Then the vice president of Guadalajara declared: “I won’t say it’s a good thing, but it’s always been done.”
And Rafael del Castillo, who was the top boss of junior soccer, asked: “Why can’t Mexico be sneaky when other countries do it as a matter of course?”
Shortly after the 1966 World Cup the comptroller of the Argentine Soccer Association, Valentín Suárez, declared: “Stanley Rous is a shady fellow. He ran the World Cup so that England would win. I’d do the same if the Cup were played in Argentina.”
The morals of the market, which in our days are the morals of the world, give a green light to all keys to success, even if they’re burglar’s tools. Professional soccer has no scruples because it is part of an unscrupulous system of power that buys effectiveness at any price. And after all, scruples were never worth much. In Renaissance Italy a “scruple” was the smallest measure of weight, the least significant. Five centuries later, Paul Steiner, a player for the German club Cologne, explained: “I play for money and for points. The opposing player wants to take my money and my points. That’s why I ought to fight him by all means at my disposal.”
And the Dutch player Ronald Koeman justified the brutal kick to the stomach his compatriot Gillhaus gave the Frenchman Tigana in 1988: “It was a class act. Tigana was their most dangerous player and he had to be neutralized at any cost.”
The end justifies the means, and any beastly act is fine, though it’s wise to do it on the sly. Basile Boli of Olympique de Marseille, a defender accused of mistreating the ankles of others, described his baptism by fire. In 1983 Roger Milla was elbowing him like crazy, so he flattened him with his head. “That was the first lesson: strike before they strike you, but strike discreetly.”
You have to strike far from the ball, since that is where the referee, like the TV cameras, keeps his eyes. In the 1970 World Cup Pelé was marked savagely by the Italian Bertini. Later on he praised him: “Bertini was an artist at committing fouls without being seen. He’d punch me in the ribs or in the stomach, he’d kick me in the ankle … An artist.”
Argentine journalists frequently applaud the wiles of Carlos Bilardo because he knows how to deploy them carefully and effectively. They say that when Bilardo was a player he would prick his opponents with a pin and put on an innocent face. And when he was manager of the Argentine national team, he managed to send a canteen filled with emetic water to Branco, a thirsty Brazilian player, during the toughest match of the 1990 World Cup.
Uruguayan journalists like to call brazen crime a “strong-legged play,” and more than one has celebrated the effectiveness of the “softening kick” to intimidate opposing players in international contests. That kick must be given in the first minutes of the match. Later on, you run the risk of being sent off. In Uruguayan soccer, violence is the daughter of decadence. Long ago, “Charrua’s claw” was a term for bravery, not for a vicious kick.
In the 1950 World Cup, during the famous final in Maracanã, Brazil committed twice as many fouls as Uruguay. In the 1990 Cup, when the manager Oscar Tabárez managed to get the Uruguayan team to go back to playing cleanly, several local commentators took pleasure in affirming that it did not achieve much. There are many fans and officials, too, who prefer winning without honor to losing nobly.
Uruguayan forward “Pepe” Sasía said: “Throw dirt in the eyes of the goalkeeper? Managers don’t like it when you get caught.”
Argentine fans heap praise on the goal that Maradona scored with his hand in the ’86 World Cup, because the referee didn’t see it. In the qualifiers for the World Cup in 1990, Chile’s keeper Roberto Rojas pretended to be wounded by cutting himself on the forehead, but he got caught. Chile’s fans, who adored Rojas and called him “The Condor,” suddenly turned him into the villain of the picture, because his ploy didn’t work.
In professional soccer, like everything else, the crime does not matter as long as the alibi is good. “Culture” means cultivation. What does the culture of power cultivate in us? What sad harvests could come of a power that bestows impunity on the crimes of the military and the graft of politicians and converts them into triumphs?
The writer Albert Camus, who once was a goalkeeper in Algeria, was not referring to the professional game when he said: “Everything I know about morals, I owe to soccer.”
