A man with a portrait of Infantino, FIFA president, protests in Switzerland. VALENTIN FLAURAUD (AFP)
Dear Martin:
Indeed, we are in the rare moment of the pause that footballers usually take advantage of to spit.
No one has fully studied this phenomenon.
Although there is no evidence that a missed goal produces excessive saliva, after the play is over, the gladiator spits as a strange way to turn the page.
The spittle is the point and apart of football.
It is not easy to change pace after an overdose of matches.
In the supermarket the desire to kick grapefruit enters.
You say that since 1974 you have been writing about football.
Although I'm a year older than you, you've gotten ahead of me in all areas of the trade.
I covered my first World Cup in 1990, thinking it would be my last, and here I am.
In that unreal time, where cameras were not objects of power but gadgets, print newspapers achieved numerous accreditations (my newspaper had seven! Which explains my inclusion).
Today we write about what we see on TV and we continue on the networks.
Will we follow the next World Cup by Metaverse?
I pass to a primitive form of images, the cinema.
Do you remember the movie
The Third Man
?
There Orson Welles says that the peace and neutrality of Switzerland produced nothing but the cuckoo clock.
He was unaware that among those peaceful mountains, FIFA's entanglements would thrive.
Gianni Infantino took on the difficult task of giving another image to one of the most corrupt institutions on the planet, which gave the headquarters of the 2022 World Cup to a country that violates human rights.
We've already talked about that, so I'm concentrating on a limited surface: Infantino's complexion.
At the beginning of the World Cup, the soccer leader launched a harangue in which he said he felt gay, Qatari, black, red-skinned, disabled, migrant and, if necessary, an alien.
What motivated so much love of diversity?
Infantino made an autobiographical confession: as a child he was discriminated against for having freckles.
Is it possible to compare his fate with that of someone who travels for days in a boat, without water or food, to reach the shores of progress where exploitation will be his relief?
Television coordinated by FIFA is obliged to show Infantino in every match.
I've studied him in his cushioned sheikh's chair while he checks his cell phone (he rarely looks at the court), and no matter how hard I try, I don't see him as freckled.
Did he undergo laser dermo treatment?
His freckles are a symbol of what does not exist in the World Cup.
Social issues cannot be erased with statements.
In addition, there are clearly sporting deficiencies.
Do you especially miss a player?
As a good Real Madrid player, I suppose you would have liked to see the incalculable Benzema.
How unfair that he missed the World Cup at the height of his career!
The same can be said of Sadio Mané, who left Senegal orphaned, or Diogo Jota, who would have completed Portugal in a fearsome way.
And what about the Italians who didn't make it to Qatar, or the Norwegian Erling Haaland, who scores kung-fu goals?
The freckles that I don't see on Infantino's face make me think of the players that I don't see in the World Cup either.
The excess of parties produces disturbances that I have no hesitation in confessing.
After the round of 16, the fan is not saved from alienation.
This is valid for you, who still suffers for your loved ones, and for me, who plays emotional Russian roulette and changes passions and hopes.
The pause does not cause the region of the brain dedicated to soccer to decrease.
There are no matches, but there are memories.
The World Cups serve to measure our lives in terms of four years.
It is an ideal period for there to be significant changes.
Germany 74 reminds you of your first girlfriend and Argentina 78 that you didn't marry her.
The greedy Infantino does not understand this and has proposed that the World Cups be held every two years, which would lose memory relevance.
Qatar 2022 has brought me a family revelation.
From the beginning of the tournament, Joao Félix caught my attention, an exceptional class player who ruined certain plays.
His problem is not talent, but behavior.
Can't that boy be better behaved?
I understood that Cholo Simeone reprimanded him at Atlético, but I did not stop following him with a persecutory desire.
The skilful and young Portuguese man upset me without knowing why.
A few days ago we went to eat at my mother's house and my daughter Inés, who at 22 years old watches the matches on her own because they happen when she is at the University, said that the only thing that interested her in the World Cup was…Joao Félix! !
The daughter's hero is never the father's hero.
For the first time I see a World Cup with the look of a father-in-law.
I will end up loving Joao Félix.
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