Why do I like soccer so much? Why does bouncing a ball obsess me to the point of insanity? Why am I fascinated by the colors of the shirts, the anthems on the PA system, the roar of the cheering fans? Why does the sound make me tingle when the boot hits the leather?
I often stop to think and try to answer these questions, but I can’t formulate an answer. So I remember. I remember and see myself at the age of ten leaning out the back window of Aitite’s car, my maternal grandfather, and climbing the hill of Artxanda, a privileged vantage point from which one can see all of Bilbao. It’s four o’clock on a winter afternoon. We have just eaten as a family and Aitite has offered my cousin and I to go with him to San Mamés, whose searchlights are already delimiting the sacred space where the ball will be rolling an hour later. We watch in fascination from above. San Mamés is a flash of light in the gray and dark city. A Sunday miracle. On the radio, the radios of the remaining stadiums open, reminding us that in all cities at the same time the same scene is repeated, with streams of fans making pilgrimages to their respective temples in search of the goal.
In San Mamés we were greeted by the murmur of the crowd, the smell of wet grass and cigar smoke. In the stands, listening to my parents talk, I learned that the supporter is a suffering being, that he sees happiness as something extraordinary and that expecting victory before the ball rolls is bad luck. Crammed into our long seats, thousands of us were one for ninety minutes plus the interval, in a ceremony that ended when the referee blew three whistle and gestured with both hands at the dressing room tunnel. On the way back, from the top of Artxanda, I went back to look for San Mamés but the lights were off, now everything was back to normal, dark.
When I try to understand why I love football so much, I remember those moments. I think every time I walked into the stadium I longed to feel what I felt then: to be part of a whole. American writer Bill Buford learned the value of football as a show while watching a match between Cambridge and Millwall in the 89/90 FA Cup that ended in a goalless draw and was decided by an own goal after a devastating error in extra time a guest defender.
At the ‘small and soulless’ Abbey Stadium, Buford, desperate to understand the reasons behind England’s passion for the ball, had an epiphany. It had nothing to do with aesthetics. He understood that the value of football rests on two pillars: the improbability of the goal and the stadium experience. The grandstands, he wrote, “offer the crowd experience […]more intense than ever before in life. For him, a Louisiana native born into the world’s most individualistic society, football meant community.
Football executives seem obsessed with engaging young people through hashtags, media and engagement, forgetting that the true essence of this sport is personal community. For the British working class, football is their opera and stadiums are their museums. Four o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday is still a sacred moment there. What do your second, third and fourth division teams have to fill the stands with life? They are still a meeting place. What do their stadiums have for their fans that the megaclubs don’t? Oh, it’s a no-brainer: geographic proximity.
Reasonable opening hours and prices. That will keep real football alive and inspire young people. How many games can a ten-year-old go to the stadium with his father today, where games are so often relegated to the underground of the night? The connection with the grandstands is broken, nothing remains.
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