Indigestion
In 1989 in Buenos Aires, a match between Argentinos Juniors and Racing ended in a draw. The rules called for a penalty shootout.
The crowd was on its feet, biting its nails, for the first shots at twelve paces. The fans cheered a goal by Racing. Then came a goal by Argentinos Juniors and the fans from the other side cheered. There was an ovation when the Racing keeper leaped against one post and sent the ball awry. Another ovation praised the Argentinos keeper who did not allow himself to be seduced by the expression on the striker’s face and waited for the ball in the center of the goal.
When the tenth penalty was kicked, there was another round of applause. A few fans left the stadium after the twentieth. When the thirtieth penalty came around, the few who remained responded with yawns. Kicks came and went and the match remained tied.
After forty-four penalty kicks, the match ended. It was a world record for penalties. In the stadium no one was left to celebrate, and no one even knew which side won.
The 1990 World Cup
Nelson Mandela was free, after spending twenty-seven years in prison for being black and proud in South Africa. In Colombia the left’s presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo lay dying and from a helicopter the police were shooting drug trafficker Rodríguez Gacha, one of the ten richest men in the world. Chile’s badly wounded democracy was recuperating, but General Pinochet, at the head of the military, was still keeping an eye on the politicians and reining in their every step. Alberto Fujimori, riding a tractor, was beating Mario Vargas Llosa in the Peruvian elections. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were losing that country’s elections, defeated by the exhaustion wrought by ten years of war against invaders armed and trained by the United States, while the United States was beginning a new occupation of Panama following the success of its twenty-first invasion of that country.
In Poland labor leader Lech Walesa, a man of daily mass, was exiting jail and entering government. In Moscow a crowd was lining up at McDonald’s. The Berlin Wall was being sold off in pieces, as the unification of the two Germanys and the disintegration of Yugoslavia began. A popular insurrection was putting an end to the Ceausescu regime in Romania, and the veteran dictator, who liked to call himself the “Blue Danube of Socialism,” was being executed. In all of Eastern Europe, old bureaucrats were turning into new entrepreneurs and cranes were dragging off statues of Marx, who had no way of saying, “I’m innocent.” Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. Up in heaven, terrestrial machines were visiting Venus and spying on its secrets, while here on earth, in Italy, the fourteenth World Cup got under way.
Fourteen teams from Europe and six from the Americas took part, plus Egypt, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Cameroon, which astonished the world by defeating the Argentine side in the first match and then playing head to head with England. Roger Milla, a forty-year-old veteran, was first drum in this African orchestra.
Maradona, with one foot swelled up like a pumpkin, did the best he could to lead his team. You could barely hear the tango. After losing to Cameroon, Argentina drew with Romania and Italy and was about to lose to Brazil. The Brazilians dominated the entire match, until Maradona, playing on one leg, evaded three markers at midfield and set up Caniggia, who scored before you could even exhale.
Argentina faced Germany in the final, just as in the previous Cup, but this time Germany won 1–0 thanks to an invisible foul and Beckenbauer’s wise coaching.
Italy took third place, England fourth. Schillaci of Italy led the list of scorers with six, followed by Skuharavy of Czechoslovakia with five. This championship, boring soccer wit
hout a drop of audacity or beauty, had the lowest average scores in World Cup history.
Goal by Rincón
It happened at the World Cup in 1990. Colombia was playing better than Germany, but was losing the match 1–0.
Then, in the final minute, the ball reached midfield in search of a head with an electrified afro: Valderrama got the ball from behind, he turned, shook off three Germans he had no need of and passed to Rincón. The ball traveled from Rincón to Valderrama, Valderrama to Rincón, yours and mine, mine and yours, touch after touch, until Rincón loped forward several paces like a giraffe and faced Illgner, the German keeper, alone. Illgner covered the goal completely. So Rincón didn’t kick the ball, he caressed her. And she slid softly between the goalkeeper’s legs and scored.
