O Globo sports editor, the young journalist Thales Machado, who signs the newsletter “what a game is this”, makes magnificent analysis of the phenomenon produced by the internet by enhancing the fan’s intolerance with any defeat, even when his team lives a victorious phase.
“Digital culture is immediate, aggressive, anxious. The feed calls for instant result and the timeline no longer forgives relapses. It is no longer (only) the noisy charge at the CT gate, but an invisible audience that guides leaders, players and technicians.
What was previously a standard discussion became a trial in a public square, with prosecution hashtags and memes that run any confidence in long -term work.
The coach no longer argues with the press: he responds to the shadow of a diffuse mass, which is never satisfied.
It is the “unconformed winner syndrome”: even in a good phase, the charge takes on tragedy. An elimination, albeit punctual, is enough to turn recent achievements into mirage.
Renato’s Fluminense, eliminated from the South American, was a World Cup semifinalist and is still alive in the Brazilian Cup. The feeling that “is not enough” imposes itself as a rule. At the limit, the work of a coach is judged not for the whole, but by the most recent stumble – and in the feverish logic of the networks, stumbling is anything that is not raising a cup.
The victory became a product, and the fan became a client. Reasoning is business. If I paid, I demand return.
Otherwise, I consider boycott, abandonment, zero audience.
The club is no longer a community and becomes a cafeteria, where frustration is treated as a service failure.
‘We lost’ dissolve in a ‘I was fooled.’
There are no more pacts, only contracts. And in the contract, the defeat is an abusive clause.
The technician can no longer be questioned, the fan can no longer lose, the club no longer knows how to mediate this relationship. All tired, all guilty.
Renato, with his abrupt departure, gave a diffuse sensation: the bankruptcy of coexistence with defeat, which has always been a constitutive part of the game.
And that’s where the necessary reflection lives.
Football has always been made of frustration. Joy is born precisely from the rarity of triumph.
Suffer together, laugh together, comfort yourself in the bar or in the stands: this has always been the essence. The pact has never been of guaranteed happiness, but belonging.
To cheer is to stand: 20 years without title, 90 minutes of suffering, the certainty that life is more loss than I earn.
It is a contract of suffering, not consumer.
What Renato exposed, albeit in a bitter tone, is that we are forgetting that.
If football is sick, perhaps the cure is to recover this irrational, hard and collective dimension.
Accepting that defeat is not an accident in the course, but part of the way.
Because, in the end, cheering is an exercise in resistance: continuing holding hands even when the ball insists on not entering. Until she enters. “
And that!
The achievements do not accumulate balance. Being a world champion yesterday and losing the state championship today is equivalent, in odious accounting that kicks away that the most sacred in the heart of the true fan: the feeling of belonging.
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