In 1592 in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare turned to soccer to formulate a character’s complaint:
Am I so round with you as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.
And a few years later in King Lear, the Earl of Kent taunted: “Nor tripped neither, you base football player!”
In Florence soccer was called calcio, as it is even now throughout Italy. Leonardo da Vinci was a fervent fan and Machiavelli loved to play. It was played in sides of twenty-seven men split into three lines, and they were allowed to use their hands and feet to hit the ball and gouge the bellies of their adversaries. Throngs of people attended the matches, which were held in the largest piazzas and on the frozen waters of the Arno. Far from Florence, in the gardens of the Vatican, Popes Clement VII, Leo IX, and Urban VIII used to roll up their vestments to play calcio.
In Mexico and Central America a rubber ball filled in for the sun in a sacred ceremony performed as far back as 1500 B.C. But we do not know when soccer began in many places of the Americas. The Indians of the Bolivian Amazon say they have been chasing a hefty rubber ball to put it between two posts without using their hands since time immemorial. In the eighteenth century, a Spanish priest from the Jesuit missions of the Upper Paraná described an ancient custom of the Guarani: “They do not throw the ball with their hands like us, rather they propel it with the upper part of their bare foot.” Among the Indians of Mexico and Central America, the ball was generally hit with the hip or the forearm, although paintings at Teotihuacán and Chichén-Itzá show the ball being kicked with the foot and the knee. A mural created over a thousand years ago in Tepantitla has an ancestor of Hugo Sánchez maneuvering the ball with his left. The match would end when the ball approached its destination: the sun arrived at dawn after traveling through the region of death. Then, for the sun to rise, blood would flow. According to some in the know, the Aztecs were in the habit of sacrificing the winners. Before cutting off their heads, they painted red stripes on their bodies. The chosen of the gods would offer their blood, so the earth would be fertile and the heavens generous.
The Rules of the Game
After centuries of official denial, the British Isles finally accepted the ball in its destiny. Under Queen Victoria soccer was embraced not only as a plebeian vice but as an aristocratic virtue.
The future leaders of society learned how to win by playing soccer in the courtyards of colleges and universities. There, upper-class brats unbosomed their youthful ardors, honed their discipline, tempered their anger, and sharpened their wits. At the other end of the social scale, workers had no need to test the limits of their bodies, since that is what factories and workshops were for, but the fatherland of industrial capitalism discovered that soccer, passion of the masses, offered entertainment and consolation to the poor and distraction from thoughts of strikes and other evils.
In its modern form, soccer comes from a gentleman’s agreement signed by twelve English clubs in the autumn of 1863 in a London tavern. The clubs agreed to abide by rules established in 1848 at the University of Cambridge. In Cambridge soccer divorced rugby: carrying the ball with your hands was outlawed, although touching it was allowed, and kicking the adversary was also prohibited. “Kicks must be aimed only at the ball,” warned one rule. A century and a half later some players still confuse the ball with their rival’s skull owing to the similarity in shape.
The London accord put no limit on the number of players, or the size of the field, or the height of the goal, or the length of the contest. Matches lasted two or three hours and the protagonists chatted and smoked whenever the ball was flying in the distance. One modern rule was established: the offside. It was disloyal to score goals behind the adversary’s back.
In those days no one played a particular position on the field. They all ran happily after the ball, each wherever he wanted, and everyone changed positions at will. It fell to Scotland around 1870 to organize teams with defense, midfielders, and strikers. By then sides had eleven players. From 1869 on, none of them could touch the ball with his hands, not even to catch and drop it to kick. In 1871 the exception to that taboo was born: the goalkeeper could use his entire body to defend the goal.
The goalkeeper protected a square redoubt narrower than today’s and much taller. It consisted of two posts joined by a belt five and a half meters off the ground. The belt was replaced by a wooden crossbar in 1875. Goals were literally scored on the posts with a small notch. Today goals are registered on electronic scoreboards but the expression “to score a goal” has stuck. In some countries we call the goalmouth the arco and the one who defends it the arquero, even though it’s all right angles and not an arch at all, perhaps because students at English colleges used courtyard arches for goals.
In 1872 the referee made his appearance. Until then, the players were their own judges, and they themselves sanctioned any fouls committed. In 1880, chronometer in hand, the referee decided when the match was over and when anyone should be sent off, though he still ran things by shouting from the sidelines. In 1891 the referee stepped onto the playing field for the first time, blowing a whistle to call the first penalty kick in history and walking twelve paces to indicate the spot where it was to be taken. For some time the British press had been campaigning in favor of penalties because the players needed some protection in front of the goal, which was the scene of incredible butchery. A hair-raising list of players killed and bones broken had been published in the Westminster Gazette.
In 1882 English authorities allowed the throw-in. Eight years later the areas of the field were marked with lime and a circle was drawn at the center. That same year the goal gained a net to trap the ball and erase any doubts as to whether a goal had been scored.
