Source : The Atlantic
As the 2018 tournament kicks off, it’s worth revisiting the late Uruguayan writer’s classic book on a sport he approached as both a fan and a social critic.
As a boy, Galeano loved football, but he didn’t play well. “By writing,” he explained in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, “I was going to do with my hands what I never could accomplish with my feet.” And so he drew political cartoons as a teenager and went on to become a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a celebrated social critic. His pioneering 1971 book, the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, implausibly landed on Amazon’s bestseller list in 2009 after Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, gave President Barack Obama a copy, calling it “a monument in our Latin American history.” (Despite its influence, Galeano appeared to renounce the book later in his life.) In the 1970s and ’80s, Galeano was forced into exile in Argentina and then Spain by Uruguay’s right-wing military regime. During that period, he wrote most of his ingenious historical trilogy, Memory of Fire, an epic retelling of 500 years of conquest, myth, and rebellion flecked with humor and invective.
Soccer, in Galeano’s vision of it, isn’t just a war between teams or countries: It’s also a war between humanity and technocracy. He called himself “a beggar for good soccer” and in later years found himself frustrated by the hyperprofessionalization of the sport, which “negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring.” He saw the influence of corporations (with their logos emblazoned upon the players’ uniforms) and the power of television executives to determine “where, when, and how soccer will be played.” Such standardization, he argued, caused players to “run a lot and risk little.” Readers can hear his indignation rise as he writes, “Audacity is not profitable.” Although cancer kept him from writing about the 2014 World Cup, Galeano watched as Brazilians took to the streets to protest the lavish spending on new stadiums rather than on education and infrastructure. In a statement released the year before the tournament, he said that the Brazilian people “have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few.”
For Uruguay, there is the diabolical striker Luis Suárez, who illegally batted Ghana’s ball out of the goal in the 2010 World Cup, vaulting Uruguay into the semifinals. Galeano, ever the contrarian, defended Suárez’s “act of patriotic madness,” seeing it as a vestige of garra charrúa—the fighting spirit by which the country’s Charrúa tribe fought foreign occupiers. At the 2014 World Cup, Suárez famously bit Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini, prompting much derision, and the creation of a novelty bottle opener shaped like Suárez’s open mouth. Suárez’s foil today is perhaps the humble hero Mohamed Salah, who lifted Egypt into its first World Cup in 28 years, all while leading Liverpool into the Champions League final.
It’s easy to imagine the ghost of Galeano sitting in that favorite chair watching this match, his heart open wide. He was soccer’s own literary rascal, writing with abandon, audacity, and a childish passion for combat and play.
Though Galeano relished each World Cup, after each he also felt spent and sad.In an updated epilogue to a 2013 edition of Soccer in Sun and Shadow, he wrote of the loss he experienced at the end of the 2010 tournament:
I miss the celebration and the mourning too, because sometimes soccer is a pleasure that hurts, and the music of a victory that sets the dead to dancing sounds a lot like the clamorous silence of an empty stadium, where one of the defeated, unable to move, still sits in the middle of the immense stands, alone.
