A couple of years ago, I heard the Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta give a brilliant lecture in which he explained that the popularity of football expresses an innate desire for legality, equality and freedom.
His argument was clever and amusing. According to him, the public sees football as a sort of model society-one governed by clear and simple laws which everyone understands and observes and which, if violated, bring immediate punishment to the guilty party. A football field is an egalitarian space which excludes all favouritism and privilege. Here, on this grass marked out by white lines, a person is valued for what he is: for his skill, dedication, inventiveness and effectiveness. Names, money and influence count for nothing when it comes to scoring goals and earning the applause or whistles from the stands. The football player exercises the only form of freedom that society can allow its members if it is not to come apart: to do whatever they please as long as it is not prohibited by rules that everyone accepts.
This is what, in the end, stirs the passions of the crowds that, the world over, pour into the grounds, follow games on television with rapt attention and fight over their football idols: the secret envy, the unconscious nostalgia for a world that -unlike the one they live in, which is full of injustice, corruption, lawlessness and violence-offers harmony, law and equality.
Could this beautiful theory be true? Would that it were, for nothing could be more positive for the future of humanity than to have these civilised feelings nestling in the instinctive depths of the crowds. But, as usual, reality overtakes theory-showing it up as incomplete. Theories are always rational, logical, intellectual (even those theories that propose irrationality and madness); but in society, in human behaviour, the unconscious, unreason and pure spontaneity will always play a part. This is both inevitable and immeasurable.
I'm scribbling these lines in a seat in the Nou Camp, a few minutes before the Argentina-Belgium game that is kicking off this World Cup (Spain 1982). The signs are favourable: a radiant sun; an impressive multi-coloured crowd full of waving Spanish, Catalan, Argentine and a few Belgian flags; noisy fireworks; a festive atmosphere and applause for the dancing and gymnastic displays which are a warm-up to the game.
This is a much more appealing world than the one left outside, behind the Nou Camp stands and the people applauding the dances and patterns made by dozens of young people on the pitch. This is a world without wars, such as those in the South Atlantic and Lebanon, which the World Cup has relegated to second place in the minds of millions of fans throughout the world; they, like those of us here in the stands, will be thinking of nothing else in the next two hours except the passes and the shots of the 22 Argentine and Belgian players who are opening the tournament.
Perhaps the explanation for this extraordinary contemporary phenomenon, the passion for football-a sport raised to the status of a lay religion, with the greatest following of all-is in fact a lot less complicated than sociologists and psychologists would have us suppose; football might simply offer people something they can scarcely ever have: an opportunity to have fun, to enjoy themselves, to get excited, to feel certain intense emotions that daily routine rarely offers them.
To want to have fun, to enjoy ourselves, to have a good time, is a most legitimate aspiration-a right as valid as the desire to eat and work. For many, doubtless complex reasons, football in the world today has taken on this role with more success than any other sport.
Those of us who get pleasure from football are not in any way surprised at its great popularity as a collective entertainment. But there are many who do not understand it and even criticise it. They see it as deplorable because, they say, football alienates and impoverishes the masses-distracting them from important issues. Those who think like this forget that it is important to have fun. They also forget that what characterises entertainment, however intense and absorbing (and a good game of football is enormously intense and absorbing), is that it is ephemeral, non-transcendent, innocuous. An experience where the effect disappears at the same time as the cause. Sport, for those who enjoy it, is the love of form, a spectacle that does not transcend the physical, the sensory, the instant emotion; a spectacle that, unlike a book or a play, scarcely leaves a trace in the memory and does not enrich or impoverish knowledge. This is its appeal: it is exciting and empty. For that reason, intelligent and unintelligent, cultured and uncultured people can equally enjoy football. But that's enough for now. The King has arrived. The teams have come out. The World Cup has been officially opened. The game is beginning. That's enough writing. Let's enjoy ourselves a bit.