After that the century died, and with it the British monopoly. In 1904 FIFA was born, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, which has governed relations between ball and foot throughout the world ever since. Through all the world championships, few changes have been made to the British rules that first organized the sport.
The English Invasions
Outside a madhouse, in an empty lot in Buenos Aires, several blond boys were kicking a ball around.
“Who are they?” asked a child.
“Crazy people,” answered his father. “Crazy English.”
Journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly remembers this from his childhood. At first, soccer seemed like a crazy man’s game in the River Plate. But as the Empire expanded, soccer became an export as typically British as Manchester cloth, railroads, loans from Barings, or the doctrine of free trade. It arrived on the feet of sailors who played by the dikes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, while Her Majesty’s ships unloaded blankets, boots, and flour, and took on wool, hides, and wheat to make more blankets, boots, and flour on the other side of the world. English citizens—diplomats and managers of railroad and gas companies—formed the first local teams. The English of Montevideo and Buenos Aires staged Uruguay’s first international competition in 1889, under a gigantic portrait of Queen Victoria, her eyes lowered in a mask of disdain. Another portrait of the queen of the seas watched over the first Brazilian soccer match in 1895, played between the British subjects of the Gas Company and the São Paulo Railway.
Old photographs show these pioneers in sepia tones. They were warriors trained for battle. Cotton and wool armor covered their entire bodies so as not to offend the ladies in attendance, who unfurled silk parasols and waved lace handkerchiefs. The only flesh the players exposed were their serious faces peering out from behind wax-twirled mustaches below caps or hats. Their feet were shod with heavy Mansfield shoes.
It did not take long for the contagion to spread. Sooner rather than later, the native-born gentlemen of local society started playing that crazy English game. From London they imported the shirts, shoes, thick ankle sock
s, and pants that reached from the chest to below the knee. Balls no longer confounded customs officers, who at first had not known how to classify the species. Ships also brought rulebooks to these far-off coasts of southern America, and with them came words that remained for many years to come: field, score, goal, goalkeeper, back, half, forward, out ball, penalty, offside. A “foul” merited punishment by the “referee,” but the aggrieved player could accept an apology from the guilty party “as long as his apology was sincere and was expressed in proper English,” according to the first soccer rulebook that circulated in the River Plate.
Meanwhile, other English words were being incorporated into the speech of Latin American countries in the Caribbean: “pitcher,” “catcher,” “innings.” Having fallen under U.S. influence, these countries learned to hit a ball with a round wooden bat. The Marines shouldered bats next to their rifles when they imposed imperial order on the region by blood and by fire. Baseball became for the people of the Caribbean what soccer is for us.
Creole Soccer
The Argentine Football Association did not allow Spanish to be spoken at the meetings of its directors, and the Uruguay Association Football League outlawed Sunday matches because it was British custom to play on Saturday. But by the first years of the twentieth century, soccer was becoming a popular and local phenomenon on the shores of the River Plate. This sport, first imported to entertain the idle offspring of the well-to-do, had escaped its high window box, come to earth, and was setting down roots.
The process was unstoppable. Like the tango, soccer blossomed in the slums. It required no money and could be played with nothing more than sheer desire. In fields, in alleys, and on beaches, native-born kids and young immigrants played pickup using balls made of old socks filled with rags or paper and a couple of stones for a goal. Thanks to the language of soccer, which soon became universal, workers driven out of the countryside could communicate perfectly well with workers driven out of Europe. The Esperanto of the ball connected the native-born poor with peons who had crossed the sea from Vigo, Lisbon, Naples, Beirut, or Bessarabia with their dreams of building America—making a new world by laying bricks, carrying loads, baking bread, or sweeping streets. Soccer had made a lovely voyage: first organized in the colleges and universities of England, it brought joy to the lives of South Americans who had never set foot in a school.
On the playing fields of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, a style came into being. A homegrown way of playing soccer, like the homegrown way of dancing being invented in the milonga clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile and soccer players created their own language in the tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.
At the same time, soccer was being tropicalized in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo by the poor who enriched it while they appropriated it. No longer the possession of the few comfortable youth who played by copying, this foreign sport became Brazilian, fertilized by the creative energies of the people discovering it. And thus was born the most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso, and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dance steps of the big-city slums.
As soccer became a popular passion and revealed its hidden beauty, it disqualified itself as a dignified pastime. In 1915 the democratization of soccer drew complaints from the Rio de Janeiro magazine Sports: “Those of us who have a certain position in society are obliged to play with workers, with drivers.… Playing this sport is becoming an agony, a sacrifice, never a pastime.”
The Story of Fla and Flu
The year 1912 saw the first classic in the history of Brazilian soccer: the first Fla–Flu. Fluminense beat Flamengo 3–2.
