Football has to do with culture, with tradition, with rituals, but we are in a moment in which it seems weakened, full of dents. First because we want to buy his heart with money when football has always been a selfless passion. The players pay the consequences.
We have never seen so many injuries. Injuries have the same logic and the same solution as climate change. We all know the solution, but greed is greater than will. Football is an industry in which chimneys only produce smoke when matches are played. Only then are the stadiums filled, content is sold to television stations and brands get on board with the excitement of the product. Money, money, money… It’s a shame that this industry depends on a single raw material: human beings. Quite reliable machinery, but when it pushes the limits it first gets tired and then breaks. The first alarm is not attended to and the second is regretted. We have to play fewer games, is the proclamation. This is expressed from the players to the highest organizations. But every time they meet to review the competitions, the only thing the organizations can think of are championships with more games and the players, those who benefit most from economic growth, respond by keeping their mouths shut.
The dents are also referees, characters who went from not speaking to speaking too much. On the court and in the media. There are referees everywhere. An institution with an almost military hierarchy that was closed like a ball bug, now talks non-stop to contribute to the confusion. We have filled with interpretations that regulation whose secret was simplicity. Now we see, thanks to the VAR, that decisions are much more an arbitration issue than a regulatory issue. We have reached a point where not even they can agree on where the arm ends and the shoulder begins, at what moment the impulse to jump becomes a devious elbow or how good is differentiated from evil, since intentionality has lost all relevance. The more they lighten, the darker it gets.
A shame because football is our recreational ritual. A game that, like every game, puts us before a time of another quality. This week San Mamés came to the rescue. In Bilbao there is a fidelity to principles that were born with the club and were solidified little by little. Today, the grandfather suffers and enjoys alongside his grandson and also with his neighbor because the game is a community explosion that puts football in another dimension. That is when “the machinery of forgetting that we are all going to die” works at full capacity, as Leila Guerriero writes, referring to something else, in her latest and extraordinary book (The call, Anagram).
This beautiful alienation occurs, above all, when big teams visit San Mamés, which Athletic challenges with the force of identity thanks to a euphoric team that runs at the pace set by the fans. Players and fans end up equally exhausted and proud.
There I saw the same old football, where everyone’s fight was waiting for Oihan Sancet or Nico Williams, different players, to clarify and speed up the game to put things at risk and make the entire stadium feel as big as its rival. A night for football to show its primitive strength, clean of modernities that interfere, putting controversy in the place where there has always been emotion. Enough for football to fix the dents of the week. Until the next day when we discuss, VAR through, whether a foul was constitutional or unconstitutional.
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