Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The Sin of Losing

Soccer elevates its divinities and exposes them to the vengeance of believers. With the ball on his foot and the national colors on his chest, the player who embodies the nation marches off to win glory on far-off battlefields. If he returns in defeat, the warrior becomes a fallen angel. At Ezeiza airport in 1958, people threw coins at Argentina’s players returning from a poor performance at the World Cup in Sweden. At the ’82 Cup, Caszely missed a penalty kick and in Chile they made his life impossible. Ten years later, several Ethiopian players asked the United Nations for asylum after losing 6–1 to Egypt.

We are because we win. If we lose, we no longer exist. Without question, the national uniform has become the clearest symbol of collective identity, not only in poor or small countries whose place on the map depends on soccer. When England lost out in the qualifiers for the 1994 World Cup, the front page of London’s Daily Mirror featured a headline in a type size fit for a catastrophe: “THE END OF THE WORLD.”

In soccer, as in everything else, losing is not allowed. In these end of century days, failure is the only sin that cannot be redeemed. During the ’94 Cup a handful of fanatics burned down the home of Joseph Bell, the defeated Cameroon goalkeeper, and shortly after Colombian player Andrés Escobar was gunned down in Medellín. Escobar had had the bad luck of scoring an own goal, an unforgivable act of treason.

Should we blame soccer? Or should we blame the culture of success and the whole system of power that professional soccer reflects? Soccer is not by nature a violent sport, although at times it becomes a vehicle for letting off steam. It was no coincidence that the murder of Escobar took place in one of the most violent countries on the planet. Violence is not in the genes of these people who love to party and are wild about the joys of music and soccer. Colombians suffer from violence like a disease, but they do not wear it like a birthmark on their foreheads. The machinery of power, on the other hand, is indeed a cause of violence. As in all of Latin America, injustice and humiliation poison people’s souls under a tradition of impunity that rewards the unscrupulous, encourages crime, and helps to perpetuate it as a national trait.

A few months before the ’94 Cup began, Amnesty International published a report according to which hundreds of Colombians “were executed without due process by the armed forces and their paramilitary allies in 1993. Most of the victims of these extrajudicial executions were people without known political affiliation.”

The Amnesty report also exposed the role of the Colombian police in “social cleanup” operations, a euphemism for the systematic extermination of homosexuals, prostitutes, drug addicts, beggars, the mentally ill, and street children. Society calls them “disposables,” human garbage that ought to die.

In this world that punishes failure, they are the perennial losers.