Pasolini was a footballer before he became a poet and philosopher

Pasolini was killed on a soccer field.

That lot next to the beach of Ostia where his corpse appeared, beaten to a pulp, was an improvised terrain for the neighborhood parties that the great Italian intellectual liked so much.

Almost 20 years after the crime, still surrounded by mystery today, some precarious gates were still there when Nanni Moretti was driving his scooter in the movie

(1993) bordering the sea from Rome until reaching the exact place.

The plane closes on the back of one of the goals, an empty rectangle with which Moretti seems to pay homage to his teacher.

Football was important to him because it contained two ingredients that he already saw as scarce in his time: the ritual and the popular.

For Pasolini (1922-1975), football was the last refuge from the disenchantment of the world.

Like almost everyone, Pasolini started kicking the ball as a child, but he didn't finish until almost the end.

A few months before his murder, a match took place between the team that was shooting Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom, his last film, under his command, and the team that was working with Bernardo Bertolucci on

From his time at the Bologna school, he always played on the left wing and wrote about football before it became fashionable among intellectuals.

Before Eduardo Galeano defined Maradona as “more human than the gods”.

Or that Mario Benedetti also said about Pelusa that it was “the only reliable proof of the existence of God”.

Before Manuel Vázquez Montalbán called Barça "the unarmed army of Catalonia" or Javier Marías affirmed that football is "the weekly recovery of childhood".

“Football is the last sacred representation of our time.

The last great rite that remains to us”, said first the killjoy of modernity, the communist persecuted by the PCI, the religious homosexual.

In one of his last articles, in February 1975, Pasolini uses the metaphor of the disappearance of fireflies to explain the dangers of consumer society.

In the same way that the contamination of the factories in the Italian countryside of the sixties ended with those luminous insects, something of the human was also being lost before the advance of a "new fascism" without a face and "American pragmatic".

From his first films or his poems, the antidote against the bombardment of television and advertising has always been aimed at the body.

A body as a “reserve of innocence”, as the Mexican writer Juan Villoro explained in a recent conference on Pasolini and football.

“He had a great devotion to the body, also thought of in a social key, the body not corrupted by consumption and commercialism.

That led him to approach football.

Young bodies of the lumpen proletariat play football in A Violent Life, his second novel: “Two teams of backstage kids are playing ball, yelling badly, running like a flock of sheep.

All on offense or all on defense,” he wrote.

Football is for him a language, a system of codes made up of the body and the ball, the “words-footballer” are infinite, but “who does not know the code of football does not understand the meaning”.

As in any language, there are two genres: football in prose and football in poetry.

He wrote all this in 1971 after seeing Italy lose the World Cup final against Brazil.

"Brazilian poetry has won over Italian aestheticizing prose."

The visionary Pasolini was also the first to anticipate the football culture wars of the future: Bilardo against Menotti, Mourinho against Guardiola.

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