When Winston Churchill reached the age of ninety, buoyant as ever, a journalist asked him the secret of his good health. “Sports,” Churchill responded. “I never played them.”

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  In today’s world, everything that moves and everything that doesn’t carries some sort of commercial message. Every soccer player is a billboard in movement, but FIFA expressly prohibits players from wearing messages of solidarity. Julio Grondona, the boss of Argentine soccer, reminded us all of this in 1997, when a few players tried to show their support for the demands of the country’s teachers, who earn salaries of perpetual fasting. Not long before that, FIFA fined the English player Robbie Fowler for the crime of writing on his shirt a slogan in support of striking stevedores.

  Roots

  Many of soccer’s greatest stars suffer discrimination because they are black or mulatto. On the field they find an alternative to the life of crime to which they had been condemned by statistical average, and thus they become symbols of collective hope.

  A recent survey in Brazil showed that two out of three professional players never finished primary school. Many of these—half—have black or brown skin. Despite the invasion of the middle class evident lately on the field, Brazilian soccer today is not very different from the days of Pelé, who as a child used to steal peanuts in the train station.

  Africans

  Njanka, from Cameroon, took off from the back, left the entire population of Austria in the dust, and scored the prettiest goal of the ’98 Cup. But Cameroon itself did not go far.

  When Nigeria, with its joyous soccer, defeated the Spanish team, and Paraguay fought Spain to a tie, Spain’s President José María Aznar commented, “Even a Nigerian, even a Paraguayan could take your place.” Then, when Nigeria was knocked out of the running, an Argentine commentator decreed, “They’re all bricklayers, not one of them uses his head to think.”

  FIFA, which gives awards for fair play, did not play fair with Nigeria. Even though the team had just won the Olympics, they would not let it be seeded at the top of its group.

  Black Africa’s teams left the World Cup early, but Africa’s children and grandchildren continued to shine on the teams of the Netherlands, France, Brazil, and others. Some commentators called them darkies. They never called the others whiteys.

  Fervor

  In April 1997 guerrillas occupying the Japanese embassy in the city of Lima were gunned down. When commandos burst in and carried out their spectacular lightning butchery, the guerrillas were playing soccer. Their leader, Néstor Cerpa Cartolini, died wearing the colors of Alianza, the club he loved.

  Few things happen in Latin America that do not have some direct or indirect relation with soccer. Whether a shared celebration or a shipwreck that takes us all down, soccer counts in Latin America, sometimes more than anything else, even if the ideologues who love humanity but can’t stand people don’t realize it.

  Latin Americans

  Mexico played well in the ’98 Cup. Paraguay and Chile were tough bones to chew. Colombia and Jamaica gave it their best. Brazil and Argentina gave it a lot less than their best, handcuffed by strategies that were rather stingy in joy and fantasy. On the Argentine squad all joy and fantasy fell to Ortega, master of gambols and arabesques but a crummy actor when it comes to rolling on the ground.

  Dutch

  Of the Latin American teams, to tell the truth, the one I liked best was the Netherlands. The orange offered a feast for the eyes, with good footwork and quick passes, luxuriating in the ball. Their style was due, in large part, to the contribution of players from South America, descendants of slaves born in Suriname.

  There were no blacks among the ten thousand Dutch fans who traveled to France, but there certainly were on the field: Kluivert, Seedorf, Reiziger, Winter, Bogarde, Davids. The engine of the team, Davids plays and makes plays: he gets his goals and gets in trouble, because he will not accept that black players earn less than white ones.

  French

  Nearly all of the players wearing blue shirts and singing “La Marseillaise” before each match were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Thuram—elevated to the category of national hero for two magnificent goals—and Henry, Desailly, Vieira, and Karembeu were from Africa, the Caribbean, or New Caledonia. Most of the others came from Basque, Armenian, or Argentine families.

  Zidane, the one most acclaimed, is the son of Algerians. “Zidane for President” wrote an anonymous hand on the Arc de Triomphe the day of the victory celebration. President? There are many Arabs and children of Arabs in France, but not a single one is a member of parliament, much less a minister.

  A poll published during the World Cup found that four out of every ten people in France have racist views. Racism’s doublespeak lets you cheer the heroes and curse the rest. France’s victory was celebrated by a crowd comparable only to the one that overflowed the streets half a century ago, when the German occupation finally ended.

  Fish

  In 1997 an advertisement on Fox Sports exhorted viewers to watch soccer: “See the big fish gobble up the little ones.” An invitation to boredom. Fortunately, on more than one occasion during the ’98 Cup, the little fish ate the big ones, bones and all. That’s the bright side we sometimes see in soccer, and in life.

  The 2002 World Cup

  A season of collapses. A terrorist attack had leveled the Twin Towers in New York. President Bush had rained missiles down upon Afghanistan and razed the dictatorship of the Taliban, which his father and Reagan had suckled. The war against terrorism was giving its blessing to military terror. Israeli tanks were demolishing Gaza and the West Bank, so that the Palestinians could continue paying for the Holocaust they did not commit.

