“He’s sick,” they said. They said, “He’s done for.” The Messiah who came to redeem southern Italians from their eternal damnation was also the avenger of Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands by means of one sneaky goal and another fabulous one that left the English spinning like tops for several years. But when he fell, the Golden Boy was nothing but a numb-nosed, whoring phony. Maradona had betrayed the children who adored him and brought dishonor on the sport. They gave him up for dead.

  But the body sat up. Once he had served his cocaine sentence, Maradona became the fireman of the Argentine squad, which was burning up its last chances to reach the ’94 World Cup. Thanks to Maradona, they made it. And at the Cup once again, as in the old days, Maradona was the best of the best until the ephedrine scandal hit.

  The machinery of power had sworn to get him. He spoke truth to power and you pay a price for that, a price paid in cash with no discount. And Maradona himself gave them the excuse, with his suicidal tendency to serve himself up on a platter to his many enemies and that childish irresponsibility that makes him step in every trap laid in his path.

  The same reporters who harass him with their microphones, reproach him for his arrogance and his tantrums, and accuse him of talking too much. They aren’t wrong, but that’s not why they can’t forgive him: what they really do not like are the things he sometimes says. This hot-tempered little wiseacre has the habit of throwing uppercuts. In ’86 and ’94, in Mexico and the United States, he complained about the omnipotent dictatorship of television, which forced the players to work themselves to the bone at noon, roasting under the sun. And on a thousand and one other occasions, throughout the ups and downs of his career, Maradona said things that stirred up the hornet’s nest. He wasn’t the only disobedient player, but his was the voice that made the most offensive questions ring out loud and clear: Why aren’t the international standards for labor rights applied to soccer? If it’s standard practice for performers to know how much money their shows bring in, why can’t the players have access to the books of the opulent multinational of soccer? Havelange, busy with other duties, kept his mouth shut, while Joseph Blatter, a FIFA bureaucrat who never once kicked a ball but goes about in a twenty-five-foot limousine driven by a black chauffeur, had but one comment: “The last star from Argentina was Di Stéfano.”

  When Maradona was finally thrown out of the ’94 World Cup, soccer lost its most strident rebel. And also a fantastic player. Maradona is uncontrollable when he speaks, but much more so when he plays. No one can predict the devilish tricks this inventor of surprises will dream up for the simple joy of throwing the computers off track, tricks he never repeats. He’s not quick, more like a short-legged bull, but he carries the ball sewn to his foot and he has eyes all over his body. His acrobatics light up the field. He can win a match with a thundering blast when his back is to the goal, or with an impossible pass from afar when he is corralled by thousands of enemy legs. And no one can stop him when he decides to dribble upfield.

  In the frigid soccer of today’s world, which detests defeat and forbids all fun, that man was one of the few who proved that fantasy too can be effective.

  They Don’t Count

  At the end of 1994, Maradona, Stoitchkov, Bebeto, Francescoli, Laudrup, Zamorano, Hugo Sánchez, and other players started organizing an international soccer players union.

  Up to now the stars of the show have been blindingly absent from the structures of power where decisions are made. They have no say in the management of local soccer, and neither can they enjoy the luxury of being heard in the heights of FIFA where the global pie is divvied up.

  Who are the players? Monkeys in a circus? They may dress in silk, but aren’t they still monkeys? They are never consulted when it comes to deciding when, where, and how they play. The international bureaucracy changes the rules at its whim, the players have no say. They can’t even find out how much money their legs produce, or where those fugitive fortunes end up.

  After many years of strikes and demonstrations by local unions, the players have won better contracts, but the merchants of soccer continue treating them as if they were machines to be bought, sold, and loaned: “Maradona is an investment,” the president of Napoli liked to say.

  Now European clubs, as well as a few Latin American ones, have psychologists on staff, as in factories. The directors do not pay them to help troubled souls, but to oil the machinery and increase productivity. Athletic productivity? Labor productivity, though in this case the hired hands are really hired feet. The fact is that professional players offer their labor power to the factories of spectacle in exchange for a wage. The price depends on performance, and the more they get paid the more they are expected to produce. Trained to win or to win, squeezed to the last calorie, they are treated worse than racehorses. Racehorses? British player Paul Gascoigne likes to compare himself to a factory-raised chicken: controlled movements, rigid rules, set behaviors that must always be repeated.

  Stars can earn top salaries while their fleeting splendor lasts. Clubs pay them much more now than twenty or thirty years ago, and they can sell their names and faces for advertising. But the glorious idols of soccer are not rewarded with the fabled treasure people imagine. Forbes magazine published a list of the forty top-earning athletes in the world in 1994. Only one soccer player was among them, the Italian Roberto Baggio, and he fell near the bottom of the list.

