And the football continues…

On June 11, opened in Mexico on 23^̬me edition of the FIFA World Cup organized by the United States, Canada and Mexico. A competition which takes place until 07/19, already punctuated by scandals, controversies, embezzlement and controversies. Between dismay Рculture and passion, the post from Jean-Marie Pottier, journalist at the magazine Human Sciences.

I missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not the conquest of Rome.ÂI have no media memory of the night of November 9, 1989 (I was seven years old, not quite “and a half”, as I probably said at the time), but I remember staying up, eight months later, for see the FRG, soon reunified with its eastern neighbor, win the 1990 FIFA World Cup in the Italian capital. I had seen, without yet understanding it, how this game makes both history and our stories.

I have thought about this founding memory in recent weeks as I see the next edition of the World Cup approaching, with a mixture of excitement and weariness, which opens this Thursday, June 11. This competition is co-organized by the United States in full authoritarian drift, a drift which is also welcomed by the international football federationhere at décerné Donald Trump is a laughable « FIFA peace prize HAS”. It occurs in an increasingly unequal football, where the wealth of the greatest struggles to trickle down to the base. It will be peppered with video nitpicks and advertising “cool breaks”. And yet, I continue to watch for it with a certain impatience.

I rediscovered this power of football on our imaginations a few days ago while watchingAnd life goes on(1992), a film by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. In 1987, the latter revealed himself to the eyes of the Western public withWhere is my friend’s house?, which depicts the quest by an eight-year-old kid from the house of one of his classmates, whose notebook he took by mistake and who risks being sent back. The story takes place in Koker, a village in northern Iran. Three years later, on June 21, 1990, the town is devastated by a gigantic earthquake which leaves nearly 50,000 dead in the country. Kiarostami goes to the scene of the disaster, looking for the child actors from his previous film: did they survive?

And life goes on tells this quest in docu-fiction mode. Aboard their rickety Renault 5, a filmmaker and his son try to reach the devastated north of Iran from Tehran. The little boy recalls his memories of the night of the earthquake, tinged with those of the World Cup underway in Italy:“Maybe the boys came to Tehran to watch the football match, since they don’t even have TV. Scotland were playing Brazil that night, right? The father doubts – that the boys came, that it was really that match. Towards the end of the film, on a stony bend, he comes across a young man tinkering with a makeshift antenna. He dares a question:

“With the earthquake, and all this mourning, are you going to watch the match?”

– I’m in mourning too. I lost my little sister and three nieces and nephews. But what can we do? The World Cup comes back every four years, and life goes on. And an earthquake every forty years. HAS”

The father doesn’t really like football, but he smiles.

Nearly four decades later, perhaps, in an Iran at war with one of the organizing countries, kids will continue to find their way in time using the World Cup calendar, people will continue to look for ways to see the evening match by any means possible. We can see there the scent of a popular opium or even a nationalist fever (Iran is participating in the competition for the seventh time, but was forced to base camp in Mexico rather than the United States due to geopolitical tensions). Or, conversely, a manifestation of the resistance of this sport to the world as it is not going.A remnant of childhood against the dirty realities of the adult world. 

Shortly after discovering Kiarostami’s film, I dove back intoFootball between light and shadowan essay by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.Ce “Beggar for good football” y décrit le “Voyage sad” de ce sport passé du “Pleasure in duty”Â: for him, football“banished the beauty that is born from the joy of playing for play’s sake,”except when,“luckily”appeared on the ground« chenapan effronté » which deviates from pre-written scenarios. This zest of playfulness is a good definition of what remains of beauty in football. A few days ago, in an article devoted to the impact of migration on the World Cup, I mentioned the little smile of the Frenchman Désiré Doué seeing his big brother Guéla score a goal for the Ivory Coast against France, as if the two were opponents in a derby schoolyard. Towards the end of his book, Galeano remembers a dialogue between a journalist and the German theologian Dorothee Sölle :

“How would you explain to a child what happiness is?

– I wouldn’t explain it to him. I would throw a ball for him to play with.”

Jean-Marie Pottier, in Human Sciences