Is there anything in football that has remained beyond the reach of concentric waves after a series of monetary shocks?
The capitalization of football as a global brand has produced a dominant belief that every component of this phenomenon has become a commodity. It is true that this, essentially, a game is practically presented day by day as a fast-growing market category, into which, especially at its highest levels, money of unimaginable scale is flowing. Former playing fields, through design and equipment with highly sophisticated technologies, have become spaceships accompanied by astronomical salaries and transfers. However, despite the daily presence of commercial rhetoric and its emphasis in headlines in bold letters, it is worth asking about the (im)power of the spinning of money and the drill.
What in football cannot be bought, and to be completely clear – when it is bought, football will cease to be what it is today – is the game itself. It stands that this sporting discipline has been shaped through continuous evolving phases into a phenomenon. Long ago, it was given the phrase “more than a game,” and then it found itself flooded with interests driven exclusively by profit motives, yet it has remained the most beloved and most popular for half of all people on the planet. This is because it has not allowed its core substance to be ground down by the mint of money or drowned in an ocean of cash.
Football is a spectrum of emotions of people gathered around a game in which the ball is the soul. The desire for play of those on the pitch and those in the stands is a perpetuum mobile. The lines of the ball, guided by the desire for competition and triumph, leave the magical rectangle carrying national, regional, local and club identity within them. The passion this game brings, with scenes of footballers with hundreds of millions of euros in their accounts crying from happiness or sadness because of a missed or scored penalty, because of a (not) won trophy, is incomprehensible to many. The expressions on the faces of fans in euphoria or in a sunken ship, that drama which even the best directors could not conceive, is in fact what football remains on, alongside the images from the pitch.
Dream or fan insomnia is something that cannot be bought for any amount of money. Nights full of celebration after a great victory and nightmares until dawn due to poor performances and the failures of their favorites are only the third shift of one love. But with a new day comes an injection of hope into fan cells that the next referee’s whistle will mark something new, different, better. And so from round to round, from season to season, from decade to decade, from century to century and a half, it is like a story that will last forever.
A few days ago, we could see that football is incorruptible. The first matches of the UEFA Champions League round of 16 were played. Six Premier League clubs recorded the following balance: four defeats and two draws, conceding 2.7 goals per match. Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham lost by a margin of three goals, with the London “Blues” and “Spurs” having to pick the ball out of the net five times in Paris and Madrid respectively.
And what is strange about that? The English league is the richest football league in the world. The value of its players is close to 13 billion euros. It was expected that five of its representatives would reach the quarterfinals. And there they will be met, after a victory over Sporting (3:0), by the great Bodo Glint or Glimt. It is time to learn what that bogeyman from Norway is called, the one roaming across Europe spreading the cult of H.M. The Game!
