The fans in the stadiums are the chattering chorus of Greek tragedies; the players’ jerseys, shrouds or relics of saints; and the ball, of course, is the ultimate object of desire: round, elusive and perfect like the gods. In his latest book, Numbered heroes (Planet)Juan Villoro wraps football in mythical echoes, proving right when he said, a few decades ago, that the ball game was the last sacred representation, the last great rite that we have left.
Almost as ritual have also been the publications from (Mexico City, 69 years old) about football. During the 1978 World Cup in Argentina he wrote a story about an aspiring striker who is torn between his girlfriend or the Azteca Stadium. For Italia 90, a newspaper sent him to Rome to do reports on what was happening off the field, on the margins of football. Then, coinciding with two other World Cups, he has been publishing a book, God is round (2006) y Split ball (2014), Will there be a fourth? Sitting in a room in the publisher’s offices, his response is another nod to metafootball: “I don’t think I’m like Roger Milla,” he says, referring to the legendary Cameroonian striker who twice broke the record for the oldest player to score in a World Cup.
The new book, which also coincides with the World Cup year, is structured as a kind of football grammar dictionary, fueled by the trademark crossover of genres: chronicle, essay, memory. “What I intended was to first talk about the great elements of the game, starting with the fans themselves, continuing with the ball, the shirt, the celebrations, the reporters.” Each part of that particular grammar is a chapter. The first, dedicated to the fans, is a text recovered and updated from his chronicles of the World Cup in Italy, which he considers the matrix of all his subsequent production on football. “It is a text about what football means to me, what the vocabulary of passion is. That sense of belonging that is so special and so community. Betting on a team is like a secular way of exercising religiosity.”
Diving into the origins, many centuries before the British decided to try playing rugby without using their hands, there is a sacred precedent. “In the year 1,600 BC, the Olmecs already mastered the art of extracting sap from rubber trees and subjecting it to a natural vulcanization that created solid spheres that bounced.” Sometimes the process was completed with ashes of the dead, making the ball an emblem of resurrection. “The pre-Hispanic ball game, which was played with the elbows and hips, was played in a sacramental way, it was a synthesis of their conception of life and the universe, it represented the cosmology of duality.” the meeting place with the gods.
The other side, the mundane of football, is what Villoro calls the “sounding boards.” He remembers well those of the 90 World Cup in Italy: “There were very interesting conflicts, like that of Madonna against the Vatican, because she had fallen in love with Roberto Baggio, the fantasist of the Italian team. She wanted to give a concert and the Vatican prohibited it because she used scapulars and crucifixes in an exaggeratedly sexy way. The Communist Party was opposed to the World Cup because workers had died in the construction of the stadiums. And Chicholina, who was a congressman and actress porn, he promised to sleep, I don’t know if with the winner or the loser. There was a whole environment that showed that the game not only had to do with what happened on the field.”
Kissinger, the godfather of American soccer
With football, even arid geopolitical issues can be explained, as proof, held in three bands between the United States, Canada and Mexico while the world burns fueled by the imperial desires of Donald Trump. For Mexicans, soccer was for decades a mechanism of joyful compensation. “The nation that dominated us in everything was at least our “client” on the field.” But that began to change at the end of the 20th century, thanks in large part to a figure as obscure as Henry Kissinger.
Of German origin, the architect of American foreign policy for decades “understood the geopolitical importance that soccer would have for his adopted country.” His support for Latin American military dictatorships reached delirious extremes. Kissinger accompanied the Argentine Jorge Videla during a controversial visit to the rival team’s locker room in the middle of a decisive match in the 78 World Cup in Argentina. He was also in Italia 90, the World Cup in which Mexico was disqualified from attending due to a controversial decision, which ultimately favored the campaign to promote soccer in the United States and its role as organizer of the next World Cup.
Of all these sounding boards, the one that seems most valuable lately is the emergence of women’s football. “It is the great change in contemporary football, where a sport of greater honesty is being played. Fewer fouls are faked, there are fewer reproaches to the referee. There is a much freer handling of eroticism. There is no commercial idolatry for certain players and it is impossible for a player to cost more than the entire rival team.” The last chapter of the book is titled women and paradoxically it is the one with the most biographical load.
The writer tells how he met his wife and it was, in large part, thanks to a soccer ball that Sofía always carried in the passenger seat of her car. “I needed to share how this belongs to my life, because I am married to a soccer player.” A player who learned to toughen up against the paternalistic rudeness of her teammates when she began to participate in mixed teams, a soccer player who won a championship with Pumas, before there was an official women’s league in Mexico. And at 41 years old, the same age as the tireless Cristiano Ronaldo, she is still the captain of a team whose name sums up her convictions: La Resistencia.
The Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán defined football as “a religion in search of a God.” And, as Villoro reminds us in his book, every religion needs messengers who connect it with the supernatural. The Mayans trusted the bacabscelestial horsemen who caused rain. Catholics believe in cherubs, seraphim, angels and archangels to announce the news of the faith. “The player who scores the goal establishes contact with something that transcends him, he is the intermediary that makes the prayers reach their destination.” Whether it was Higuita, Colombia’s scoring goalkeeper, “the team that seemed taken from magical realism”; Modric, “the child of war who grew up among bombs”; or the captain of La Resistencia.
