Football will be useless, but it is ours

I try to say it elegantly, or at least without apology for viciousness, but there was a moment on Sunday when I hated football and, I am sure, many of the millions who took to the streets this Tuesday to welcome the champions were united by that grudge

It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last time that I wondered why I didn't choose polo, cricket, crocket or any other more sanitized sport, one that doesn't make people suffer.

With so many script breaks in the matches of the Argentine team, already in the last days of Qatar 2022 I had come to think "World Cup, give me back my life", but the final against France threatened to be too cruel, even within the endless repertoire of the football.

I usually remember a response from the humorist Sebastián Wainraich to an interviewer who had questioned his love for this sport, especially during the World Cups - "if it's useless", he told him - and ended up disarticulating it with an exaltation of illogicality: “Do you know why I like being a soccer fan?

Because it's useless.

And today everything has to serve for something”.

Many friends, usually indifferent and who joined the Scaleneta with a biblical release of adolescent endorphins, in this World Cup they understood that football also hurts.

When Kylian Mbaappé scored 2-2 after a procedure that seemed resolved, I fainted.

I did not lose consciousness but I let myself be defeated and, like an elephant that moves away from the herd to die, I distanced myself 30 meters from the group of friends with whom I was watching the final in the barbecue area of ​​a building in Buenos Aires and I I lay down, totally horizontal, on the grass.

There was another TV in the distance, and every once in a while I'd lift my head and peek, and make comments to guys I'd never seen in my life.

Other moments I have them blank.

Estefi, my wife, told me that I fell asleep.

I don't remember either.

This Monday I asked Daniela, a friend, where she had seen the game, if she had been with us: “Yes”, she told me.

I also love football because it is a great amnesiac.

I heard Argentina's third goal, Lionel Messi's second, due to the shouts of the people: I looked up, saw that the assistant referee marked an advanced position but that the main referee marked the center of the field of play and, standing up, I ran towards my son, Félix, to throw myself on him, while he laughed and told me “don't crush me”, and I started crying and wanted to make him understand –in vain– that at 6 years old I was witnessing an explosion of joy popular that happens very once in a while, maybe never.

I don't know how he will remember that moment of my weakness when he grows up, but I hope he repeats it with his children.

But then the new tie came, and again I collapsed, and the penalties, and Dibu, and Montiel's

, and out on the street, and the return to my love for soccer.

I'm not playing distracted, but I'm not giving up our permitted delirium either: it's weird, excessive, what happens with football in this country and this part of the world.

The wind blows against so many things, and yet Diego Maradona and Messi were born here, and even many do without Alfredo Di Stéfano.

In recent days, from a different logic, many foreign friends have asked me questions that are not usually asked here, such as why the president, Alberto Fernández, did not go to the World Cup final?

I tried to say that he had much more to lose than to gain in a country with almost 100% inflation (and that, if Argentina were to lose, they would brand him bad luck on top of that).

Why did Alberto himself give a holiday if the economy is his main deficit? They asked me.

And also, why are boys' and girls' classes suspended when Argentina plays in the World Cups?

Not everything has an answer, nor does everything deserve to be asked: football unites us, it is our more or less guaranteed victory, our revenge, the winning Argentina, and on top of that, Maradona's death was followed by Messi's canonization.

The millions who today left their homes like flocks of migrating birds in love to meet Messi and the World Cup, even for a second and tens of meters away – and in 99% of the cases knowing that they were not going to achieve in a collapsed city–, they also mean the return to the street of football, a sport that is increasingly exclusive to minorities, far from the delirium recovered in these hours by the crowds on foot.

According to Peperina, a song by Charly García, Argentine musical icon, we hate soccer, we love it, we want more.

It won't do anything, but it's our everything.

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