Yes. It's Soccer. It's the Best. It's Worldwide! (blog para mis amigos gringos)

Luego del partido de #ESL vs #USA decidí escribir unas palabras para mis amigos del norte en #fb, hablando mal y rápido del fenómeno fútbol en sudamérica, para ver si la cazan.

Well done against Eslovenia US! The referee was as blind as a bat; however, this is what makes soccer what it is. It is that particular third of a second that a ref can misjudge, which will go down in history and those who witnessed it will tell their grandchildren. The soccer fan remembers everything by the second and can talk all night with his peers about a certain play which happened 25 years ago as it occurred 25 minutes ago under the same emotional state.

South America breathes, eats and sleeps soccer. It is a cultural phenomenon that has as much power as religion or politics to move the masses. Every Sunday men, women and children of all social classes and colors will flock to the temples where soccer is celebrated, sometimes traveling a thousand miles in a day back and forth to another city or country, by whatever means he can find, ignoring weather conditions, regardless of his age or economic situation. He will get there to the tune of “carrying his flag throughout the world, accompany his team to the end”.

The world stops rotating for 30 days during the Football World Cup. It is 200000 people dead silent at Maracaná Stadium and many committing suicide over Brazil losing the 1950 World Cup final match to Uruguay in 1950 at home - until this day they don’t wanna talk about it. It is Diego Maradona, in Mexico ’86, scoring the winning goal with his hand versus England - which 2 billion people saw, except the ref. - granting 25 million Argentineans a sense of revenge after losing the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) in the war a few years before, and making Maradona a timeless god. It is France world champions in 1998 where people in the endless street parties remembered The Liberation as the only other date in their history in which there was such country wide celebration. It is men becoming celebrities for life and revered more than political/religious figures.

As much as soccer might appear as an excuse for violence, it is a minority who take it outside of the stadium, making it a way of life, taking it to the extreme of terminating another human being’s life just for the sake of being in the opposite team. Men transform themselves in the soccer arena. It is unthinkable to put opposite fans together. All this adrenaline pumping through 90 minutes of battle in which the team’s barra brava leader makes everyone jump cheer and sing hymns of war throughout the match, along with an army of wind instruments and sometimes up to 30 drums, make big soccer matches one of the top forms of massive human celebration. Tourist packages offer soccer matches in Argentina. In Brazil, a 30000 seat stadium section could not be accessed by the regular guy, for everyone of those seats is implicitly owned by the barra brava members throughout the duration of the whole tournament. Streets are closed and army elements are shown as intimidation when lifelong rivals have a match, sometimes 24 hrs before the tickets even go on sale, as people line up to purchase their tickets with sleeping bags.

Housewives and the average non-soccer-fan will never understand this. He/she will forever try to find a nonexistent rational answer in the fact that such devotion grants no retribution, the imperfection of the game, or the nonsense of a tied match.

It's inheritance. It’s devotion to a flag. It’s about belonging. It’s about pride. It’s about brotherhood; it’s about love, hence the impossibility to be rationally explained. It might not be best sport in the planet despite billions will get upset over such remark, it is clear however, that is the most passionate.

“To say that these men paid their shillings to watch 22 mercenaries kick a ball is simply to say that a violin is wood and strings or that Hamlet is paper and ink.” – J.B. Priestley, The Good Companions 1928.