  What about the thousands upon thousands of players who are not stars? The ones who do not enter the kingdom of fame, who get stuck going round and round in the revolving door? Of every ten professional soccer players in Argentina, only three manage to make a living from it. The salaries are not great, especially considering the short duration of an active player’s career: cannibalistic industrial civilization devours them in a flash.

  [Four soccer stars kicked their way into Forbes’s top forty in 2012: David Beckham (#8), Cristiano Ronaldo (#9), Lionel Messi (#11), and Wayne Rooney (#38). A few millionaire exceptions that prove the rule.]

  An Export Industry

  Here is the itinerary of a player from the southern reaches of the globe who has good legs and good luck. From his hometown he moves to a provincial city, then from the provincial city to a small club in the country’s capital. The small club has no choice but to sell him to a large one. The large club, suffocated by debt, sells him to an even larger club in a larger country. And the player crowns his career in Europe.

  All along this chain, the clubs, contractors, and intermediaries end up with the lion’s share of the money. Each link confirms and perpetuates inequality among the parties, from the hopeless plight of neighborhood clubs in poor countries to the omnipotence of the corporations that run European leagues.

  In Uruguay, for example, soccer is an export industry that scorns the domestic market. The continuous outflow of good players means mediocre professional leagues and ever fewer, ever less fervent fans. People desert the stadiums to watch foreign matches on television. When the World Cup comes around, our players come from the four corners of the earth, meet on the plane, play together for a short while, and bid each other good-bye, without ever having time to jell into a real team: eleven heads, twenty-two legs and a single heart.

  When Brazil won its fourth World Cup, only a few of the celebrating journalists managed to hide their nostalgia for the marvels of days past. The team of Romario and Bebeto played an efficient match, but it was stingy on poetry: a soccer much less Brazilian than the hypnotic play of Garrincha, Didi, Pelé, and their teammates in ’58, ’62 and ’70. More than one reporter noted the shortage of talent, and several commentators pointed to the style of play imposed by the manager, successful but lacking in magic: Brazil had sold its soul to modern soccer. But there was another point that went practically unmentioned: the great teams of the past were made up of Brazilians who played in Brazil. On the 1994 team, eight of them played in Europe. Romario, the highest-paid Latin American player in the world, was earning more in Spain than all eleven of Brazil’s ’5
8 team put together, who were some of the greatest artists in the history of soccer.

  The stars of yesteryear were identified with a local club. Pelé was from Santos, Garrincha was from Botafogo, and Didi as well despite a fleeting experience overseas, and you could not imagine them without those colors or the yellow of the national team. That’s the way it was in Brazil and everywhere else, thanks to loyalty to the uniform or clauses in the contracts of feudal servitude that until recently tied players for life. In France, for example, clubs had property rights over players until they were thirty-four years old: they could go free once they were all washed up. Demanding freedom, France’s players joined the demonstrations of May 1968, when Paris barricades shook the world. They were led by Raymond Kopa.

  The End of the Match

  The ball turns, the world turns. People suspect the sun is a burning ball that works all day and spends the night bouncing around the heavens while the moon does its shift, though science is somewhat doubtful. There is absolutely no question, however, that the world turns around a spinning ball: the final of the ’94 World Cup was watched by more than two billion people, the largest crowd ever of the many that have assembled in this planet’s history. It is the passion most widely shared: many admirers of the ball play with her on fields and pastures, and many more have box seats in front of the TV and bite their nails as twenty-two men in shorts chase a ball and kick her to prove their love.

  At the end of the ’94 Cup every child born in Brazil was named Romario, and the turf of the stadium in Los Angeles was sold off like pizza, at twenty dollars a slice. A bit of insanity worthy of a better cause? A primitive and vulgar business? A bag of tricks manipulated by the owners? I’m one of those who believe that soccer might be all that, but it is also much more: a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it. A reporter once asked German theologian Dorothee Sölle, “How would you explain happiness to a child?”

  “I wouldn’t explain it,” she answered. “I’d toss him a ball and let him play.”

  Professional soccer does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites. And maybe that’s why soccer never stops being astonishing. As my friend Ángel Ruocco says, that’s the best thing about it—its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a runty, bowlegged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.

  An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.

  For years I have felt challenged by the memory and reality of soccer, and I have tried to write something worthy of this great pagan mass able to speak such different languages and unleash such universal passion. By writing, I was going to do with my hands what I never could accomplish with my feet: irredeemable klutz, disgrace of the playing fields, I had no choice but to ask of words what the ball I so desired denied me.

  From that challenge, and from that need for expiation, this book was born. Homage to soccer, celebration of its lights, denunciation of its shadows. I don’t know if it has turned out the way soccer would have liked, but I know it grew within me and has reached the final page, and now that it is born it is yours. And I feel that irreparable melancholy we all feel after making love and at the end of the match.

