That the World Cup begins today is barely a chronological pretext. FIFA deploys its customary planetary simulacrum, sports analyses are repeated like dogmas of faith, and the average spectator prepares to process his neuroses in front of the screen. Impossible to alight from the world. Faced with the imminent invasion of afternoon and evening broadcasts and the interruption of post-lunch lingering, we the publishers decided to open this dialogue, not so much to join the chorus of sports epicness as to look for an escape route. What follows is the informal crossing of two castaways who, for lack of a more sensible order, prefer to contrast the mud of the stands and the Dionysian delirium of the pitch with the pages of Joyce, Handke, or Walser. A brief conversational truce before the ball rolls.
MHM: There are things about football that have always caught my attention, after an entire life, practically, participating in it as a spectator: what we might call a “suspension of morality.” I don’t know exactly why Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten came to mind, where he speaks the whole time about the Benjamenta Institute as that space that forces one to adopt a morality; that is, the thief there suddenly perceives he is a scoundrel and the braggart becomes more modest and reflective. In football, all of this seems to operate in the exact opposite direction. I think that one of the most curious forms of the sport has to do with the distancing of reason to enter the space of the tribal, and, even more interesting, is that this perception has remained active for so long. It is as if football were accompanied for life by an emotional drive, an inability to bridle emotions. Here, of course, one would have to mention the life trajectory of a child who, as was my case, watched a World Cup for the first time in 1986—the great World Cup of Maradona, the entry of a sort of modern South American epic into elite sport. I haven’t missed a World Cup since then, and I have vivid memories of the child knocking on the door of some neighbors who had the only color television in the whole neighborhood, and this was already Italy 90. I, contrary to Javier Marías’s arch-known phrase that football is what allows us to become children again every weekend—and every midweek if your team plays in European competitions—would say it is the alibi to lose our minds a little every three or four days.
PDCS: I think there is a misunderstanding in that phrase by Javier Marías, where he says that football is the weekly recovery of childhood. Football doesn’t necessarily give you back your childhood; it is the perfect alibi to lose your head every three days, “without consequences” and without anyone asking you for explanations. I think of Joyce, in that passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen Dedalus watches a match (of football or rugby?) from outside the line, feeling alien and weak before the shaking of the others in the mud. That sensation of Dedalus, shivering while listening to the shouts of the boys and the sound of the boots on the damp earth, already contains the whole conflict. He is there, excluded by his fragility, watching the brute force of a pack running after a ball, and, even so, he senses that in that mud and in those colliding bodies there is a physical truth that escapes him. The field of play imposes a violent geography that does not answer to the rules of language. The stadium is the opposite of civilization; it is that modern quadrangle where even the most cultured cast reason aside and surrender to the collective delirium with astonishing ease. In the end, literature and art function with that same spark; nothing truly alive is sustained solely by technique or refined ideas. If there is no bottom of mud, of blind and tribal impulse to sustain the structure, the work falls by its own intellectual weight. Great art, like great football, happens when formal clarity collides head-on with barbarism. That’s why I think I am an incorrigible follower of the Argentine national team. No other team represents that tension better. In the albiceleste shirt coexist the low underworld, that place where “the mud revolts” with popular rage, and an intellectual and lyrical side like that of Menotti or Valdano. It is the only team capable of talking about the beauty of the game while giving you a “tactical blow” to the ligaments of some knee. Though that mythology came to me late. From Mexico 86, I was left with only Maradona’s name, a distant echo that, at six years old, meant nothing. My true initiation, my Big Bang, was Italy 90. I was ten years old. Since then, I haven’t missed a single World Cup—barely any match. Football stays there, in the memory, like the wonderful certainty that the order of the world can be broken for ninety minutes.
MHM: I think we can high-handedly skip the question of why we are talking about football, beyond the fact that the World Cup—this World Cup whose face they want to disfigure so much—begins today. Football is there, and football is. It gets in through our window, and it assaults us daily. No matter how much someone tries to take their distance, which would not be our case, that noise of the mundane surrounds them. We owe ourselves to an order of the days, urgent matters call us, and we are not on the margins of almost anything that has to do with these elite sports that certainly move multitudes and many millions, but in which one, as a spectator, finds some kind of retribution and connection. I like to keep up with most sports; I know who is currently leading the six divisions of Major League Baseball, and I watch quite a few NFL games, basketball a bit less. But none consumes as much of my time as European football, which is a morning affair and sometimes slightly interrupts our post-lunch lingering in the Americas. Do you know what I also find in football? A perfect theater of silences in which the spectators always provide the noise, but without managing to alter the muteness that is the hallmark of intelligence and genius. Because of the geniuses I have admired watching them on a pitch, I have always imagined them from silence—their silences. Only from that muteness is a play thought out, and some dimension is reached.
