argentina, everything was for the better: after winning the World Cup, inflation ended, abundant rain fell, there was an exceptional harvest, income was democratically distributed, teachers began to earn fortunes, the rich paid their taxes with probity and joy,
Discrimination based on race, gender or religion ended, politicians stopped dating expensive models, the political debate was carried out in the terms proposed by Habermas and the general elections consecrated the most democratic, most progressive and most modern proposal.
All thanks to football success, which produces miracles. Can you imagine how nice that would have been? And all, just for a small step.
5. The Cup showed the best fans in the world: the most enduring, the most faithful, the most boisterousthe most creative, the most boastful and narcissistic: the only fan in the world that claims to be the best fan in the world (and to top it off, goes and wins a FIFA award for the best fan in the world).
A fan so creative – out of mere love of art and the shirt – that for six months several songs competed against each other, fighting to be adopted on social networks as the fans’ official anthem.
The example of “Brazil, tell me how it feels” will continue to be powerful: the three guys who invented it still collect royalties – along with John Fogerty, the creator of the Bad Moon Rising melody, who still doesn’t understand where that fortune came from in his old age, fifty years after composing the original song.
The victory allowed that privilege to Fernando Romero, in alliance with Matías Pelliccioni and TyC Sports, as well as Guillermo Novellis and La Mosca Tsé Tsé, who They have already earned enough to guarantee a dignified old age. Again, as in 2014, the song abused commonplaces: the most unbearable, the one that assigns itself a paternity over Brazilians that is categorically unprovable.
“Dad won the final with the brazucas again” is an unsustainable statement, for two reasons: because “brazuca” is a derogatory word to the point of nausea, and because this alleged paternity violates all the principles of football culture (my rejection is respect for the truth of an experienced football fan, who only remembers a victory over Brazil in a World Cup –yes, the 1990 one– and cannot forget that Brazil won five Cups and played in two other finals.
To call that paternity is mere petulance). The other fact of the song is its reference to “the kids from Malvinas that I will never forget.” It is mere mass jingoism., and an argumentative leap that I cannot explain except for metrical reasons –it gave just two octosyllables–. Next to Messi and Maradona, it hardly sounds like a commonplace, a gesture for the gallery.
6. A Cup does not produce better sports journalists. Worse: it produces narrators who film themselves while crying while telling, and then post on their social networks the exciting videos of themselves getting emotional while crying while telling. It is not gibberish: it is the description of banal sentimentality squared produced by a television narrator. Unforgettable.
Let us recognize, however, that it is a brutal gain, considering that there was a man in that place who called to demonstrate to “those gentlemen from the IACHR that we Argentines are rights and humans.”
7. A Cup does not produce, as I said, great social changes. It can even stage the worst behaviors of our culture: the homophobic and racist song against Mbappé and the French players. God should have punished us for such rudeness: clear proof of his nonexistence.
To make matters worse, a deeply ignorant song: “They play in France but they are all from Angola.” Angola was, until 1975, a Portuguese colony. Ignorant, as well as imbeciles and racists.
8. Winning a Cup does not transform the winner into the best football in the world: see Platense-Godoy Cruz. Nor in the best organized football: look at the 345-team tournament that changes the relegation rules three times a year. Nor does it make its leaders lucid beings, managers with a strategic sense, sports statesmen: look.
9. Let me conclude with what is: happiness.
A happy moment. A happy day. A happy year. The incessant repetition of the phrase “we were happy.” The repetition ad nauseam of the match with France, a masterpiece of both good football and suspense and unpredictability – watching that match is only possible today because we know the end.
Five to six million people in just one city – how can it be that no one has taken the trouble to track down all the Argentine newspapers and quantify the crowds on December 18 in all the cities and towns in the country that have newspaper coverage?
Why do we only count the crowd on December 20? – without a single incident occurring, because that happiness works as collective and community insurance, and the crowd takes care of itself.
What is the point of winning a World Cup? To be happy, very happy. A while, which then becomes another while, and then another, and a year later there are a lot of happy moments, and some Years later we will be able to tell our children and grandchildren: “I had three happy moments.”
