What's the deal with football?
A Latina writes vaguely on the myth of nonchalance and the metaphysical weight of shared passion.
There’s a thunderous roar, the kind that makes you wonder if Maimaktês Zeus has graced us with his golden footsteps, reckoning at our doors. It ripples—first the street, then the neighborhood, the city, the country. Across the Andes, something similar is happening. Simultaneous. However, the sentiment is entirely the opposite. Watchful eyes descend on those who might as well be Gods with how people scream their throats raw for them. A sore fucking plea. Nothing is quite like our celebration of a goal.
The never-ending screams of “Goooool!” with its elongation of the vowel that I loathe with a force that transcends any logical sense or old memories that might’ve soured it. The pyrotechnics and the sheer… clamminess of it all. A sensory nightmare for an autistic girl who has been taught to measure her tone, to speak louder but not too loud. I tailor my ‘human clothes’ and stitch the human mask—needle, thread. Dermis, fat. Watch the disgusting festivities from my cocoon.
The moment is now immortalized. I cringe and thank that there were no pyrotechnics this time, the realization settles with the uncanniness of its nature. But it is 21:32, and I’m already tucked in bed. Self-soothing, peeved at existence itself, and halfway through a nasty thought, formed and festering. There it is; the comforting, familiar weight of hate and negativity (I call it like I would a dog. ‘Come here, boy’), a careless curse thrown at the wind, and not just a vulgarism either—a curse, proper. The ones that I don’t write here because they might as well be character damming, the ones I flagellate over later. Not now, though. Now I’m a ball of disdain dressed in pink pajamas meant for someone ten years younger than me.
Then, I feel it. Something in the marrow shifts. It’s dangerously close to hope, and it makes me scoff. Hope for what? A game? A win? Vindication? That we, a dirty-poor Third World country with the nastiest of societal norms, will be taken seriously, even if just for a minute? It’s a ridiculous kind of hope, and then it isn’t. It’s real over something seemingly so trivial—the kind those before us felt and left as a motto written in blood and now stitched into our flag. Disrespected every time they look into our faces and lie, and we let it happen.
I know it’s being wasted, but you cannot control something so elusive as the weight of shared passion. Of pride. I sit in my bed, darkness swallowing the sound, the wind taking the mischievous spirit elsewhere, to someone who can appreciate it. My neighbors holler at what’s no doubt the replay, and somewhere in it all, I soften regardless.
I don’t like football, grew up with it in the periphery of my vision, it never clicked (I remember the horror when I saw DV statistics before and after a football game, a rejection of anything male-centered blooming with thorns, because “God” turns away at the sight of female suffering, and we need fucking thorns.) Still, when I preen with pride and speak of my grandfather, mention the odd trajectory his life took—Football player, trainer for a club in it’s golden age, self-taught jeweler, the only man I love without bile—people get really hung up about that part, ‘football player.’ The kind that made it to local recognition, the kind that football geeks talk about in radio shows and publish every ten years in a newspaper column.
There is something mystifying about it, and it’s everywhere, from documentaries and misery porn trying to pass as documentaries. Our version of ‘making it.’ It speaks of that mandatory journey of suffering that people try to push as the norm. ‘In my time, we had it worse.’ For this reason, football is unavoidable when it comes to South America; you cannot escape its rhetoric. And though in recent years there had been talks about how it serves as a tool to perpetuate all the harmful ideologies you can think of (I agree), this is not about football so much as it is about this odd metaphysical force that breeds and takes over. Animalistic in nature and bordering on a toxic, misogynistic, poor attempt at a bacchanalia.
“On both continents, the ‘ludic’ notion of games has been undermined by the era of football professionalism, its excessive materialism, and a corresponding ‘win-at-all-costs’ philosophy. In the future, the world’s most popular game will continue to be utilized as a political tool of mass manipulation and social control: a kind of mass secular pagan religion.”
Bar-On, T. (1997) ʽThe Ambiguities of Football, Politics, Culture, and Social Transformation in Latin Americaʼ Sociological Research Online, vol. 2, no. 4
What does it say about the state of our country that there are mass mobilizations after this last game? Idolatry and football—because they come hand in hand— are so odd to me. Granted, I am particularly hateful towards new-age football players and football in general. How further into the future is this going to be repeated for us? I cling to Residente’s voice— “El que no quiere a su patria no quiere a su madre”— and yet the coming times look really fucking gloom for us.
I apologize if you expected more from this. Other than the strong (mostly negative) feelings I harbor, I have little actual agency and facts to make this into a meaningful essay. It might also be a very niche topic, football has a particular weight in South America, something that I’m not sure my writing can convey to an international reader, I hope I did, though. Even if just a little.
On March 20, 2025, we won (1:0), and the prospect of going to the World Cup for the first time since South Africa in 2010 made everyone go nuts, like clockwork. I scrawled most of this back then.