Why we still continue to talk about soccer

A journalist asked German theologian Dorothee Solle: -How would you explain to a child what happiness is? -I wouldn’t explain it to him, she answered, – I would give him a ball to play with. Professional soccer does everything in its power to castrate this energy of happiness. But she survives in spite of everything. And maybe that’s why soccer can’t stop being wonderful. As my friend Angel Ruocco says, this is the most beautiful thing it has: its inexhaustible capacity to surprise. No matter how much the technocrats program it down to the smallest details, no matter how much the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to want to be the art of the unexpected. Wherever you least expect it, the impossible turns up, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, a lanky and lopsided black makes the athlete sculpted in Greece look foolish.
(Eduardo Galeano, Splendors and miseries of the game of soccer)

There are three kinds of soccer players. Those who see the free spaces, the same spaces that any fool can see from the stands and you see them and you are happy and feel satisfied when the ball falls where it should fall. Then there are those who suddenly show you a free space, a space that you and perhaps others could have seen if they had watched carefully. Those take you by surprise. And then there are those that create a new space where there should have been no space at all. “These are the prophets. The poets of the game.’”
(Osvaldo Soriano, Futbol. Football Stories)

0 Responses to “Why we still continue to talk about soccer”


  • No Comments

Leave a Reply