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The elevation of crime

2022-11-28T11:29:08.998Z


Organized crime moved glued to the cement of the stands, but now, the criminal kick has been replaced by bribery and fraud, so bloodless, so unpunished, so of our time


You will have heard a thousand times that football is like life.

This is an undeniably true topic.

We could offer many examples, but today we will focus on one: crime.

International football, that of major competitions, has evolved in the same way as more advanced societies: reducing petty robbery in the street, often associated with violence and comparable to treacherous kicking, and elevating robbery to the category of highly profitable art.

In other times, the leaders of international soccer were European gentlemen, almost always former referees, almost always racists (the last was the British Stanley Rous), who did not think of taking a penny from the box.

Organized crime moved glued to the cement of the stands, in the case of bully bars, hooligans and other wild groups, or to the grass of the field.

Those who are still in awe of Nigel de Jong's kick to the chest against Xabi Alonso in the 2010 final should be aware that it was like a swan song, a farewell to the old ways.

And remember the footballers from Hungary and Portugal who beat Pelé in 1966 (standing or already fallen on the ground, it didn't matter), until they broke him.

Or the 23 fouls that the Italian Gentile committed on Maradona in 1982. In the same Spanish World Cup, the German goalkeeper Schumacher attacked the Frenchman Battiston, who fell into a coma with a vertebra, three ribs and two broken teeth.

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The World Cup of the Brave

Also remember Italy-Chile in 1962, a pitched battle (the Battle of Santiago) that lasted 90 minutes and in which the players did not stop kicking and spitting in each other's faces.

That World Cup in Chile was the most brutal of all.

In the Yugoslavia-USSR game, the Bosnian Mujic broke the leg of the Soviet Dubinski (without particular comment from the referee) and left the bone so splintered that a sarcoma developed;

Dubinski died soon after, at age 34.

The usual cry of the Chilean fans was "kill him, kill him."

The British press described the 1962 tournament as "a bloodbath."

These are things that cause social alarm.

Like street crime.

The lawyer and researcher Jennifer Taub points out that violent robbery in the United States has been decreasing and reducing its profitability: the FBI affirms that every year some 16,000 million dollars are stolen in this way (almost the same in euros).

On the other hand, white-collar theft, the one that is not seen, the one that is perpetrated from a carpeted office, has increased vertiginously: its annual amount is estimated between 300,000 and 800,000 million dollars.

And it usually goes unpunished.

A similar phenomenon occurs in European societies.

They see him?

The crime rises.

In the Qatar stands, the public (when there is one) is as cuddly as a kitten.

And the footballers perform like gentlemen.

Bracing costs a card, the hands must stick to the body, the game stops when someone receives a ball on the head;

It is not difficult for me to imagine that in the near future bad looks will be included in the regulations as moral aggression.

Even those who are nostalgic for brave football, like the person signing these lines, appreciate fair play.

And even the drastic reduction, thanks to the cumbersome VAR, of referee errors and prevarications, which added adrenaline to the game and, in its injustice, made it more similar to real life.

That similarity is lost.

It is won, however, in the box.

Look at the box from time to time.

Look at the billionaire FIFA managers and some of the satraps that accompany them.

The criminal kick has been replaced by bribery and fraud, so bloodless, so unpunished, so of our time.

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Source: elparis

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