  In Montevideo, in the summer of 1995

  Extra Time

  The 1998 World Cup

  India and Pakistan were fulfilling the dream of having their own bombs, waltzing into the great powers’ exclusive nuclear club through the front door. Asian stock markets were lying prostrate, as was the long dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia, emptied of power even while his pockets remained heavy with the $16 billion that power had placed there.

  The world was losing Frank Sinatra, “The Voice.” Eleven European countries were agreeing to launch a single currency, the euro. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.

  João Havelange was abdicating the throne and installing in his place the dauphin Joseph Blatter, senior courtier in the kingdom of world soccer. General Videla, Argentina’s former dictator who twenty years earlier had inaugurated the World Cup alongside Havelange, was marching off to jail, while in France a new championship got under way.

  Despite serious complications caused by a strike at Air France, thirty-two teams arrived at elegant Saint Denis stadium to take part in the final World Cup of the century: fifteen from Europe, eight from the Americas, five from Africa, two from the Middle East, and two from Asia.

  Cries of victory, murmurs of mourning: a month of combat in packed stadiums left France, the host, and Brazil, the favorite, waiting to cross swords in the final. Brazil lost 3–0. Suker from Croatia led the list of scorers with six, followed by Batistuta from Argentina and Vieri from Italy with five apiece.

  According to a study reported in the London Daily Telegraph, during a soccer match fans secrete nearly as much testosterone as the players. Multinational companies also work up such a lather that you would think they were the ones on the field. Brazil did not become a five-time winner, but Adidas did. Beginning with the ’54 Cup, which Adidas won with Germany, this was the fifth victory of the players representing the three bars. With France, Adidas raised the solid gold trophy once more. And with Zinedine Zidane, it took the prize for best player. Rival Nike, whose star, Ronaldo, was ill for the final, had to settle for second and fourth places, which it won with Brazil and the Netherlands. A junior company, Lotto, scored a coup with Croatia, which had never been to a World Cup and against all odds came in third.

  Afterward, the grass at Saint Denis was sold off in slices, just as at the previous Cup in Los Angeles. The author of this book has no loaves of lawn to sell, but he would like to offer, free of charge, a few morsels of soccer that also had something to do with this championship.

  Stars

  The most famous soccer players are products who sell products. Back in Pelé’s day, players played and that was all, or nearly all. By Maradona’s time, television and advertising already held sway and things had changed. Maradona charged a high price and paid one as well. He charged for his legs, and paid with his soul.

  At fourteen, Ronaldo was a poor mulatto from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, with rabbit teeth and the legs of a great striker, who couldn’t play for Flamengo because he did not have the bus fare. At twenty-two he was making a thousand dollars an hour, even while he slept. Overwhelmed by his own popularity and the pressure of money, obliged to always shine and always win, Ronaldo suffered a nervous breakdown with violent convulsions hours before the ’98 Cup was decided. They say Nike forced him to take the field in the final against France. He played but he didn’t. And he could not demonstrate the virtues of Nike’s new line of shoes, the R-9, being marketed on his feet.

  Prices

  At the end of the century, soccer reporters write less about players’ abilities and more about the prices they command. Club presidents, businessmen, contractors, and related fishmongers crowd the soccer columns. Until a few years ago “pass” referred to the movement of the ball fr
om one player to another. Now it alludes more to the movement of a player from one club to another, or one country to another. What’s the return on investment in the stars? Soccer columnists bombard us with the vocabulary of the times: offer, buyout, option to buy, sale, foreclosure, appreciation, depreciation. During the 1998 World Cup, TV screens across the globe were invaded and overwhelmed by collective emotion, the most collective of emotions. But they were also turned into tradeshow displays. There were ups and downs in leg futures.

  Hired Feet

  Joseph Blatter, soccer’s new monarch, gave an interview to the Brazilian magazine Placar at the end of 1995, while he was still Havelange’s right-hand man. The journalist asked about the international players union being organized.

  “FIFA doesn’t deal with players,” Blatter responded. “Players are employees of the clubs.”

  While Blatter the bureaucrat offered his disdain, there was good news for the athletes and for all of us who believe in human rights and freedom for labor. In a suit brought by Belgian soccer player Jean-Marc Bosman, Europe’s highest judicial authority, the European Court of Justice, ruled that European players could become free agents at the ends of their contracts.

  Later on, Brazil’s “Pelé Law” further weakened the chains of feudal servitude. But in many countries, players are still treated as fixed assets of the clubs, most of which are companies disguised as nonprofit organizations.

  Just before the ’98 Cup, one manager, Pacho Maturana, offered this opinion: “Nobody thinks about players’ rights.” That continues to be a truth as large as a house and as vast as the world, even though at long last players are winning the right to free agency. The higher a player goes in professional soccer, the greater are his obligations, always more numerous than his rights. He must live by the decisions of others, suffer military discipline, exhausting training, and incessant travel, and play day after day after day, always in top form, producing ever more.