Pen portraits of the beautiful game

Renowned Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano slices and dices the commercial interests that drive global football with humour and irony.

There was an inevitable sense of “well, what now” once the final penalty kick had been missed and the Euros came to a close at Wembley a fortnight ago. The curtains had come down on the Copa America as well the previous day and Messi cemented his place as the greatest footballer of his time (inevitable heated debates ensued in pubs, living rooms and Twitter threads around the world).

Now that the carnival is done and tired legs are getting some well-deserved rest before the juggernaut of the club season, it’s a good time to dive back into the past. And there was no greater chronicler of football’s history than the great Uruguayan writer and journalist, Eduardo Galeano.

Born in Montevideo in 1940, Galeano came of age as a journalist at a time when many Latin American countries were going through periods of revolutionary politics or drowning in the fervour of nationalism and suppressing democratic rights. Among those he profiled and befriended in his early career were iconic figures like Che Guevara and Salvador Allende.

Vignettes of satire

His work as a writer is not easy to categorise — very often they were short-form vignettes, which presented facts with a mix of dark comedy, satire and surrealism. Football in Sun and Shadow, which was first published in 1995 (and updated in various editions till 2013, two years before Galeano’s death), is not a non-fiction historical narrative about the beautiful game. Instead, it is a series of vivid pen portraits of the elements of football, its evolution from its birth in China to the first ever association football match played between England and Scotland, the quadrennial circuses of World Cups and more.

But each of these snapshots, when strung together, speak more about the colourful history and personalities of the world’s most popular sport than any conventional textbook ever could. In June when Spanish goalkeeper Unai Simon conceded an own goal against Croatia, and spent the first period of the game haunted by the possibility that his team would soon be out of the tournament, I recalled Galeano’s vivid description of the goalie. “He wears the number one on his back. The first to be paid? No, the first to pay. It is always the keeper’s fault. And when it isn’t, he still gets blamed.”

Interspersed between these gems that illuminate the various personnel who make the game what it is, is a reflection on the political movements that have buffeted football and the men who rule the field, the money men who drive its commercial engines, and the men and women who watch and cheer. Football, which mines its talents from some of the most destitute countries and neighbourhoods of the world, is very much a capitalist enterprise. Galeano slices and dices the commercial interests that drive global football with humour and irony. For him, the true romance of football lay in the fact that despite the mercenary nature of the modern professional game and the need to win dominating the field and managerial strategies that led, for a long while at the end of the last century, to dry, defensive matches, magic still breaks through. That magic was solely because of the elemental joy that any human would feel in kicking a ball. Football’s “stubborn capacity to surprise” trumps all and keeps us coming back for more.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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