The futility of asking football players to become symbols of struggle

It is almost impossible to find out what it should be, or what football, or rather football players, want to be. There are those who ask them to take a stand, to become models of struggle and football, of behavior against ugly, dirty and evil regimes, the same regimes that often, through sponsorships, presidencies, commercial, television and digital agreements, allow the same football to live more or less well, more or less opulently. And then rainbow bands, one love, gestures, silences and non-assents, big and ringing words. Political football, now, after years that football had to be football and that’s it, and football that was it had really become.

That a sport followed, even in a visceral way, by millions and millions of people could be of interest to politics, especially the more authoritarian one, was, is, quite natural. Politics has used football for a long time, especially when football expanded by occupying the center of national sporting interest, and whoever governed did so with an authoritarian attitude. However, football has also become political, it has become a stage in which to reiterate and propagate ideological positions, social struggles, desires for change. Günter Grass wrote that it was in the 1960s “that football was transformed, in various cases and quite widespread, into an accelerator of social change”. The Ajax of the revolution of Rinus Michels, Bayern Munich of Udo Lattek and Dettmar Cramer, Liverpool of Bob Paisley were for the Nobel Prize for Literature “supporters of a social change and not just an expression of a change that was already there , but which these teams and their champions managed to amplify, multiplying their persuasive force”.

Sixty-eight started in European football a few years earlier. Footballers were privileged men, they played football and were paid well for it, but they were still connected to the social context around them. Their world barely crossed that of the fans, even if it wasn’t completely extraneous to it. Football itself intersected that of the fans. The clubs lived on the public, on full stadiums (and on the money that bankrolled the presidents), not on advertising contracts and television rights. And these stadiums were political, too politicized in many cases. They were places that represented, but in a more evident way, the same fears, idiosyncrasies, violence of the outside world. Against which we complained, we intervened to repress them, we did not always succeed.

It’s quite different now, to such an extent that we can no longer accept certain banners and chants in the stands, certain gestures on the pitch. The last regurgitation of a world that had disappeared manifested itself, at least on the fields of Serie A, in the early 2000s. Cristiano Lucarelli’s clenched fist addressed to the Livorno fans and Paolo Di Canio’s Roman greeting to those of Lazio, appeared to us inopportune, inconvenient, for some even reprehensible. Definitely detached from reality. It was more the time of Socrates, Paolo Sollier, Roberto Boninsegna, political affiliation in the curve was increasingly labile and increasingly loud and confused, and the stadiums themselves were changing. The fans, the organized ones, were no longer a resource, they were often just a problem. Ultras became synonymous with delinquent and the fewer the better. The stadium began slowly, but not too much, to transform itself into a place of vision. And football itself was the vision: the matches could be watched blissfully on TV, the stadiums “became a welcoming place only for respectable and wealthy people”, said in 2010, with much regret, the former midfielder of Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and West German national team Paul Breitner.

We would hope that footballers would go back to being just footballers, because there’s no place to do anything else in a sport that has become a pleasant, very pleasant show. Because that meeting between the world of fans and the world of footballers hasn’t existed for some time. It is football itself that wanted to leave out the world of fans, going back would be difficult, much more complex than wearing a headband one love.