Football is no longer ours

“Soccer belongs to the working class”, César Luis Menotti in 1980.

It had a fuzzy start in time. It was a collective and popular construction. No one invented it individually. The English ordered it, regulated it and spread it almost all over the world. The popular classes of all cities adopted it as entertainment, but also as a mode of expression and communication. The game had a meaning that transcended the result: it gave a sense of belonging and was a form of identity.

Of course, the result mattered, but it was conditioned by an ethic and an aesthetic that justified it. It was not worth winning anyway. You had to win by deserving it. Of course, nobody cried if he won playing badly or worse than the rival, but neither did nobody feel satisfied that way.

The business arrived and ordered to stop

The ruling elites, who saw soccer as a stupid and rowdy game, typical of the suburbs, changed their contemptuous gaze when they sensed that there was a possible big business there. Money, the only true god for these people, worked the miracle of empathy and they began to meddle in issues that until then they had endured with a wrinkled nose.

Little by little they approached the clubs and even became interested in understanding the offside and accompanying the commoner fans in the goal cry, although still without sharing emotions that they did not feel. As they were with the money ahead, they won a place in the directive committees and from one day to the next they found themselves in the presidency of the entities.

They were even encouraged to comment on players, plays, arbitrations and other issues that they did not fully understand, but protected by the right of money, they made themselves heard.

And then the multinationals appeared

When they approached football, multinationals imposed technology that measures and quantifies everything, in a game that is not quantifiable. And billionaires, and Arab sheiks and dubious fortunes took over the privatized clubs.

The fans and the partners were displaced from the ownership of the entities that changed owners and values. Now they were customers and worshipers of manufactured or authentic idols who were acting, willingly or not, as propagandists of products to be sold.

We must forget about sentimentality, football is a business, said Enrique Cerezo, president of Atlético de Madrid, in case anyone had any doubt or an inappropriate feeling about the colors of his club.

As it shows, one pass is enough

Messi, after 21 years at Barcelona, ​​left his club overwhelmed by a cataract of money and the temptation to join a team, PSG, full of notable figures from all over the world and thus be able to play the game he plays best, such as Serrat sang. A pass with the secret voice intervention of Qatar, the country that will host the next World Cup and intends to wash its image, after having bribed left and right to achieve it. Actually, I do not know if he needed it, since that detail does not seem to have bothered anyone in the football field. And less the slave treatment it gives to its workers, almost all immigrants, especially those who build stadiums and other works for the next World Cup, 6,500 of whom died due to the atrocious working conditions.

Consequences of the new football

We already know that when capitalism intervenes, everything is turned upside down and with abundant doses of corruption. I’ll try to summarize some of the mess:

* Division of roles. South American and African soccer are only suppliers of players for Europe, the center of soccer’s economic power.

* Europe begins to deny South America the selected players, asserting their economic power, which generates an evident inequality.

* The capitalist logic put aside the ethical and aesthetic values ​​of football since for that logic it is only worth winning. The game that was identity and pride, is a romantic and past flaw.

* Like the other common goods (health, education, social services, culture), football has been taken from the popular classes and turned into another object of purchase and sale, and incidentally also serves as a social anesthetic and political.

And now that?

As always. The fight to recover what belongs to us and has been stolen from us. There are some signs of neighborhood club recreation in Argentina, Spain and especially in England. Also resistance of the fans to the abuses of the new owners, in England.

It is strange, yes, the word of the footballers. Not everyone is silenced with mountains of money. Most of them are alien to that market that the media disseminates. And, as always, the fight for a just and authentically democratic society. There cannot be a socialist football in a capitalist society.