Soccer: Passion and Business

Manuel Humberto Restrepo Domínguez

26/06/2014

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The indifference that was the great collective passion, has been replaced by passion itself as a sentiment of profound enthusiasm for what is felt with all intensity. The so-called subject of the market is under pressure to consume, to forget, to dream, to ecstasy. This passion is the product of Soccer that according to ratings is alive and well everywhere, affecting in their daily lives one of every four human beings on the planet. There is no time for long conversations, complex speeches, extensive arguments, nor for boredom or solitude. Passion is time itself, the full emotion of the immediate present moment.

Costa Rica Vs England in the World Cup. Photo: Telesur

In Soccer, this simple game marked by mathematical rules and common sense from the past century, which has allowed us to know forgotten countries and geopolitics alien to the United Nations, but at the same time to be aware of the humble origins of players who came of age in popular barrios that businessmen bought in order to profit, is now dead. This Soccer no longer exists, it has been replaced by the complex game of businessmen who get rich and whole peoples who live the passion or suffer from it. Today Soccer is a commodity, created, calculated, a mixture of transnational capital and collective identities that produce profits. It is an operation of looting by other means.

Africans, Europeans, Asians, Australians and Latins, equal for a moment, painted or disguised, do not worry about skin colour or language. United by passion, they are separated by the flag that they follow. In the stadium things happen that are unthinkable in politics. A country hidden in the map of the world such as Ghana makes the invincible Germany squeal, that has Greece completely controlled, mortgaged by the Bundesbank, and is now defeated by Colombia. Costa Rica eliminates Italy, on the day that the Argentinian Pope Francis excommunicates the Calabrian Mafia. Europe’s best side, Spain, is overcome by Chile at the same time as the Spanish king abdicates. Minuscule anti-imperialist Uruguay defeats the fearsome England that had emerged victorious from the Malvinas war.

The stadiums and the television screens are for the moment a Vatican, a Mecca, a Wall Street, in synthesis a centre of passions and business where games are combined that bring joy to some and money to others. The stadiums themselves are a biennial of architecture, impressive scenarios, with high technology, well-guarded and controlled, where fifty to seventy thousand people pay hundreds of dollars to pass through the gates. These area areas of real and symbolic good will, in which thanks to the formless masses it is possible – as can only happen there – to express affection and enthusiasm for Iran or Algiers, without fear of assassination by US drones or spies. The stadiums move time forward. The one in Manaus – Arena Amazonia – is the first one built in the most dense and environmentally rich jungle in the world, an area sought after by financiers and Mafiosi or both at the same time. Soccer will bring them back to establish bases and bring death from the desert to the green Amazon, establishing Soccer first, and then war.

Outside the stadiums, politics brings together nonconformity and opportunism. The streets of Brazil bring visions of reality: that of the Workers Party (PT) that came to power with Lula and has brought the country to the point of being the sixth economic power in the world, and whose president could be re-elected in October; social democracy that seeks power and raises a No to the World Cup, complaining of expensive investments that provoke mobilizations and street violence; the socialists who support the PT and who want to govern but do not want street violence, their slogan is Yes to the World Cup but No to FIFA. The PT government claims to have invested 236 times as much in education as in stadiums and hopes to receive income eight times the amount invested. The commodity-Soccer is sold by FIFA, which has become a powerful para-state that shares world government. Coca Cola, McDonald’s and other transnational corporations at their command, control the informal market that the needy had created out of necessity, but they regarded as contemptible and a rabble to be persecuted. In any event, nothing to do with this debate and confrontation detains the passion or the consumption.

Outside of Brazil, in thousands of cities around the world, Soccer fills urban squares, as does the Pope every Sunday when he announces miracles and beatifications. The passion of Soccer also creates miracles from the feet of the players, people who cheer, loves sealed or broken, soldiers who desert their posts, sick people who walk, curses that go away. Public screens are welcomed by full-time bureaucrats, taxi drivers, street venders, professionals, the unemployed, university students, high school students, tourists, vagabonds and passers-by of all nationalities. For good luck or bad, the best way to live for hundreds of millions is to be carried along with the happy and noisy crowd that shouts, that is carried away by the madness of the moment. The way was paid for passion, in venues, bars, shops, streets, squares, theatres. Schedules, clothing, meals were adapted. The screen brings ways of life, customs and needs of one social class to another with the rhythm of a globalization that seems, natural, seductive. Everything imaginable happens thanks to ball game that provokes passions to accumulate millions.

Like a commodity market, the players have prices that rise and fall in the wink of an eye or in a kick of a ball. Messi arrived costing 137 million euros, Cristiano Ronaldo 105 and Neymar 87. In one hour they make the equivalent of the cost of a health plan for millions of sick people or thousands of scholarships for university students. The results speak for countries and geopolitics, bring superstitions, induce affection and anger. Racists suffer from African triumphs, homophobes suffer from kisses and embraces among players, owners sweat and suffer heart stopping crises when their player misses and stock markets fall, government officials prepare speeches, generals revise strategies to eliminate enemies rather than defeat them. The passion for commodity Soccer exalts patriotism that results in profits for financiers. The poor are entertained, celebrate to the rhythm of solidarities and passion, as these accelerate the fluidity of the market on all sides, even though one may have to sell blood, a kidney, or rent out a room to buy a television set. In Colombia passion is euphoria, colour, flags, songs, embraces and uncontainable cries. A few others adhere to the aesthetics of the mafia or the camorra of a country divided by a regime of hatred, and celebrate with stridency, with bullets or acts of revenge and disrespect against another, whether supporter or adversary, even to kill or die if the team wins, or if they lose too. Irresponsible commentators exalt this kind of vengeance with: we are studs, unique, invincible, killers, machos, who neither humble ourselves nor pardon, assassins of the football... Then comes the passion for peace, which is neither commodity nor business, it comes with the people but does not bring miracles, hatred or commentators.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

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