football is not eternal

This is full of footballs.

I had a busy and varied football week.

One day I ate with the top executive of a big club, another day with an intelligent television businessman, another day with a top-level coach and, for professional reasons, I had contact with a good number of first and second division players.

I came out of that mental cocoa unscathed and it helped me to confirm what I have as evidence: there are as many footballs as there are people.

From each place you can see a different game that cultivates different satisfactions, concerns and expectations.

Depending on where you look at it, football changes its appearance.

It can look old or new, sick or healthy, with a conservative or revolutionary future.

What I do not see, in any case, are the bridges between one possibility and another.

What football will we have left in ten years?

A modern one that looks directly at the metaverse or the jungle one that continues to effectively fire our animal adrenaline?

The great question.

Television does not help to clarify my ideas.

On one channel I see Rayo and Betis fight for the Cup with brilliance and amateur spirit.

The two aware that the competition is surely the only door to a title.

I change the channel and there is Manchester City showing off their game and their power in the bright Premier.

There is no emotional difference.

The Rayo, Betis and City fans feel the same, but that doesn't count when business gets in the way.

I leave the reflection with the same question: Where will the Ray be in ten years?

Where the City?

Where the Cup?

Where the Premier?

Where the football?

Because I have always believed that football was an immovable and even eternal phenomenon within the social landscape.

And if it's not that way?

That doubt was the most revolutionary of my week.

Will we have to put a chip on the ball?

Everything is going so fast that it is very difficult to know where it is going.

Every time I go through the Bernabéu I am more surprised.

The super stadium begins to be glimpsed, which will host matches, fairs, concerts and everything that the crowds intend to buy or consume.

I wonder: How long will it take for this monument to football modernity to seem old to us?

How long will it take for a man like Florentino, a specialist in imagining the future, to start building a virtual stadium?

Of course, there is an exciting aspect in everything that is to come, in everything that awaits us in the not too distant future.

But the avalanche of possibilities opened up by new technologies is so powerful that inevitably I see football and that weapon of mass seduction that is the ball, as helpless, as insufficient for the new generations.

That is the great game that awaits football.

The Champions League comes to the rescue.

In the midst of these reflections I see Athletic-Valencia, where, with the complicity of the referee, an attack was committed against the show.

Since low passions are easier to achieve than high ones, there are people who like that.

But if football wants to survive, it would be better to seek adrenaline in another way.

Fortunately, the Champions League knocks on the door, with those games that leave reality and worries outside the stadium.

Real Madrid and PSG as the main course.

The game has been around our heads for a while now.

The two hobbies have reasons to see it as an opportunity or as a threat.

The truth is that there is no reason to worry about the future of football if Messi and Mbappé are before our eyes;

Benzema and Vinicius.

Uncertainty, emotion, perhaps beauty... To fight against decadence,

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