Updated:10/12/2020 01:13h
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A journalist said that if you don’t like politics, you don’t like society, because the former is still a manifestation of the latter. The same happens with football, or the so-called “modern” football, which is professed to hate and where the premiums and their inhuman bureaucracy are more news than the games themselves. Sports, in short, seem like an extension of reality, the same world seen with a different perspective, that of balls, hoops or fences. A venue where in recent years, the best leagues on the planet have become a scene of demand or protest and an infinite generator of unexpected leaders. His last episode, the past Tuesday at PSG-Basaksehir, when the 22 footballers, in an unprecedented event in European football, left the field due to an alleged racist act by the fourth official towards Pierre Webó, a member of the Turkish team’s coaching staff.
The United States, almost a time machine, because what happens there does not take long to jump the pond, it is also a forerunner in the social cause in sports. Bill Russell, a true NBA legend and iconic Boston Celtics player, was one of the first athletes to boycott a party for social causes. The Massachusetts team was in Kentucky, a southern state, in 1961 to play a preseason game and Russell, with segregation still in place in the country, was barred from entering a restaurant. He and his three other African-American teammates refused to play, something supported by the coach and the rest of his teammates. The clovers never played that match.
In recent years, the “political organization,” as former President Donald Trump liked to call the NBA, staged its commitment to el «Black lives matter» in the past season. After many meetings, owners, coaches and players they sealed several agreements to encourage voting in disadvantaged neighborhoods with an African American majority. The champions, who traditionally appear before the president after winning the title, have not visited the iconic building since 2016.
Alves and the banana from La Cerámica
In Spanish football, the mere act of eating a banana became a symbol. In 2014, in a Villarreal-Barcelona in which the Catalans lost by 2 to 1, Dani Alves, full back of the Catalan team, was about to take a corner when the piece of fruit flew to his feet from the stands. The Brazilian, not knowing that his act would have such an impact, se ate it before hitting the ball. Footballers like Neymar, Sergio Agüero, David Luiz and even the former striker of the English team, Gary Lineker, uploaded videos to their social networks imitating the gesture. No matches were suspended in Italian Serie A, but in November 2018 volatile striker Mario Balotelli, of Ghanaian descent, received racist insults when he visited Hellas Verona’s pitch with Brescia. After hitting a ball into the stands, he went to the locker room to leave the field of play, something that was finally aborted by teammates and rivals.
But surely the most mediatic case of this trend was that of the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, the year in which the player was the first to start kneel during the american anthem pre-game for police abuses against African-Americans. “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in the flag of a country that oppresses black people,” said the San Francisco 49’ers athlete at the time, who at the end of that season became a free agent and has not since has returned to play a match of the competition. The American football league, almost the antithesis of the NBA, reluctant to change and this type of political demonstration, exercised a “veto” on the player while praising his social and political figure. PSG and Basaksehir honored this tradition yesterday, as the players walked alongside the referees to the center of the field, where they kneeled and raised their fists.
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