No autographs, thanks

There is a scene that is often repeated in the world of football: players getting off the team bus immersed in their headphones, looking straight ahead, even at the ground.

Soccer players passing by while a group of fans, especially children, wait for them to receive an autograph.

It is the image that reflects the worst of football, in fact: it shows them deified and distant, as if they belonged to a world that lacks time and courtesy.

Patrice Evra told how in pre-season Sir Alex Ferguson made them get off the team bus to sign autographs.

Ferguson had spent half an hour stamping his signature on shirts and papers, while the players sat waiting on the coach.

“Who the hell do you think you are?

Those people are paying your salaries.

Those people have come to see you.

Now get off the fucking bus and sign,” he yelled at them from the stairs.

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Sir Alex Ferguson, master of management

In retrospect, collecting autographs as a child can seem like a futile mission.

But it is a way to mark memories and even to mark life: years counted by seasons and images.

It is a very powerful emotional exercise.

I still have a red ring notebook full of notes from players like Revivo and Mostovoi, whom I hunted outside A Madroa, Celta's old training ground.

I also have a couple of napkins from a hotel in Portugal where we stayed the same summer as the Manchester United players.

There are still the marks, some already illegible, of David Beckham, Gary Neville or Paul Scholes.

There was a time when you could send letters to footballers and be rewarded with their autograph in the mail.

It's a shame that signatures have lost that value over the years, now becoming secondary guests behind

selfies

.

I think about the time we spent as children devising a brand with personality.

My print, practiced to the point of exhaustion, elongated the L in the form of an envelope for the rest of the letters under which it accommodated, smaller, the surname.

Now it has ended up becoming an inane scribble that could well mean “Mercedes” rather than “Lucía.”

It even seems strange that a simple signature can be taken seriously as identification or as any proof of uniqueness.

But a signature goes much further than that and can even be taken seriously as a treasure, regardless of age or status.

Bob Dylan himself had to publicly apologize for using a machine to autograph special copies of his book

The Philosophy of Modern Song

initially advertised as “hand-signed.”

UEFA itself had to warn its referees about the unacceptable and undignified nature of asking players for autographs.

“You are already old,” UEFA failed to say.

But for that very reason I believe that signatures will survive biometrics, pins or

selfies

: because signatures embody people (see Donald Trump's crazy signature, for example).

And, in that sense, an autograph says much more about the person who executes it than about the person who receives it;

Above all, he says a lot about the conceited people who are capable of passing them by.

Could there be anything more important as a footballer than giving your signature to a kid?

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