Football with a human face

(oslobodjene.ba)

The World Cup, which begins today, June 11, with a match between Mexico and South Africa at the magnificent Azteca Stadium - the same one where Pele and Maradona, two football geniuses, won the World Cup in 1970 and 1986, respectively - has served as a global reminder of the somewhat prosaic statement that football is the most important sideline in the world. Three countries are partner organizers of the championship (Canada, the United States and Mexico), but the Trump administration's relationship with its neighbors is imbued with turbulent and somewhat bizarre relations. However, trade wars and occasional hegemonic claims to Canadian territory, as well as a restrictive migration regime and frequent stereotyping of Mexico, have not prevented the neighboring countries from jointly offering the world 39 days of football spectacle. The entire World Cup is in numbers: 104 matches will be played in 16 cities, the number of players is 1.248 (48 teams are made up of 26 players), and estimates are that the global economy will generate billions of dollars in added value - conservative estimates are around 40 billion, and slightly higher ones reach 80 billion US dollars - which is not surprising, since FIFA predicts that about 6 billion people, or about 73%, will follow the championship via television or digital platforms.

At the same time, to these optimistic and prosperous figures it is necessary to add the bad, tragic ones, which testify to the contrasts and contradictions of our time. The World Cup will also be accompanied by children who tragically suffer in induced wars, millions of displaced people, people who starve and suffer in countries that are called fragile. The World Cup will be a stage on which a whole constellation of world powers will spread ideas about peace, love, inclusion and happiness, while in their own political agendas they will resort to diametrically opposed dynamics based on unilateral violence and the generation of chaos.

Football, that simple game, dates back to ancient China, and later, historians claim, it would spread to ancient Greece, then the Roman Empire, and later to the Middle Ages - in all these periods of civilization, people chased the ball, frantically and violently, without clear rules - and in the last two centuries, the game of football in its modern form would take precedence over all other sports activities. If football was once a game in which people also learned the need for dynamics, conflict, fun, and identity determinants, modern football has changed this basic paradigm, becoming simply a mass entertainment industry.

The game of football has mostly stopped being lively and fun, and that feeling of football with a human face has been replaced by something else, professional, but less human: the technological and analytical paradigm has reduced football to the sphere of calculated risk, with little freedom and improvisation, modern tactics have become mostly conservative and functional, and the biomedical paradigm of modern football has created hyperathletes who, through personalized nutrition, optimization of sleep and neurological training, play longer, higher, stronger, but also more boring. The economic aspect of modern football has turned clubs into corporate units, ideal for the entertainment industry, but still distant from life.

The view of football teams has also changed. If football teams once represented an almost completely ethnically pure base, ideal for national and other idolatries, most world teams today reflect population changes. A different color scheme, identity determinants, aspects that are most often politically problematic, in many contemporary teams provide a counterbalance to these primitives and symbolically show that reality on the field or outside is always greater than any narrowing of the horizon of humanity that dominates the spheres of politics.

In this context, the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team, having made it to that prestigious world football stage, represents a team with a human face and as such has aroused sympathy from both the domestic, regional and even part of the world public, at least those with a sporting spirit. Bearing in mind all the socio-political challenges that this society has continuously faced since the pre-war phases, the fragility of the entire state, and then also the sports infrastructure, the departure of Bosnia and Herzegovina to that world football festival represents a human, touching and even warm story, all of which a good part of the world football industry is almost completely deprived of.

The national team of Bosnia and Herzegovina has mostly personally experienced the tragedies of the 1990s and the period after: some of them sought happiness in third countries, were raised in different football cultures and schools, many were considered unpromising. As a result of the war, they lost the familiarity of their own lives, which they had started elsewhere, and through top-level football, which requires a lot of sacrifice, they reconnected with the place where it all started, with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today, they are successful athletes, belong to celebrity culture, and in public appearances they show completely normal, human and peaceful views of the world. They are worldly, but also ours at the same time. Their football stands out from the modern perfectionist paradigm, but at the same time there is something so human in it that in those ninety minutes of football we experience various dynamics and phases, which seem to reflect human life itself. The national team of Bosnia and Herzegovina reminds us of football as it once was, but also of the society we can be, modern, normal and with a human face.