Mundial

Mundial, that Spanish word is today unambiguous in all languages, it is a word that has embraced the entire planet.

One of the important achievements of the 20th century, major competitions, primarily the Olympics and the World Cup in football, but also the entire sports system of national teams, are largely responsible for shaping the way people experience the world today. Simply put, sports and major competitions have made the world more understandable and somewhat simpler.

This may have changed, to a crucial extent, the classical paradigm about one's country and the world. To clarify what I'm talking about, imagine a citizen of any century up to and including the 19th - he saw foreign flags only in war or on a journey, and there wasn't much travelling. Every patriotic fervor ended with some bloody massacre. Some noise and fury.

Only the spirit of modernity relaxed these “emotional” registers and reshaped the so-called “patriotism”, reducing it to a benign fan emotion. Sport fundamentally shaped people's image of the modern world, and was a valuable and deserving agent of the infamous globalization.

As this column is dedicated to words, and it is one of the words we are perhaps right about, even though its notoriety is proverbial: globalization.

Every hook and hoe brings out that work on globalization and presents it as almost the greatest evil of all existence.

Of course, it doesn't take much to recognize when this kind of empty rhetoric conceals classic hatred of the other and the very idea of ​​communication.

Isn't globalization everything that has been happening since the Mesopotamian dawn and the Egyptian dawn of civilization... Not (just) a conspiracy of big capital but - the key logic of history.

If globalization exists throughout history, its greatest prophets and creators are Homer, Shakespeare, Bach, Cervantes, Dante, Nietzsche, and then you have to feel uncomfortable when you see how they spit on this truly stretchy concept.

You will rarely find this term in a meaningful context, but it is important that everyone knows that they are against globalization.

Every world championship is a milestone in time. The most personal one.

The most beautiful championship I remember is the one from 1986. In a few days (June 14th) it will be the 40th anniversary. Borhesovog departure that occurred during that championship.

When Borges died, I was a student in Belgrade and passionately followed the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. I was the only Argentina fan on the team, so, perhaps more in the desire to, as Belgraders would say, "inflame" my friends, I said - that when the Master died, Argentina had to win the championship. Because, such a "sacrifice" had been made. What followed was swearing. Maradona and "the hand of God", I believed it could not have been otherwise.

Many years later, in 2005, I remember he died. Papa Vojtila, and I met my friend Shofar, "I'm ticking among sports commentators" and a passionate Milan fan who was supposed to play the Champions League final in Istanbul the other day.

I couldn't resist and told him that there was no way Liverpool wouldn't win the League. Wojtyla was a declared Liverpool fan, and I explained my theory to Shofr: too great a "sacrifice" had been made, as in the case of Borges and Argentina in 1986. He had no right to hear all that.

It was a final, as if the boys from Anfield were guided from heaven, not from the coaching bench. The next day I was waiting for Sofro's TV report. He started with - "he judged the principle of sacrifice", and quoted the whole story including the explanation of who he heard it from.

However, there is a huge shadow over the current championship, a dark stain that few expected.

That's why it's important how we remember this World Cup: as the end of a world, or perhaps the final proof that the game is truly all-powerful...

Because this World Cup is not like other World Cups. It has something of the eerie, twilight charm of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, in the face of a monstrous regime and its caricatured leader.