PDCS: I share that intuition. That “theater of silences” you mention seems key to me, above all because it removes from the stage the typical reading of noise in the stadium. That muteness does not respond to an esoteric void or a pure elegance; it is rather a radical isolation. That quiet, absorbed player is too busy deciphering the geometry of chaos while the tribe roars around him. Now I remember The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, the novel by Peter Handke. There, football appears less as a spectacle than as a situation of extreme, almost unbearable reading, in which a man must interpret minimal signs before reality collapses upon him. The goalkeeper before the penalty does not look solely at a ball; he looks at a constellation of threats, feints, shifts, silences… Something of that also happens with the great player when he seems absent: he hasn’t left the match; he has entered what they call the zone. One sits down to watch the match not just for mere entertainment, but also to see if the miracle of lucidity occurs in the midst of haste. That silence you speak of—I think of Messi’s vacant look during matches, while he walks, or Zidane’s coldness—is the true eye of the hurricane. Outside is the shout of the stands; inside, in those seconds of isolation, the guy is alone before space-time. The spectator believes he pushes with his noise—and sometimes he manages to, because the tribe also actively participates in the football epic—but the beauty of the play is always gestated in a desolate solitude. It is there that football, as you rightly say, gives us that retribution that justifies all the wasted time.
MHM: You have mentioned Messi and Zidane, two players who seem to belong to different and clashing galaxies. Earlier, Maradona’s name also came up. There are three players who seem to come less from cartography than from a sanctuary or the iconography of the sacred. Someone has said that, during these days when so much is written on the subject, football is a religion in search of gods. And that also strikes me in some way as attractive or provocative: its capacity to reunite those spheres that are so foreign to it—religions, pagan mythologies, the epic, ethics—everything that serves to try to explain its effects and, in passing, explain ourselves and give intellectual shape to what could be for many a mere inclination or perhaps a recess from obligations. The Neapolitan images of a Maradona on prayer cards prompt one to think about that complex relational world that leads one to wonder about a certain hegemony of a Latin sensibility, if you will, in the way we understand the game—and at the risk of throwing out some stereotypes: simulation, viscerality, mud in its less literal sense, but also the appearance of genius, the ten, the enganche, the short guy with the ball sewn to his foot, in contrast to the Pelé-type player in that arc that reaches up to Cristiano Ronaldo: all power, muscle, voracity, physicality.
PDCS: It’s true about the Maradona prayer cards in the alleyways of Naples, that mixture of paganism and sacred iconography. In that whole area, going down the Amalfitan coast to Sorrento, speaking ill of Maradona transcends sporting opinion; it is a sacrilege, one could say a theological offense that can cost you expulsion from the table or the taxi. Although perhaps the trap of that counterpoint between the “Latin sensibility” of the short genius (Maradona, Messi) and the purely physical athlete (Pelé, Cristiano, Mbappé) is that technical-tactical magic and muscle also create their own mythology. In the end, it is the old tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian taken to the grass. Elite football is a strange sanctuary; it does not seek pious saints, but implacable demigods. Ultimately, that “religion in search of gods” works because football is the only modern space where idolatry is still permitted without remorse. We create those icons to explain ourselves to ourselves, but also to project onto them a sovereignty that we no longer possess in civil life. Maradona is not a saint just because of what was virtuous in his football, but because of the tragedy of his life, because he embodied that revolted mud I spoke of before; he is the myth of the flawed hero, pure Dionysian delirium, which Mediterranean culture understands to perfection because it always prefers delirium to symmetry. In contrast, the perfect machine that is Cristiano Ronaldo, or the power of Pelé, inspires a different devotion, based on the conquest of the physical limit, an epic of form and Apollonian order that also has its own liturgy. What is fascinating is how football absorbs all those spheres—ethics, aesthetics, and religion—and transforms them into ninety minutes. It doesn’t matter if the genius thinks the play from Messi’s magical calculation or from CR7’s physical force; what the spectator seeks in that sanctuary is the theophany, the moment when the body, whether by cunning or by power, breaks the logic of the possible. We need that sacred alibi to explain why we continue to be moved by something so gloriously useless.
