In his youth he was an aspiring player, he tried out in the Pumas youth team to be part of that ritual and aware that he was not going to stay, he directed his passion for football towards letters. Juan Villoro was born in Mexico, he is a journalist and writer, a Necaxa fan and his temptation to write about this sport arose in the ’90s, on the eve of the World Cup in Italy, with the idea of telling everything that happened beyond the stadiums. “There was the issue of Diego in Naples. He was the local hero, a figure who had become a kind of great liberator of that city and suddenly he was going to have to face Italy, then that situation of emotional division, which also put poor Italy, poor Italy, at stake. of the South against Northern Italy, all that was at stake,” he tells Página/12 from Spain.
Soccer became Villoro’s raw material and in addition to narrative fiction, he wrote with a critical eye about this sport of which he considers himself a “fan.” Part of his library is made up of God is Round, Ball Divided, The Tribe’s Eleven, Round Trip (an exchange of emails with Martín Caparrós that occurred during the 2010 South Africa World Cup), among others. His latest work is It wasn’t penal. A play in two stages, a story, disguised as a short novel, where two childhood friends (Tanque and Valeriano Fuentes) end up facing each other in the definition of a match and from the history of these two people, the plot offers postcards from Mexico, friendship and failures. With the excuse of this release, the Mexican author reviews some concepts of the game and its framework.
-Has football stopped being “the opium of the people” in the intellectual sphere?
– The idea of writing about football was normalized and the myth was broken that it was, on the one hand, the opium of the people and that from a leftist perspective the issue could not be approached, or that it was an exclusively dignified phenomenon. of the populace and was therefore too vulgar for the demands of the intellectual world. In the ’60s there was a very healthy mix of the cultured and the popular. Umberto Eco published his book Apocalyptics and Integrates, where he spoke of two extreme reactions to mass culture. There he proposed the need to establish communicating vessels between forms of industrial culture or counterculture, mass phenomena and the so-called high culture. Roland Barthes wrote about it in those same years, Carlos Monsiváis in Mexico, and in Argentina, Beatriz Sarlo. Anyway, that taboo was broken and starting in the ’80s there were notable precursors, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Spain, Eduardo Galeano in Uruguay, Osvaldo Soriano and Roberto Fontanarrosa in Argentina, among many others. It began to become a habit and fortunately now we can talk about it, which seems healthy to me because at the end of the day football is the best organized and distributed form of entertainment on planet Earth. Just think that FIFA has more members than the UN. Humanity has organized itself better to organize World Cups than to seek political solutions. If we want to know a time we have to know how people had fun in that time: the Roman Empire is not clear to us, if we do not also have a certain notion of Roman leisure, and that corresponds to the search to understand the phenomenon of football from different areas. . I am basically a fan of fiction, that is, I am interested in the psychological components that accompany the game and the stories that derive from it.
– Does the economic overflow seen in world football put competition at risk?
– The great abuse committed in football is economic, there are no limits in the leagues. In the same league, a team can face another where the economic inequalities are such that the player from the most valued strong team is worth more than the entire opposing team. Football is not won with money alone, but this has excessively influenced the results and a totally inflated business where there is a great concentration, both of money and of superstars in the teams, which has also avoided searches for one’s own style and idiosyncrasies that the clubs previously had, it is not played in the same way in England as in Argentina, for example, but inevitably the Argentines who are going to play in the Premier League have to adapt to the game model of the team they are in, yes. When Pep Guardiola coaches him, he has to practice the touch, but if another coach coaches him, they have to play off the hook and have long spaces marked for him, so the fact that the footballers have to subordinate themselves to the dance of money also destroys the possibility a little. to practice it in different ways, I believe that as long as there are no limits in the main leagues, there will be a distortion of the game that will simply benefit those who have the most money, as is already happening. You can’t win the Champions League from a poor team. It may be that some are capable of that feat, but it sounds very difficult.
– Are there solutions?
– Hardly, because there is no social pressure to suggest it, football is successful as it is. There are even leagues like the Mexican one, which is the most successful league on the American continent, which does not have high performance and greatly harms the national team with short tournaments and the presence of foreign players. However, it is a magnificent business, it does not change, it happens like in soap operas: if they make so much money when they are poorly made, why invest a lot in natural settings or in other things that are simply going to cost you and are not going to give you money. Football has this: it generates so many economic things that there will hardly be a step back. There would have to be great social pressure from local governments in Europe, but organized sport has found islands of impunity that do not exist in European societies. If you see what has happened in the International Olympic Committee, in the World Boxing Council, in FIFA or in UEFA, you realize that there are leaderships that can last for decades without audits and where the rules of the game are totally different from that of the European countries that normally oppose this type of zones of impunity, then sport is a kind of free zone or free port where things happen differently and the countries have tolerated that because they also benefit from that discretionary business that is football. The FBI intervened in FIFA gate in 2015, naturally it did not do so in a disinterested manner, many of us described that from that moment it was clear that the next World Cup would be for the United States, as was decided.
– In several interviews you expressed your displeasure with the organization of the next World Cup.
-It’s nonsense. There will be too many matches, immoderate transfers, everything based on profits and where Canada and Mexico became mere troupes of the true protagonist that is the United States. There are 104 matches that are going to be held and of those, only 13 will happen in Mexico, so it’s a joke, just over 10% of the World Cup.
– Why did Mexico accept such a condition?
– Because this attitude, if you like, subordinate and even humiliating, is also a great deal. The opening match will be played at the Azteca Stadium and that broadcast alone will give millions of dollars in royalties. The closest thing to hosting the Super Bowl in American football is going to be a very sought-after day, and Mexico is happy with that.
– In your book of correspondence with Caparrós, Round Trip, you mention the figure of the referee and write: “How tedious it would be if the referee did not make a mistake!…This imponderable condition magnifies the game and exasperates the announcers who would prefer that “Football was monitored by efficient television robots.” You anticipated the arrival of the VAR…
– Soccer was very fun with the referee’s mistakes, which we all realized could happen. Now the error can be deferred, sometimes it is right, but the referee’s performance has also decreased in some cases, because certain plays in the area, the referee knows that the VAR can intervene, so he does not feel too confident to mark the play, because They say they will talk to me through the VAR and tell me that something happened. On the other hand, he also introduced artificial intelligence in offside plays. It’s stupid because the human eye can tell when someone has an advantage or not. Before the flag bearer saw that a player was ahead, but he saw how you and I can see it, that is, someone has part of the body clearly in front of the other, but now someone has the phalanx of one finger in front of the other and that is technically qualifies as if you have gained an advantage. Everyone knows that this is non-existent, so we have also delegated to artificial intelligence something that lacks any criteria.
– Can we talk about creativity in such measured and studied football?
– Everything is computerized, everything is calculated, there are any number of people who intervene to make decisions in the clubs, but suddenly a player like Vinicius arrives at Real Madrid, a player who has not yet completely conquered, despite his gestures populists, to the stands of the Santiago Bernabéu, because he is a player who dribbles madly, who loses the ball and that costs them a goal. When he doesn’t dribble, he makes some totally unexpected plays, there is something extraordinary in his own creativity. It has been the case with Messi during so many fantasy plays that he has made. I think that there lies the greatness of football, in the ability to reinvent the unexpected, there are still players who do crazy things, perhaps they are not as great as what Higuita did as a goalkeeper, but the crazy ones are loose, there will be no way to expel them from football . It is possible that these players have fewer opportunities in the big clubs today, but they are there. I think that football has those antibodies against discipline and against scientism, I am convinced.
2024-05-26 03:01:00
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