  Spider-Man was toppling box-office records. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. What did tumble was Argentina, the model nation, and down with it went its currency, government, and everything else. In Venezuela, a coup d’état overthrew President Chávez and, when a multitude reimposed the deposed leader, television, that champion of the free press, made like it had not heard.

  Shattered by its own swindles, the corporate giant Enron, one of the more generous donors to the campaigns of Bush and most U.S. senators, came crashing down. And like dominoes, the stock of other sacred monsters went tumbling after: WorldCom, Xerox, Vivendi, Merck—all because of a few small billion-dollar accounting errors. FIFA’s largest business partners, ISL and Kirch, were also going belly-up, but their outrageous bankruptcies failed to keep Joseph Blatter from being installed, by a landslide, on the throne of world soccer. If you want to look good, find someone worse: a master at cooking books and buying votes, Blatter the untouchable turned Havelange into a Sister of Charity.

  Bertie Felstead was tumbling too, done in by death. Felstead, the oldest man in England, was the sole survivor of that extraordinary soccer match between British and German soldiers on Christmas Day 1915 in no-man’s-land. Under the magical influence of a ball that appeared from who knows where, the battlefield became a playing field for a short while, until screaming officers managed to remind the soldiers that they were obliged to hate each other.

  * * *

  Thirty-two teams traveled to Japan and Korea to wage the seventeenth World Cup in the shiny new stadiums of twenty cities. The first World Cup of the new millennium was the first to be played in Asia. Pakistani children sewed the high-tech ball for Adidas that started rolling on opening night in the stadium at Seoul: a rubber chamber, surrounded by a cloth net covered with foam, all inside a skin of white polymer decorated with the symbol of fire. A ball built to lure fortunes from the grass.

  * * *

  There were two world soccer championships: one had athletes of flesh and blood; the other, held simultaneously, featured robots. The mechanical players, programmed by software engineers, waged RoboCup 2002 in the Japanese port of Fukuoka, across from the Korean coast. What do the businessmen, technocrats, bur
eaucrats, and ideologues of the soccer industry dream about? Theirs is a recurring dream, ever more like reality, in which players imitate robots.

  Sad sign of the times: the twenty-first century sanctifies uniformity in the name of efficiency and sacrifices freedom on the altar of success. “You win not because you’re good, rather you’re good because you win,” noted Cornelius Castoriadis some years ago. He wasn’t referring to soccer, but he might as well have been. Wasting time is forbidden, so is losing. Reduced to a job, subjected to the laws of profitability, the game is no longer played. Like everything else, professional soccer seems to be run by the almighty, even if nonexistent, UEB (Union of the Enemies of Beauty).

  Obedience, speed, strength, and none of those fancy turns: this is the mold into which globalization pours the game. Soccer gets mass-produced, and it comes out colder than a freezer and as merciless as a meat grinder: soccer for robots. Such boredom supposedly means progress, but historian Arnold Toynbee had already seen enough of that when he wrote, “Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.”

  * * *

  Back to the flesh-and-blood Cup. In the opening match, more than one quarter of humanity witnessed the first surprise on television. France, winner of the previous championship, got beaten by Senegal, one of its former colonies and a first-time participant in the World Cup. Contrary to all predictions, France was sidelined in the first round without scoring a single goal. Argentina, the other great favorite, also fell in the first exchange. And then Italy and Spain were sent packing after suffering armed assaults at the hands of the referees. All these powerful teams were done in by twin brothers: the imperative of winning and the terror of losing. The greatest stars of world soccer came to the Cup overwhelmed by the weight of fame and responsibility, and exhausted from the ferocious pace demanded by the clubs for which they play.

  With no World Cup history, no stars, no obligation to win or trepidation about losing, Senegal played in a state of grace and was the revelation of the championship. China, Ecuador, and Slovenia also faced a baptism by fire, but were sidelined in the first round. Senegal made it to the quarterfinals undefeated and no further, but their unending dance brought home a simple truth that tends to escape the scientists of the ball: soccer is a game, and those who really play it feel happy and make us happy too. The goal I liked best in the entire tournament was scored by Senegal: backheel by Thiaw, deft shot by Camara. Another Senegalese, Diouf, dribbled the ball an average of eight times per match, in a championship where that pleasure for the eyes seemed prohibited.

  The other surprise was Turkey. Nobody could believe it. The country had been from the Cup for half a century. In its first match, against Brazil, the Turkish side was high-handedly cheated by the referee, but the team kept flying and ended up winning third place. Its fervor and quality play rendered the experts who had scorned it speechless.

  Nearly all the rest was one long yawn. Fortunately, in its final matchups Brazil remembered that it was Brazil. The team finally let go and played like Brazilians, slipping out of the cage of efficient mediocrity in which the manager, Scolari, had locked them. Then their four R’s, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Roberto Carlos, shone brilliantly, and Brazil at last turned into a fiesta.