MHM: Maradona was a king who reigned alone. Our parents compared him to Pelé, but the comparison seemed pointless to us because we hadn’t seen him play. Then came the epiphany of the deadliest duet, Messi and Cristiano. It stimulates me to think about those dynamics between opposites that football generates, the impossibility of imagining yours without their nemesis: Argentina without Brazil, Liverpool without Everton, Barcelona without Real Madrid, Boca without River, the two of Milan, Roma without Lazio, United without City, or the North London derby… All that branding of violence that Bill Buford narrates so well in his book, Among the Thugs. Rivals that devour each other, but who are recognizable, many times, from curious alternations: when one is doing very well, the other suffers his journey through the desert, and when one wins, the first thought goes in the direction of the opponent, whom they imagine swallowing the bitter drink of their own defeat and the other’s triumph. That rivalry—which wanes a lot with national team football, it must be said—is what has continually made people want to see this sport on the threshold of a catastrophe when two enraged multitudes face each other. And horrible battles there have been, like the Heysel tragedy and the Hillsborough massacre. Kapuściński has a book on the so-called “Football War”—which was only partially about football—between Honduras and El Salvador. All of that seems like prehistory today, but the truth is that, after Sunday’s skirmish, the next day the waters find their level and until next week.
PDCS: It’s curious that you mention Buford and that choreography of hate. There is something of a perverse symmetry in the fact that we need the enemy to know who we are; it is a form of existential parasitism. The Boca fan doesn’t sleep well if he knows the River fan is celebrating, and vice versa. That logic of the concave mirror is what sustains the entire scaffolding of club football, a machinery of mutual resentment that turns out to be, at bottom, a great lesson in survival: the other exists so that I can blame him for my own miseries. With national team football, it seems to me that a displacement occurs, a mutation of the conflict. In the World Cups, the violence is no longer that of the neighborhood neighbor but rather another, more abstract, historical, and geopolitical one… It is post-colonial resentment or nationalist pride, the old bills of borders processed in a rectangle of grass. What happens is that today, as you well say, all of that has been domesticated under the umbrella of global entertainment. The tragedies of Heysel or Hillsborough, or that Central American war that Kapuściński portrayed, belong to a football that still smelled of gunpowder and industrial precariousness. Today’s football prefers the simulacrum. FIFA has turned catastrophe into an export product, with background music and HD replays. We consume the danger from the comfort of the sofa, knowing that on Monday, after “the combat,” the offices will reopen and the market will run its course. Football allows us to play at war without corpses, and perhaps that is why we forgive it everything.
MHM: In that same sense, I thought that people often speak of suffering when an important match is on. Some teams sign up for a Schopenhauerian state of affairs, repeating that “life is the history of suffering.” Now that this World Cup is starting, what fanatic really believes their team is going to win it? Is it possible that Algerians, Haitians, Koreans, and Qataris come to think they will get past the first round? And yet, it is probable that the idea of suffering does not even cross their minds. They will watch the matches and celebrate any goal they manage to score, but the idea of suffering might already be so deeply rooted in their day-to-day lives that they will not spill it over the shoulders of those unknown players who have reached a World Cup thanks to the expansion FIFA has granted. In them, however, I do see something of the playful character that, according to Huizinga, highly professionalized sport had lost. For Huizinga, systematization and discipline travel in the opposite direction of the game, settling in another territory where the legitimate, spontaneous, and carefree attitude no longer appears. This, of course, belongs to a book that was written almost a hundred years ago, in the full boom of that Olympism that today we have so thoroughly digested. For my part, digressions, strictures, and diversions aside, I will sit down as the least warned of spectators to watch either an opening Mexico-South Africa or a hypothetical Brazil-England in the quarterfinals, if my “bracket predictor” doesn’t deceive me. But the truth is, someone has already said it: between football and life, one will naturally choose literature.
PDCS: I share your final skepticism. When the television is turned off, the spell unravels, and the void of the post-lunch table remains. At bottom, football is only a truce, an artificial order that we invent (for ourselves) so that the chaos of the world stops for an hour and a half. Therefore, when the referee blows the final whistle, and the plastic gods head to the locker room, one gets up from the sofa, sets the bracket aside, and opens a book again. Football gives us the myth and the delirium of the body, but it is literature that stays behind to clean up the debris and to explain the defeat.
