Soccer in Sun and Shadow

They Don’t Count

At the end of 1994, Maradona, Stoitchkov, Bebeto, Francescoli, Laudrup, Zamorano, Hugo Sánchez, and other players started organizing an international soccer players union.

Up to now the stars of the show have been blindingly absent from the structures of power where decisions are made. They have no say in the management of local soccer, and neither can they enjoy the luxury of being heard in the heights of FIFA where the global pie is divvied up.

Who are the players? Monkeys in a circus? They may dress in silk, but aren’t they still monkeys? They are never consulted when it comes to deciding when, where, and how they play. The international bureaucracy changes the rules at its whim, the players have no say. They can’t even find out how much money their legs produce, or where those fugitive fortunes end up.

After many years of strikes and demonstrations by local unions, the players have won better contracts, but the merchants of soccer continue treating them as if they were machines to be bought, sold, and loaned: “Maradona is an investment,” the president of Napoli liked to say.

Now European clubs, as well as a few Latin American ones, have psychologists on staff, as in factories. The directors do not pay them to help troubled souls, but to oil the machinery and increase productivity. Athletic productivity? Labor productivity, though in this case the hired hands are really hired feet. The fact is that professional players offer their labor power to the factories of spectacle in exchange for a wage. The price depends on performance, and the more they get paid the more they are expected to produce. Trained to win or to win, squeezed to the last calorie, they are treated worse than racehorses. Racehorses? British player Paul Gascoigne likes to compare himself to a factory-raised chicken: controlled movements, rigid rules, set behaviors that must always be repeated.

Stars can earn top salaries while their fleeting splendor lasts. Clubs pay them much more now than twenty or thirty years ago, and they can sell their names and faces for advertising. But the glorious idols of soccer are not rewarded with the fabled treasure people imagine. Forbes magazine published a list of the forty top-earning athletes in the world in 1994. Only one soccer player was among them, the Italian Roberto Baggio, and he fell near the bottom of the list.

What about the thousands upon thousands of players who are not stars? The ones who do not enter the kingdom of fame, who get stuck going round and round in the revolving door? Of every ten professional soccer players in Argentina, only three manage to make a living from it. The salaries are not great, especially considering the short duration of an active player’s career: cannibalistic industrial civilization devours them in a flash.

[Four soccer stars kicked their way into Forbes’s top forty in 2012: David Beckham (#8), Cristiano Ronaldo (#9), Lionel Messi (#11), and Wayne Rooney (#38). A few millionaire exceptions that prove the rule.]