Soccer to the rescue.
About the original sin of corruption and the political and social suspicion that fell on Qatar, in a city rather than a country, within an artificial atmosphere and in an extravagant month for a World Cup, the relentless emotional lock pick of football opened He passed and emerged triumphant.
He used everything: a varied game, shocking surprises, all-out controversies, thunderous fans, a fight between heroes... And in the epic Finale, this dramatic spectacle taught us, over and over again, that glory and failure fit in an inch, in a second.
A game that when it reaches its fullness is because the top and the abyss are distressingly close.
At times it can be ordered as a military parade.
In such a case, the football is put into standby mode.
At times it can be chaotic like a village dance.
It is when, runaway, he loses control.
One.
It is incredible how this team game does not know how to live without the cult of the individual.
Only when a man gives it a title, we define a championship as successful, even incomparable.
Pelé's World Cup in 1970;
that of Maradona in 86;
Messi's now.
I have an image of that Pelé that reminds me perfectly and I am devoutly a fan of Maradona for obvious reasons, but I love this Messi as if he were football itself.
The trend is always right and it is not lost on me that the time of overwhelming specimens like Mbappé or Haaland is coming.
Welcome and thanks for bringing us another way to unbalance and make the game attractive.
But Messi, in this World Cup, reviewed football of all time.
It was like walking into a football museum and enjoying all the eras.
The owners.
The journey of a World Cup is always very winding.
Argentina emotionally collapsed against Saudi Arabia, challenged their nervous system against Mexico and stabilized against Poland.
From there the team found each other, but went through storms of all kinds.
Messi took him out of some of them, in others a very solvent team with peaks of great football and, of almost all of them, the passionate fuel of an exciting, tireless and possibly hypnotic fan base for those who are not Argentine.
I say this because it was also for me, who has been abroad for decades.
A crowd that crossed half the world, that abandoned their respective lives for a month and that, centuries away from the commercialism towards which football is heading, reminded us that this game is about love and belongs to the people.
Soccer and who knows how many other things.
Football does not produce revolutions, but it shows them.
That war between El Salvador and Honduras baptized by Kapuscinski as
The Soccer War
, had little to do with football.
But the qualifying rounds between the two countries for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico starkly and violently showed the differences caused by social, economic and political causes.
Soccer only happened there.
And the World Cup also passed through Argentina, taking to the streets five million people full of joy, pride and we will have to ask ourselves: how many more things?
Who can believe that there was only football in that joy that took over the public space to end up destroying it?
Argentina lives a time in which everything is interpretable from two irreconcilable political spheres.
If we give time, even the World Cup will fall into that crack.
We didn't even let football be just football.
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