  * * *

  And they were champions. Just before the final, 170 million Brazilians stuck pins in German sausages, and Germany succumbed 2–0. It was Brazil’s seventh victory in seven matches. The two countries had each been finalists many times, but never before had they faced each other in the World Cup. Turkey took third place, South Korea fourth. Translated into market terms, Nike took first and fourth, while Adidas came in second and third.

  The Brazilian Ronaldo, recovered after a long injury, led the list of scorers with eight, followed by his compatriot Rivaldo and Germany’s Klose, each with five, then the Dane Tomasson and the Italian Vieri with four goals apiece. Sükür of Turkey scored the fastest goal in World Cup history, eleven seconds after the match began.

  For the very first time, a goalkeeper, the German Oliver Khan, was chosen as best player of the tournament. Such was the terror he inspired that his opponents thought he was a son of that other Khan, Genghis. But he wasn’t.

  The 2006 World Cup

  As usual, CIA aircraft were flying in and out of Europe without permission or notice or so much as a hello–good-bye, ferrying prisoners to torture chambers around the world.

  As usual, Israel was invading Gaza, and in order to rescue a soldier held hostage was holding Palestine’s freedom hostage with guns blazing.

  As usual, scientists were warning that the climate was coming unhinged and sooner rather than later the polar icecaps would melt and the oceans would swallow seaports and shorelines. But the ones poisoning the atmosphere and unhinging the climate continued, as usual, to turn a deaf ear.

  As usual, the fix was in on the Mexican election, where the computer system for the official vote count was impeccably programmed by the brother-in-law of the candidate of the right.

  As usual, well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.

  As usual, human rights violations in Cuba were making headlines. This time at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo, where three of the hundreds of prisoners held without charge or trial were found hanged in their cells. The White House said the terrorists were just trying to attract attention.

  As usual, a scandal was erupting after Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, nationalized the country’s oil and gas resources, thus committing the unpardonable crime of keeping his promises.

  As usual, killings were continuing in Iraq, a country guilty of harboring oil, while Pandemic Studios of California was announcing a new video game in which the heroes invade Venezuela, also guilty of harboring oil.

  And the United States was threatening to invade Iran, yet another country guilty of harboring oil. Iran was a menace because it wanted a nuclear bomb. Remind me, was it Iran that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

  Bruno, too, was a menace. Reared in captivity in Italy then released, the bear was frolicking in the forests of Germany. Although he showed not the slightest interest in soccer, the agents of order were taking no chances. They shot Bruno to death in Bavaria just before the opening of the eighteenth World Cup.

  * * *

  Thirty-two countries from five continents played sixty-four matches in twelve attractive, well-designed, even majestic stadiums across a unified Germany: eleven in the West and just one in the East.

  This World Cup had a theme: before each match the players unveiled a banner decrying the global plague of racism.

  A hot topic: on the eve of the tournament, French political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen declared that the country could not see itself in its players, for nearly all were black, and he added that its captain Zinedine Zidane, more Algerian than French, refused to sing the national anthem. The vice president of the Italian senate, Roberto Calderoli, echoed the sentiment saying that the French team consisted of blacks, Islamists, and Communists who preferred “l’Internationale” to “La Marseillaise” and Mecca to Bethlehem. Earlier, the coach of the Spanish team, Luis Aragonés, called French player Thierry Henry a “black piece of shit,” and the president in perpetuity of South American soccer, Nicolás Leoz, opened his autobiography by saying he had been born “in a town populated by thirty people and a hundred Indians.”

  At the end of the tournament, in practically the final moment of the final match, a bull charged: Zidane, who was saying farewell to soccer, head-butted a rival who had been needling him with the sort of insult that lunatic fans like to shriek from the upper decks. The insulter got flattened and the insulted got a red card from the referee and jeers from a crowd poised until then to give him an ovation. And Zidane left the field for good.

  Still, this was his World Cup. He was the best player of the tournament, despite that final act
of insanity or integrity, depending on how you look at it. Thanks to his beautiful moves, thanks to his melancholy elegance, we could still believe that soccer was not irredeemably condemned to mediocrity.

  * * *

  In that final match, shortly after Zidane was sent off, Italy beat France on penalties and was crowned champion.

  Until 1968 ties were decided by the toss of a coin, since then by penalty shots: more or less another way of leaving it to chance. France was better than Italy, but a few seconds obliterated more than two hours of play. The same thing had happened in the match that put Argentina, a better team than Germany, on the plane home.

  * * *

  Eight players from the Italian club Juventus reached the final in Berlin: five for Italy and three for France. Juventus was the club most deeply implicated in the rackets uncovered on the eve of the Cup. Italy’s “Clean Hands” campaign became “Clean Feet”: judges found evidence of a vast array of deceptions, including paying off referees, buying journalists, falsifying contracts, cooking the books, raffling off positions, manipulating TV coverage … Also implicated was Milan, property of Silvio Berlusconi, the virtuoso who has so successfully avoided prosecution for his fraudulent practices in soccer, in business, and in government.

  * * *

  Italy won its fourth Cup and France came second, followed by Germany and Portugal. You might say Puma won out over Adidas and Nike.