BarcelonaWhen he was 14 years old, Yeltsin Tejeda had to face a very important decision: whether he would play a football game on a Saturday. His parents went so far as to discuss it with a priest before telling the boy they trusted him. Basically, they gave him the freedom to decide for himself whether he prioritized football or faith. Tejeda picked the ball. And now he remembers how his parents supported him, although with sad eyes, because for Adventists, the Sabbath is a day to rest.
Yeltsin Tejeda had always wanted to be a footballer. The teachers at the Adventist school where he went used to call his parents, worried, because he always arrived “sweaty and dirty”: “When it was playground time, he stayed longer than he should, he didn’t want to go to class until that he didn’t finish the game and didn’t get good grades,” his mother recalled in an interview with the Costa Rican press. The parents tried to get football out of his head, but with no luck. And without imagining that a few years later Yeltsin would be on the other side of the planet, in Qatar, playing a World Cup with Costa Rica. The trip has been worth it, for the player, as it has not caused any fights with his people. It has tested his faith, and generated debates from which he has come out quite well. “My faith is everything. And I have the conviction that playing football fits with my religion,” he said when he played for Evian, a French club. He now plays for Herediano in his homeland, where he is one of the best players. As long as the team doesn’t play on Saturday, of course.
An Adventist to the World Cup
The Seventh-day Adventist Church was born in 1867 in the United States, but it has its roots earlier. William Miller, a preacher who had served as sheriff and justice of the peace, studied Daniel’s prophecy in the Bible and came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ would return to earth around 1843, when the purification of the planet would be completed. Christ, however, did not return. And Adventists still refer to that fact as “the great disappointment,” even though they continued to grow until they founded their church, which quickly began sending young people far away from the United States to serve as missionaries. They arrived in Costa Rica in 1903, especially in the area of the Limón region, where in a few years some local families already converted to the new faith. The Tejedas are heirs of those first faithful.
And it was in the city of Puerto Limón that Tejeda began to chase the ball, especially on Cieneguita beach. His parents didn’t pay much attention to it at first, but when both he and his brother Dylan started getting bad grades because they spent too much time on soccer, they became concerned. The two, however, did well enough on the field and were recruited by the school owned by Julio Fuller, a former First Division player. Then the head of the local school in Puerto Limón of the country’s most popular club, Deportivo Saprissa, which is named after its founder, Ricardo Saprissa, former player of Espanyol de Barcelona, also asked about them. The parents made it a condition for them to train at both places that they did not play or train on Saturdays. The reason? Adventists believe in the validity of the fourth commandment, which remembers that the Sabbath is the day of rest established by God as a sign of recognition of his authority and a reminder of his creative work. So it can’t be played.
But as his son got better at playing, it became harder to avoid Saturdays. Yeltsin, named after Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whom the Tejedas identified as someone who had ended communism, received a proposal to go to the Deportivo Saprissa school in San José. The parents agreed once they found a place for him at the Adventist school in the city. The conditions remained twofold: study and rest on Saturdays. But finally, at the age of 14, he had to decide. And Tejeda chose to play on Saturdays. In fact, within Adventism, sporting activities are analyzed with a magnifying glass. If sport serves to sacrifice, work or improve, it is well seen. If it is just a fun game that brings pleasure, on the other hand, it is not viewed favorably. The key is the difference “between recreation and fun.” The first makes you strong, the second distracts you. In fact, Tejeda discovered that there was a 7-a-side soccer team in San Jose made up of Adventists, who felt that this sport could fit their ideas.
And that’s how Tejeda was able to go on to make his debut in Primera with Saprissa. And in three years he was already in Europe, in France and Switzerland, where he always had to play on Saturdays. He didn’t like it, but at least he knew he was working and making sacrifices to get better. Football was not a pleasure, for him. It was his life, in which sport and faith were mixed.
