You have to set the topics as they come. And Mario Ferri, nicknamed “Falco”, one of the best-known speedsters in international football, has a feel for topics that can reliably produce headlines. On Monday, during the World Cup game between Portugal and Uruguay, the Italian again had the entire potpourri of global crises in his luggage. Although that’s not entirely true: The most global of all crises was not mentioned at all when Ferri ran across the lawn in the 51st minute – a direct addressing of the ticking time bomb called climate catastrophe can obviously still wait. At least until the next gig.
Apart from that, Ferri presented pretty much everything that is currently moving the world. “Save Ucraine” was printed on the front of the blue T-shirt he wore during the approximately ten-second storm, and on the back he called for respect for Iranian women. Of course, for the sake of completeness, the most talked-about symbol of this year’s Winter World Cup couldn’t be left out: Ferri was holding a rainbow flag, which made members and supporters of the LGBTQ community very happy and the Qatari organizers very angry. The flexible all-rounder was ruthlessly removed by the security forces, but only the approximately 90,000 spectators in the sold-out Lusail Iconic Stadium saw that. The TV cameras had already switched off and were only broadcasting those pictures that FIFA and the Emir liked.
In the past, Ferri was primarily involved in purely sporting matters
The thematic arbitrariness, as you can see, also makes Ferri the (involuntary) master of diagnosing the present: after all, many crises offer many opportunities for positioning – and thus for uncomplicated skim of applause and likes. Ferri was very clear about his concerns when crises were rarer and moral entitlement less pronounced. At the beginning of his racing career, he was still concerned with purely sporting matters, for example in 2009 at a game of the Italian national team: attacker Antonio Cassano should please go to the World Cup in South Africa next year, demanded the forward of national coach Marcello Lippi – and as the Blue Team was then eliminated without Cassano in the preliminary round, Ferri made it onto the pitch again with a message. It read: “Lippi, I told you so”. After that, Ferri got political. At the Club World Cup final between Inter Milan and Mazembe in Abu Dhabi in December 2010, he campaigned for the release of Iranian Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was then in prison for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. In 2014, at the World Cup in Brazil, Ferri addressed the living conditions of children in the favelas.
Ferri was released by Qatari authorities on Tuesday morning. “I am free and there are no legal consequences for me,” he wrote on Instagram after a night in Qatari custody. “I thank everyone for the messages that have reached me from around the world, Iran and Ukraine.” The speedster can now resume his work as a semi-professional footballer, in which he was already under contract in San Marino, India or the Seychelles. Or he even goes back to his most important foreign mission to date, which generated little attention: Mario “Falco” Ferri traveled to Ukraine in March and helped bring refugees to safety there after the outbreak of war. Without TV cameras, without a motley mix of symbols. But with a clear crisis focus.