Hugo Sánchez
As 1992 unfolded, Yugoslavia fell to pieces. War taught brothers to hate each other, and to kill and rape without remorse.
Two Mexican journalists, Epi Ibarra and Hernán Vera, wanted to go to Sarajevo. Bombarded, under siege, Sarajevo was off-limits to the foreign press, and recklessness had already cost more than one reporter his life.
Chaos reigned on all approaches to the city. Everyone against everyone else: no one was sure who was who, or who they were fighting in that bedlam of trenches, smoking ruins, and unburied bodies. Map in hand, Epi and Hernán made their way through the thunder of artillery-fire and machine-gun blasts, until on the banks of the Drina River they suddenly came face-to-face with a large group of soldiers who threw them to the ground and took aim at their chests. The officer bellowed who knows what and the reporters mumbled back who knows what else, but when the officer drew his finger across his throat and the rifles went click, they understood that there was nothing left to do but say good-bye and pray, just in case there is a heaven.
Then it occurred to the condemned men to show their passports. The officer’s face lit up. “Mexico!” he screamed. “Hugo Sánchez!”
And he dropped his weapon and hugged them.
Hugo Sánchez, the Mexican key to impossible locks, became world famous thanks to television, which showcased the art of his goals and the handsprings he turned to celebrate them. In the 1989–1990 season, wearing the uniform of Real Madrid, he burst the nets thirty-eight times and became the leading foreign scorer in the entire history of Spanish soccer.
The Cricket and the Ant
In 1992 the singing cricket defeated the worker ant 2–0.
Germany and Denmark faced each other in the final of the European Championship. The German players were raised on fasting, abstinence, and hard work, the Danes on beer, women, and naps in the sun. Denmark had lost out in the qualifiers and the players were on vacation when war intervened and they got an urgent call to take Yugoslavia’s place in the tournament. They had no time for training nor any interest in it, and had to make do without their most brilliant star, Michael Laudrup, a happy and sure-footed player who had just won the European Cup wearing a Barcelona shirt. The German team, on the other hand, came to the final with Matthäus, Klinsmann, and all of its other big guns. Germany, which should have won, were defeated by Denmark, which had nothing to prove and played as if the field were a continuation of the beach.
Gullit
In 1993 a tide of racism was rising. Its stench, like a recurring nightmare, already hung over Europe; several crimes were committed and laws to keep out ex-colonial immigrants were passed. Many young whites, unable to find work, began to blame their plight on people with dark skin.
That year a team from France won the European Cup for the first time. The winning goal was the work of Basile Boli, an African from the Ivory Coast, who headed in a corner kicked by another African, Abedi Pele, who was born in Ghana. Meanwhile, not even the blindest proponents of white supremacy could deny that the Netherlands’ best players were the veterans Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, dark-skinned sons of Surinamese parents, or that the African Eusébio had been Portugal’s best soccer player ever.
Ruud Gullit, known as “The Black Tulip,” had always been a full-throated opponent of racism. Guitar in hand, he sang at anti-apartheid concerts between matches, and in 1987, when he was chosen Europe’s most valuable player, he dedicated his Ballon d’Or to Nelson Mandela, who spent many years in jail for the crime of believing that blacks are human.
One of Gullit’s knees was operated on three times. Each time commentators declared he was finished. Out of sheer desire he always came back: “When I can’t play I’m like a newborn with nothing to suck.”
His nimble scoring legs and his imposing stature crowned by a head of Rasta dreadlocks won him a fervent following when he played for the strongest teams in the Netherlands and Italy. But Gullit never got along with coaches or managers because he tended to disobey orders, and he had the stubborn habit of speaking out against the culture of money that is reducing soccer to just another listing on the stock exchange.
Parricide
At the end of the southern winter of 1993, Colombia’s national team played a World Cup qualifier in Buenos Aires. When the Colombian players took the field, they were greeted with a shower of whistles, boos, and insults. When they left, the crowd gave them a standing ovation that echoes to this day.
