Televisa then showed them who was boss. Maurer was bombarded without mercy: overnight, creditors foreclosed on his companies and his home, he was threatened, assaulted, and declared a fugitive from justice, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. What’s more, one nasty morning his club’s stadium was closed without warning. But gangster tactics were not enough to make him climb down from his horse, so they had no choice but to put Maurer in jail and sweep him out of his rebel club and out of the Mexican Soccer Association, along with all of his allies.
Throughout the world, by direct and indirect means, television decides where, when, and how soccer will be played. The game has sold out to the small screen in body and soul and clothing too. Players are now TV stars. Who can compete with their shows? The program that had the largest audience in France and Italy in 1993 was the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup between Olympique de Marseille and AC Milan. Milan, as we all know, belongs to Silvio Berlusconi, the czar of Italian television. Bernard Tapie was not the owner of French TV, but his club, Olympique, received from the small screen that year three hundred times more money than in 1980. He lacked no motive for affection.
Now millions of people can watch matches, not only the thousands who fit into the stadiums. The number of fans has multiplied, along with the number of potential consumers of as many things as the image manipulators wish to sell. But unlike baseball and basketball, soccer is a game of continuous play that offers few interruptions for showing ads. The one halftime is not enough. American television has proposed to correct this unpleasant defect by dividing the matches into four twenty-five-minute periods — and Havelange agrees.
Staid and Standardized
Don Howe, manager of the English team, said in 1987: “A player who feels satisfied after losing a match could never be any good at soccer.”
Professional soccer, ever more rapid, ever less beautiful, has tended to become a game of speed and strength, fueled by the fear of losing.
Players run a lot and risk little or nothing. Audacity is not profitable. Over forty years, between the ’54 and ’94 World Cups, the average number of goals fell by half, even though as of 1994 an extra point was awarded for each victory to try to discourage ties. The highly praised efficiency of mediocrity: in modern soccer, ever more teams are made up of functionaries who specialize in avoiding defeat, rather than players who run the risk of acting on inspiration and who allow their creative spirit to take charge.
The Chilean player Carlos Caszely made fun of greedy soccer: “It’s the tactic of the bat,” he said. “All eleven players hanging from the crossbar.”
And the Russian player Nikolai Starostin complained about remote-control soccer: “Now all the players look alike. If they changed shirts, no one would notice. They all play alike.”
Playing a staid and standardized soccer, is that really playing? According to those who understand the root meanings of words, “to play” is to joke, and “health” is when the body is as free as can be. The controlled effectiveness of mechanical repetition, enemy of health, is making soccer sick.
To win without magic, without surprise or beauty, isn’t that worse than losing? In 1994, during the Spanish championship, Real Madrid was defeated by Sporting from Gijón. But the men of Real Madrid played with enthusiasm, a word that originally meant “having the gods within.” The coach, Jorge Valdano, beamed at the players in the dressing room: “When you play like that,” he told them, “it’s okay to lose.”
Running Drugstores
In the ’54 World Cup, when Germany burst out with such astonishing speed the Hungarians were left in the gutter, Ferenc Puskás said the German dressing room smelled like a garden of poppies. He claimed that had something to do with the fact that the winners ran like trains.
In 1987 Harald “Toni” Schumacher, the goalkeeper for the German national team, published a book in which he said: “There are too many drugs and not enough women,” referring to German soccer and, by extension, to all professional teams. In his book Der Anpfiff (The Starting Whistle), Schumacher recounts that at the 1986 World Cup the German players were given innumerable injections and pills and large doses of a mysterious mineral water that gave them diarrhea. Did that team represent Germany or the German chemical industry? The players were even forced to take sleeping pills. Schumacher spat them out; to help him sleep he preferred beer.
The keeper confirmed that the consumption of anabolic steroids and stimulants is common in the professional game. Pressed by the law of productivity to win by any means necessary, many anxious and anguished players become running drugstores. And the same system that condemns them to that also condemns them for that every time they get caught.
Schumacher, who admitted that he too took drugs on occasion, was accused of treason. This popular idol, runner-up in two world championships, was knocked from his pedestal and dragged through the mud. Booted off his team, Cologne, he also lost his spot on the national squad and had no choice but to go and play in Turkey.
Chants of Scorn
It’s not on any map, but it’s there. It’s invisible, but there it is. A barrier that makes the memory of the Berlin Wall look ridiculous: raised to separate those who have from those who need, it divides the globe into north and south, and draws borders within each country and within each city. When the south of the world commits the affront of scaling the walls and venturing where it shouldn’t, the north reminds it, with truncheons, of its proper place. And the same thing happens to those who attempt to leave the zones of the damned in each country and each city.
Soccer, mirror of everything, reflects this reality. In the middle of the 1980s, when Napoli started playing the best soccer in Italy thanks to the magical influx of Maradona, fans in the north of the country reacted by unsheathing the old weapons of scorn. Neapolitans, usurpers of prohibited glory, were snatching trophies from the ever powerful, and it was time to punish the insolence of the intruding scum from the south. In the stadiums of Milan and Turin, banners insulted: “Neapolitans, welcome to Italy.” Or they evoked cruelty: “Vesuvius, we’re counting on you.”
And chants that were the children of fear and the grandchildren of racism resounded more loudly than ever:
What a stench, the dogs are running,
all because the Neapolitans are coming.
Oh cholerics buried by quake,
you’ve never seen soap, not even a cake,
Napoli shit, Napoli cholera,
you’re the shame of all Italia.
In Argentina the same thing happens to Boca Juniors. Boca is the favorite of the spiky-haired, dark-skinned poor who have invaded the lordly city of Buenos Aires from the scrubby hinterlands and from neighboring countries. The enemy fans exorcise this fearful demon:
Boca’s in mourning, everybody knows,
’cause they’re all black, they’re all homos.
Kill the shit-kickers,
they aren’t straight.
Throw the bumpkins in the River Plate.
Anything Goes