The lessons we must learn from the Andy Polo and Martín Távara cases

There is no worse mistake for the fan than to seek a kind of essentialism in football and try to understand what happens on and off the pitch from what happens exclusively on the pitch. That’s not how sport works. As a cultural fact, football has a differential that makes it unique (its language, the beauty of a foot that opens to share a ball), but also a shared root with the forms of social organization on which it depends: club, federation , country. The ideal, in these pages, is to focus on the first. But the second exists and we would be wrong to lose sight of it. That is the reason why Alianza Lima wears purple in October, why Israeli clubs play the European Champions League and also explains why a World Cup will be held in a place as controversial as Qatar in a month.

This introduction has no other purpose than to frame the cases of Andy Polo, Martín Távara and Roberto Siucho. The first has a court sentence for domestic violence in the United States and plays in the “U” despite the resistance of a part of the swollen cream; the institutional position in Ate in his case is that it is a personal matter of the player. The second, Távara, has been accused by his partner of physical and psychological violence and that was enough for him to be separated from Sporting Cristal. Siucho, who does not own a club to date, is accused of being the financier of an illegal mining organization that exports gold to Dubai, no less.

Ensuring the exemplarity of the footballer is not an ideological issue, nor a concession to the culture of cancellation, nor a waiver of the legitimate right to defense. Instead, it is to understand that public notoriety implies a maximum degree of citizen duty. Neither football nor any sport can be understood as the continent on which an unjust society throws its waste as if the game, the most beautiful thing in the world, were a state of moral suspension that allows criminals and aggressors to roam in search of family applause. . The vagaries and privileges of salary, fame and idolatry have a counterpart in terms of conduct and correctness. It is also shocking that most of these offenses are forms of violence against women, since they focus on a normalized machismo that the football system historically tolerates. In a country that has 32 daily rape complaints and 15 missing women every 24 hours, this permissiveness is a scandal.

If football is not educational, if it is not a tool for social progress, but rather a containment barrier against the darkest areas of humanity, if it is not a set of rules that allow beauty to be created spontaneously and in an organized way, then it is nothing. . Or, worse, it’s only what the cynics and skeptics see: a group of millionaires in their shorts running after a ball on a green field that no one else can step on.

—