Regarding Argentina’s victory in Qatar 2022: football as one of the fine arts

What did a famous singer, a French existentialist and a Russian novelist have in common? What trait unites musicians like Chico Buarque, Elton John or Bob Marley? What makes metal or progressive rock bands put down their guitars for a while? The former were all goalkeepers, the latter are all soccer fans, members of a long list that includes other musicians, writers or singers, regardless of nationality or continent. Like football itself, which this year has surprised us with the presence of an African country, for the first time, in a World Cup semifinal. The fact that it is an Arab country adds another distinctive feature that would make Albert Camus, who grew up kicking a ball in Algeria, another Arab country, feel proud. As Argentina celebrates their victory in the final of the FIFA Cup Qatar 2022we review the intellectuals who showed their love for the “king sport”.

Royal July

Surely many remember him with his hand on his belly, while he sings with his eyes closed -and loafers without stockings- songs like Quixote and that lyric that says “I am one of those who dream of freedom / Captain of a sailboat that has no sea”. ”. Born in Madrid in September 1943, Julio José Iglesias de la Cueva’s initial path seemed to lead him directly to the Real Madrid first team, rather than to the recording studios. In his youth, the artist thought his applause would come for his big plays, rather than his vocal talent. The young man was a goalkeeper for Juvenil B of the white team, when he had the opportunity to be part of the first team. However, an accident changed his destiny, the night before his 19th birthday, when the car in which he was going on a party with a group of friends crashed. He was not only worried about not playing again, but also not being able to walk. His recovery came, although it took almost two years. During that time, a nurse gave him a guitar and, thanks to it, the world today knows Julio Iglesias, the most successful Latino artist in history. “Music became a way to heal my physical and emotional side,” the singer once said. Judging by what he achieved, he healed quite well.

the rebel man

“Everything I know about morality and human obligations I owe to football,” said Albert Camus in a conference delivered in January 1956, with words in favor of the peaceful solution of the conflict between Algeria and France, the homeland that adopted him. and his place of birth. He had less than 4 years to live. He had not yet won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this context, the reflection of the author of “El extranjero” highlights that football, beyond a sporting activity, is also education for everyday life. The lessons and codes that he learned in his training as an athlete also shaped the human being and, inevitably, the philosophy of the author that we know today. Albert Camus started out as a striker, but the consequences of tuberculosis he suffered as a child soon led him to goal, a position in which he would not have to run or agitate so much on those improvised courts in an Algiers that brought together Catholics and Muslims in each hug the Gol. “I soon learned that the ball does not always come from where it is expected,” he said in an interview for France Football in 1957. That helped me a lot in life, especially in big cities, where people are not always straight”.

pale archer

“The headmaster of the school, who knew hardly anything about sports, although he vehemently approved of its ability to promote sociability, was wary of my determination to always play football as a goalkeeper, instead of running after the players.” This is how Vladimir Nabokov recalled, in “Speak, memory”, his peculiar autobiography, his days as a student and archer, a position that the author of “Lolita” defended with passion, when he was not hunting butterflies. He would not become a professional player, but he would become an entomologist, translator, poet, and novelist. Coming from a wealthy family, who had left Russia to settle in London, he played tennis with his father, but the matches at Trinity College, and later at Cambridge University, were unmissable events. “I was passionate about playing goalkeeper. In Russia and in the Latin countries, this intrepid art has always been surrounded by an aura of singular luminosity. Distant, lonely, impassive”, said the author. It was the end of the 10s, the beginning of the 20s. There were no World Cups, nor was Pelé born. But something romantic, marvelous and literary was already possible when putting on a shirt and jumping onto the field to face another team. “I was not so much the keeper of a gate as the keeper of a secret,” the author, born in Saint Petersburg in 1899, also wrote.

rasta crack

In addition to being the most iconic reggae singer in history, Bob Marley was also a huge soccer fan. He organized matches on tour, bringing together musicians, journalists and collaborators. “Football is freedom”, said the man who loved standing on a stage in front of thousands of people to sing as much as becoming a creative striker or midfielder for an improvised team. The internet abounds with photos of Bob Marley playing soccer, letting his long dreadlocks become his peculiar aerodynamic drive to reach goal. Soccer even inspired his dance style, those famous steps that you can see in his concerts, in which he jumped, while it seemed that he dominated a ball with thighs and feet. “Soccer is a skill, a whole world; a universe by itself. I love it because you must have the skill to play it, ”he came to say. This passion almost saved his life. In June 1978, after one of the pichangas that he used to organize among musicians and journalists, he was trampled on his right foot and even lost the nail. Days later, overwhelmed with grief, he went to see a doctor. After some tests, they diagnosed melanoma and suggested amputation of the finger. He refused to do it, partly because of his love of soccer and dancing, and because of his Rasta religion. That oversight caused him to die of generalized cancer in May 1981, at only 36 years of age. Jamaica would just play a Soccer World Cup in France 1998.

The gospel according to Pasolini

As a legacy of his film work, the Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini has left titles such as “Mamma Roma”, “The Thousand and One Nights”, “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew” or the controversial “Salo”, but between scripts and filming, he He also gave time to express his passion for soccer, something that is lived in very particular ways in his country. Pasolini was a self-confessed fan of Bologna –the team from his birth city-, but he was not shy about expressing his admiration for Enrique Omar Sívori, star of Napoli and Juventus between the late 50s and the late 60s. “It is the last sacred representation of our time. Deep down it is a ritual, although it is also an escape. While other sacred representations, even the mass, are in decline, soccer is the only one we have left”, wrote the filmmaker. One of his fondest youthful memories was the afternoons of him playing soccer with friends in the Meadows of Caprara. The journalist Valerio Curcio took the time to collect interviews, literary fragments and testimonials in which Pasolini expands his relationship with the sport he loved the most. “Football according to Pasolini” is the product of that investigation.