I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but I really enjoy it when ‘those who know’ watch a football match and say that what happened has no explanation, that they don’t see the meaning of the result, that they hardly understand anything. This often happens with the most memorable football games, the ones that really leave a palpable mark on the brain. They are usually changing, strange, enigmatic and fast-paced duels. It is usually like this, for many centuries that pass: that what happened cannot be explained by crossing data and painting lines on a blackboard and that the most unlikely plot twists accumulate means that the match has been one of those that elevate football to the category of great experience.
I would say that all this invasion of advanced statistics, numbers and percentages is promoting a generation of fans, or a portion of them, who approach football with a convinced rational and scientific air, who looks for logical causes and consequences at any rate . Somehow I even find it endearing. I feel tenderness and fear at the same time. Tenderness for them when everything blows up in the game. Fear in case deep down they are right and one day they are able to predict all the variables. I hope not, that Don Fútbol saves us, and that the factor of emotion continues to be, in this unnatural and impossible sport that is played with the feet, such an important piece.
The essence of football
For now there is something to hold on to. It seems to me very healthy that there are footballers like Karim Benzema, come from another era and I don’t know if from another planet, who moves across the lawn like an infiltrated agent to sabotage the machines and their predictions, polishing the old football of always with artisanal charm. It seems to me very healthy that there are still undetectable elements outside the magnifying glass, and that the dimension of the mood does not fit in the tables of the computers. It seems to me the essence of football, the one that differentiates it from other sports, and please don’t steal it from us: the human factor, intuition and the intangible, mistakes, the flutter of the moment that destroys the best minds and causes the collapse unexpected from teams that just a minute before looked like cathedrals.
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What will happen, what will happen next. Nobody knows. It has some grace that Champions, the most modern and luxurious competition, is at the same time the one that keeps the keys. How many margin goals are needed to close a tie between giants? I would say that there are not enough in the world.
When I was a child – and excuse me for the elevation change – I thought a lot about death. I saw her closer than now, when I’m almost old, but that’s a separate issue. When I was a child and I thought about death, I mean, I was encouraged with arguments like ‘my great-grandmother still has to die before me, and then my grandparents and then my parents’. I saw there that it still had a certain margin. I had a three-goal advantage and things had to go very badly for them to come back earlier, but now only my parents are left, and I am worryingly approaching the limit. What you think when you grow old, children do not know. Now I think what I will feel when only I am left on the mortal scale, without parents. Maybe it’s like a second leg in the 70th minute, something like that, life like the Champions League: always playing on the wire.