It was a stirring and violent match that caused numerous fainting spells among the spectators. The boxes were festooned with flowers, fruits, feathers, drooping ladies, and raucous gentlemen. While the gentlemen celebrated each goal by throwing their straw hats onto the playing field, the ladies let fall their fans and collapsed from the excitement of the goal or the oppression of heat and corset.
Flamengo had been born not long before, when Fluminense split after much saber rattling and many labor pains. Soon the father was sorry he had not strangled this smart aleck of a son in the cradle, but it was too late. Fluminense had spawned its own curse and nothing could be done.
From then on, father and son—rebellious son, abandoned father—dedicated their lives to hating each other. Each Fla–Flu classic is a new battle in a war without end. The two love the same city, lazy, sinful Rio de Janeiro, a city that languidly lets herself be loved, toying with both and surrendering to neither. Father and son play for the lover who plays with them. For her they battle, and she attends each duel dressed for a party.
The Opiate of the People?
How is soccer like God? Each inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.
In 1902 in London, Rudyard Kipling made fun of soccer and those who contented their souls with “the muddied oafs at the goals.” Three quarters of a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges was more subtle: he gave a lecture on the subject of immortality on the same day and at the same hour that Argentina was playing its first match in the 1978 World Cup.
The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their conviction that soccer worship is precisely the superstition people deserve. Possessed by the ball, working stiffs think with their feet, which is entirely appropriate, and fulfill their dreams in primitive ecstasy. Animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riffraff get what they want.
In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers forget who they are and let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.
In the River Plate, once the English and the rich lost possession of the sport, the first popular clubs were organized in railroad workshops and shipyards. Several anarchist and socialist leaders soon denounced the clubs as a maneuver by the bourgeoisie to forestall strikes and disguise class divisions. The spread of soccer across the world was an imperialist trick to keep oppressed peoples trapped in an eternal childhood.
But the club Argentinos Juniors was born calling itself the Chicago Martyrs, in homage to those anarchist workers, and May 1 was the day chosen to launch the club Chacarita at a Buenos Aires anarchist library. In those first years of the twentieth century, plenty of left-leaning intellectuals celebrated soccer instead of repudiating it as a sedative of consciousness. Among them was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who praised “this open-air kingdom of human loyalty.”
A Rolling Flag
During the summer of 1916, in the midst of the World War, an English captain named Nevill launched an attack by kicking a ball. He leaped out from behind the parapet that had offered some cover and chased the ball toward the German trenches. His regiment, at first hesitant, followed. The captain was cut down by gunfire, but England conquered that no-man’s-land and celebrated the battle as the first victory of British soccer on the front lines.
Many years later, toward the end of the century, the owner of Milan won the Italian elections with a chant from the stadiums, “Forza Italia!” Silvio Berlusconi promised to save Italy the way he had saved Milan, the all-time champion superteam, and voters forgot that several of his companies were on the edge of ruin.
Soccer and fatherland are always connected, and politicians and dictators frequently exploit those links of identity. The Italian squad won the World Cups of 1934 and 1938 in the name of the fatherland and Mussolini, and the players started and finished each match by saluting the crowd with their rig
ht arms outstretched, giving three cheers for Italy.
For the Nazis too, soccer was a matter of state. A monument in the Ukraine commemorates the players of the 1942 Dynamo Kiev team. During the German occupation they committed the insane act of defeating Hitler’s squad in the local stadium. Having been warned, “If you win, you die,” they started out resigned to losing, trembling with fear and hunger, but in the end they could not contain their yearning for dignity. When the match was over all eleven were shot with their club shirts on at the edge of a cliff.
Soccer and fatherland, fatherland and soccer: in 1934 while Bolivia and Paraguay were annihilating each other in the Chaco War, disputing a deserted corner of the map, the Paraguayan Red Cross formed a soccer team that played in several cities of Argentina and Uruguay and raised enough money to attend to the wounded of both sides.
Three years later, while General Franco, arm in arm with Hitler and Mussolini, bombed the Spanish Republic, a Basque team was on the road in Europe and the club Barcelona was playing in the United States and Mexico. The Basque government had sent the Euzkadi team to France and other countries to publicize their cause and raise funds for defense; Barcelona had sailed for America with the same mission. It was 1937 and Barcelona’s captain had already fallen under Franco’s bullets. On the soccer field and off, the two wandering teams embodied democracy under siege.
Only four of Barcelona’s players made it back to Spain during the war. Of the Basques, only one. When the Republic was defeated, FIFA declared the exiled players to be in rebellion and threatened them with permanent suspension, but a few of them managed to find work with Latin American teams. Several of the Basques formed the club España in Mexico, who were unbeatable in the early years. The Euzkadi center forward, Isidro Lángara, made his debut in Argentina in 1939. In his first match he scored four goals. That was for San Lorenzo, where Ángel Zubieta, who had played in Euzkadi’s midfield, also starred. Later on, in Mexico, Lángara led the list of scorers in the 1945 championship.