If we agree that football is an extremely human game, we will also agree that it is extremely contradictory. When we think we have reached a conclusion, we collide with unexpected evidence that disrupts it and disarms us. We live more comfortably with evidence, but football usually has two: one and the opposite. Better to always have your guard up when making predictions.
What is happening with Pep Guardiola serves as a witness to this introduction. I have Pep as the best coach in the world for knowledge, passion, creativity, experience, results, influence… But not even he is infallible. To general confusion and tranquility, he is having to lose often. Confusion, because in his long career this is something exceptional; tranquility, because it makes us feel less stupid. If Pep doesn’t find a way around it, it’s logical that the rest of us won’t either.
From the labyrinths you exit from above, so we propose to overcome the issue by elevation. I speak in plural, because in recent days I debated this with several important coaches who, like me, justify this exceptional fact by downplaying its importance: “what happens to Pep is healthy because it shows that the players are more important than the coaches,” I they say. Thank goodness, because we were about to believe that the coaches were more important not only than the players but also than the ball.
Nobody is a guarantee of anything. Neither do the players. What can they tell me about Mbappé? An intelligent star in the prime of his career who came to strengthen the League and Champions League champion. Since no one, least of all a star, forgets to play football, we go crazy trying to explain the inexplicable. “Ha ha ha,” the game responds.
Football also escapes us as a socioeconomic phenomenon. It grows, grows and grows and we no longer know where it is based, because the game does nothing but complain about the business and the business keeps complaining about the game. The bad thing is that they are both right. Players feel stressed by the number of games and by commitments unrelated to sports, such as contributing with their image to the production of money. The business cannot stand that the product it manages continues to be so primitive nor that the players continue to be so human. They don’t collaborate with the marketing department, they get injured every now and then and they put on their boots at the end of the month. So there is no business that can resist.
The clubs intend to use the stadiums as a platform to make money every day of the week, but the neighbors are even more pampered than the players and protest because the concerts make the houses shake and force families to talk loudly. As it is, Madrid loses glamor and one percent of the budget escapes through the same gap as the noise, as Florentino explained at Madrid’s annual meeting.
Football does not get along well with itself or with society, but it continues to be the world’s leading producer of conversations and emotions. Escape route that touches extremes of frustration and happiness that help you live intensely. Does it matter if we don’t understand it? Not only does it not matter, but it is within that mystery where the indomitable monster that runs football lives and that rebels against that vulgar capitalism that takes over everything that moves, even popular causes. Now comes AI to try to tame it, but don’t get your hopes up, human contradictions are indecipherable and in football they run rampant.