Argentina lost 5–0. As usual, the goalkeeper carried the cross of the defeat, but this time the visitors’ victory was celebrated as never before. To a one, the fans cheered the Colombians’ incredible style, a feast of legs, a joy for the eyes, an ever-changing dance that invented its own music as the match progressed. The lordly play of “El Pibe” Balderrama, a working-class mulatto, was the envy of princes, and the black players were the kings of this carnival: not a soul could get past Perea or stop “Freight Train” Valencia; not a soul could deal with the tentacles of “Octopus” Asprilla or block the bullets fired by Rincón. Given the color of their skin and the intensity of their joy, those Colombians looked like Brazil in its glory years.
The Colombian press called the massacre a “parricide.” Half a century before, the founding fathers of soccer in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali were Argentines. But life has its surprises: Pedernera, Di Stéfano, Rossi, Rial, Pontoni, and Moreno fathered a child who turned out to be Brazilian.
Goal by Zico
It was 1993. In Tokyo, Kashima was playing Tohoku for the Emperor’s Cup.
The Brazilian Zico, star of Kashima, scored the winning goal, the loveliest of his career. The ball reached the center on a cross from the right. Zico, who was in the semicircle, leaped forward. But he jumped too soon. When he realized the ball was behind him, he turned a somersault in midair and with his face to the ground he drove it in with his heel. It was a backward overhead volley.
“Tell me about that goal,” plead the blind.
A Sport of Evasion
When Spain was still suffering under the Franco dictatorship, Real Madrid president Santiago Bernabéu set out a definition of the club’s mission: “We are serving the nation. What we want is to make people happy.”
His colleague from Atlético de Madrid, Vicente Calderón, also praised the sport’s virtues as a collective Valium: “Soccer keeps people from thinking about more dangerous things.”
In 1993 and 1994 the directors of several soccer teams around the world were charged and prosecuted for swindles of various sorts. Evidently soccer is useful not only for hiding social tensions and evading social conflict, but also for hiding assets and evading taxes.
The days are long gone when the most important clubs in the world belonged to the fans and the players. In those remote times, the club president went around with a bucket of lime and a brush to paint the lines on the field, and as for directors, their most extravagant act was footing the bill for a celebratory feast in the neighborhood pub. Today clubs are corporations that move fortunes to hire players and sell spectacles, and they have grown accustomed to tricking the state, fooling the public and violating labor rights and every other right. They are also used to impunity. There is no multinational corporation that enjoys gr
eater impunity than FIFA, the association of professional clubs. FIFA has its own justice system. Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, FIFA’s unjust system sentences first and tries later, so there will be plenty of time to cover up.
Professional soccer operates at the margins of the law, in a sacred territory where it can dictate its own laws and ignore all others. But why should the law operate at the margins of soccer? Judges rarely dare to red-card the big clubs for cooking the books to score illegal goals on the public treasury and leave the rules of clean play sprawled on the ground. The fact is judges know they risk a sharp whistle if they use an iron hand. Professional soccer is untouchable because it is popular. “The directors steal for us,” say the fans, and they believe it.
Some judges are prepared to defy the tradition of impunity, and recent scandals have at least shone a little light on the financial acrobatics and shell games that some of the richest clubs in the world play as a matter of course.
When the president of the Italian club Perugia was accused of buying referees in 1993, he counterattacked by charging, “Eighty percent of soccer is corrupt.”
Experts agree he was being generous. Every important club in Italy, from north to south, from Milan and Torino to Napoli and Cagliari, is involved in fraud, some more, some less. Their falsified balance sheets hide debts several times the value of their capital; the directors maintain slush funds, phantom companies, and secret Swiss accounts; instead of taxes and social security they pay hefty bills for services not rendered; and the players tend to pocket a lot less money than the books say they receive, as it gets lost along the way.