We are cartoons.
We already feared it, now we confirm it: there we are, singing and shouting, filling the screens on the empty courts.
We hoped it would not be so easy to replace us, so cheap: it was enough with a few bits of animation, recorded ovations.
We are expendable;
we wanted to presume not.
We assumed our teams needed us.
We even imagined that they played for us, the long-suffering fans who followed them with the stubbornness of a skinny dog.
We liked to believe that we were influencing with our shouts and claps and whistles: that we had a weight.
The pandemic was the perfect excuse to show us the truth: the stands were emptied and the courts filled up again;
they are, we are no more.
Soccer was, for a long time, just a story: until the sixties, perhaps 1% of those who followed it saw it and the rest consumed it - "felt" it - in the narratives of the radios and newspapers.
They were fans of something they had never seen: fairy tale passion.
Then came the TV and millions began to watch it, to be able to see it.
And it became increasingly clear that football matches did not take place in stadiums but on those screens.
The first person who understood it seriously was, as always, Maradona: that afternoon in June 1994, when he went to celebrate his Argentine goal against Nigeria in front of a camera, he finished explaining to us that the real public was there.
That it was growing more and more, multiplying the business by millions.
We remained, meanwhile, the irreducible, those who continued to go to see him in the flesh.
They are - we are - a ridiculous number: a major party can summon 100,000 on the field, 100 million on televisions.
They tolerated us: we were the best possible scenery for famous football: colors, movement, even some music, the remote possibility of the unexpected.
But now everything has become clear.
Of the four legs that soccer has always walked on, three are still indispensable and one is not.
There would be no football without the players who play it, without the brands that market them, without the television that teleports them;
there may be — there is — without the public of flesh and blood, the one that took him to the place where he is now.
It is true that they lose some money by not having us: they will already find an Arab sheikh or a Chinese exploiter or a Kazakh narco to compensate.
And it is true that these empty stadiums have the obscenity of the naked king: that you can see his gathers, wrinkles, you can hear his screams.
But the world is full of naked kings and there they continue to scream.
So we will be back, surely, in a few months, but it was already clear that we are not needed: that we will have to thank them for the kindness of receiving us in the stands.
The world becomes flat, lives are flattened.
The cartoons will get better and better, the people more and more annoying.
Now everything consists of calculating when the players will also become superfluous: when it will be better —more lucrative, more exciting, more perfect— to put together
glorified
play
matches
, “virtual reality”.
The prehistory of sport will then be over: everything will finally be pure drawing.
