In 1988 Mexican journalist Miguel Ángel Ramírez discovered a fountain of youth. Several players on Mexico’s junior team, who were two, three, and even six years beyond the age limit, had been bathed in the magic waters: the directors falsified their birth certificates and fabricated fake passports. This treatment was so effective that one player managed to become two years younger than his twin brother.
Then the vice president of Guadalajara declared: “I won’t say it’s a good thing, but it’s always been done.”
And Rafael del Castillo, who was the top boss of junior soccer, asked: “Why can’t Mexico be sneaky when other countries do it as a matter of course?”
Shortly after the 1966 World Cup the comptroller of the Argentine Soccer Association, Valentín Suárez, declared: “Stanley Rous is a shady fellow. He ran the World Cup so that England would win. I’d do the same if the Cup were played in Argentina.”
The morals of the market, which in our days are the morals of the world, give a green light to all keys to success, even if they’re burglar’s tools. Professional soccer has no scruples because it is part of an unscrupulous system of power that buys effectiveness at any price. And after all, scruples were never worth much. In Renaissance Italy a “scruple” was the smallest measure of weight, the least significant. Five centuries later, Paul Steiner, a player for the German club Cologne, explained: “I play for money and for points. The opposing player wants to take my money and my points. That’s why I ought to fight him by all means at my disposal.”
And the Dutch player Ronald Koeman justified the brutal kick to the stomach his compatriot Gillhaus gave the Frenchman Tigana in 1988: “It was a class act. Tigana was their most dangerous player and he had to be neutralized at any cost.”
The end justifies the means, and any beastly act is fine, though it’s wise to do it on the sly. Basile Boli of Olympique de Marseille, a defender accused of mistreating the ankles of others, described his baptism by fire. In 1983 Roger Milla was elbowing him like crazy, so he flattened him with his head. “That was the first lesson: strike before they strike you, but strike discreetly.”
You have to strike far from the ball, since that is where the referee, like the TV cameras, keeps his eyes. In the 1970 World Cup Pelé was marked savagely by the Italian Bertini. Later on he praised him: “Bertini was an artist at committing fouls without being seen. He’d punch me in the ribs or in the stomach, he’d kick me in the ankle … An artist.”
Argentine journalists frequently applaud the wiles of Carlos Bilardo because he knows how to deploy them carefully and effectively. They say that when Bilardo was a player he would prick his opponents with a pin and put on an innocent face. And when he was manager of the Argentine national team, he managed to send a canteen filled with emetic water to Branco, a thirsty Brazilian player, during the toughest match of the 1990 World Cup.
Uruguayan journalists like to call brazen crime a “strong-legged play,” and more than one has celebrated the effectiveness of the “softening kick” to intimidate opposing players in international contests. That kick must be given in the first minutes of the match. Later on, you run the risk of being sent off. In Uruguayan soccer, violence is the daughter of decadence. Long ago, “Charrua’s claw” was a term for bravery, not for a vicious kick.
In the 1950 World Cup, during the famous final in Maracanã, Brazil committed twice as many fouls as Uruguay. In the 199 °Cup, when the manager Oscar Tabárez managed to get the Uruguayan team to go back to playing cleanly, several local commentators took pleasure in affirming that it did not achieve much. There are many fans and officials, too, who prefer winning without honor to losing nobly.
Uruguayan forward “Pepe” Sasía said: “Throw dirt in the eyes of the goalkeeper? Managers don’t like it when you get caught.”
Argentine fans heap praise on the goal that Maradona scored with his hand in the ’86 World Cup, because the referee didn’t see it. In the qualifiers for the World Cup in 1990, Chile’s keeper Roberto Rojas pretended to be wounded by cutting himself on the forehead, but he got caught. Chile’s fans, who adored Rojas and called him “The Condor,” suddenly turned him into the villain of the picture, because his ploy didn’t work.
In professional soccer, like everything else, the crime does not matter as long as the alibi is good. “Culture” means cultivation. What does the culture of power cultivate in us? What sad harvests could come of a power that bestows impunity on the crimes of the military and the graft of politicians and converts them into triumphs?
The writer Albert Camus, who once was a goalkeeper in Algeria, was not referring to the professional game when he said: “Everything I know about morals, I owe to soccer.”
Indigestion
In 1989 in Buenos Aires, a match between Argentinos Juniors and Racing ended in a draw. The rules called for a penalty shootout.
The crowd was on its feet, biting its nails, for the first shots at twelve paces. The fans cheered a goal by Racing. Then came a goal by Argentinos Juniors and the fans from the other side cheered. There was an ovation when the Racing keeper leaped against one post and sent the ball awry. Another ovation praised the Argentinos keeper who did not allow himself to be seduced by the expression on the striker’s face and waited for the ball in the center of the goal.
When the tenth penalty was kicked, there was another round of applause. A few fans left the stadium after the twentieth. When the thirtieth penalty came around, the few who remained responded with yawns. Kicks came and went and the match remained tied.
After forty-four penalty kicks, the match ended. It was a world record for penalties. In the stadium no one was left to celebrate, and no one even knew which side won.
The 1990 World Cup
Nelson Mandela was free, after spending twenty-seven years in prison for being black and proud in South Africa. In Colombia the left’s presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo lay dying and from a helicopter the police were shooting drug trafficker Rodríguez Gacha, one of the ten richest men in the world. Chile’s badly wounded democracy was recuperating, but General Pinochet, at the head of the military, was still keeping an eye on the politicians and reining in their every step. Alberto Fujimori, riding a tractor, was beating Mario Vargas Llosa in the Peruvian elections. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were losing that country’s elections, defeated by the exhaustion wrought by ten years of war against invaders armed and trained by the United States, while the United States was beginning a new occupation of Panama following the success of its twenty-first invasion of that country.
In Poland labor leader Lech Walesa, a man of daily mass, was exiting jail and entering government. In Moscow a crowd was lining up at McDonald’s. The Berlin Wall was being sold off in pieces, as the unification of the two Germanys and the disintegration of Yugoslavia began. A popular insurrection was putting an end to the Ceausescu regime in Romania, and the veteran dictator, who liked to call himself the “Blue Danube of Socialism,” was being executed. In all of Eastern Europe, old bureaucrats were turning into new entrepreneurs and cranes were dragging off statues of Marx, who had no way of saying, “I’m innocent.” Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. Up in heaven, terrestrial machines were visiting Venus and spying on its secrets, while here on earth, in Italy, the fourteenth World Cup got under way.