The European Football Championships betray a contradiction so embarrassing that no one dares point it out. The more they insist on petal messages, with obligatory brotherhood, with children entering the pitch held by the hand of multi-coloured players, the more guerrilla warfare takes place outside the stadiums. 70 Italians arrested and then released because they were in possession of clubs, bars, knives, as if for a barbaric invasion; very violent clashes between English hooligans and Serbian ultras who support Putin, between the latter and Albanians, the Danes also fall, gentle but mindful of the ancient Nordic sagas, of Norse mythology.
The political and geopolitical tensions that the EU does not know how to deal with or is not interested in that come back from the window of sport, upset the peaceful, well-fed cities and metropolises of Felix Germany, today a little less so. And what do the black French do to you? The appeals against Marine Le Pen’s far right. “We are at a crucial moment in the country’s history, and you have to see your priorities. We are citizens first and foremost, we must not be disconnected from the world. We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. I want to address all French people and especially young people: we see that extremists are at the gates of power. We have the possibility to change everything, and we must identify with the values of tolerance, respect, diversity. Every voice counts. I share the same values as Marcus, I’m on his side.”
So Kylian Mbappéfor some the best player in the world, currently the highest paid, who has just joined Real Madrid for a salary of 150 million plus 15 million in annual salary. Marcus is Thuram, son of Liliane, world champion in 1998, now playing for Inter and the first player from the French national team to compete; “We must fight so that the RN does not pass.” Others from the blue national team, equally coloured, are less bothered, prefer not to expose themselves and mind their own business. The analyzes of these big boys in shorts and jewels aren’t much, but let’s be satisfied: there was one of Rivera, these remain with banal sloganism of “we must do well. We can do well. The secret is the collective. The coach invites us to do well.” On the other hand, coaches have emerged as a species halfway between the mystical and the madhouse: “If we go and see that good things are done, but then they don’t become good, then the good things are no longer good.” This Spalletti is either a lunatic or a drug addict. But since they gave him the Italian national team to lead, we prefer to suspect that he is marching in it.
Polemos as an eternal power game, the war of which sport, football in particular, is a vivid metaphor with its sieges on the opponent’s goal to be conquered, the wall defense, the so-called “counterattack” sorties, the conquest of the banner, the uncontrollable exhilaration after the goal. Even outside the bowl, in the streets, the fans compete for the banners, steal them, burn them in the eternal representation of Polemos which unleashes the most ferocious instincts. But the Mbappés, the Thurans, don’t consider this, it’s not important, what matters is the militancy against the extreme right of Le Pen, so extreme that she just said: “All blacks and migrants are welcome if they behave well ”. It’s not enough for the football gods, they can ignore everything, in their golden bubbleof geostrategic dynamics knowing that It doesn’t hurt to be a champion regardlessindeed it makes us forget the pharaonic privileges they enjoy and which are assumed in negotiations by President Macron, of whom they are friends, they are close.
Another open secret is that global football no longer has anything to do with sports, it is disputed between businessmen and financiers, teams in the hands of oligarchs from Putin’s clique or sheikhs, the emirs, or the fraudulent Chinese who then deliver them to the large American investment funds which are the same ones behind everything else, from vaccines to climate “reconversion”. The tournaments, not from today, already at the time of the Spanish World Cup, and then more and more are political showcases that work much better than the unrealistic “G” and for which the heads of state act in cahoots with the owners of the teams and facilitate or determine transfers of sensational wealth, one hundred, two hundred million euros, like 400 billion lire, in one go for a single footballer, in the clear expectation of being able to obtain ten or a thousand times more in the incomprehensible tangle of television business, merchandising, and politics, like a river of money that returns to the sea. And which as always squeezes the citizens – fans – subjects.
Mbappé and Thuram are also involved in politics, of support, in support of our friend the president who emerged with broken bones first from the European elections and then from the Italian G7. They do it as they can and are asked to do it, without going into analysis, content, a purely demagogic but effective role of megaphones; outside them, above them, the fans who stage Polemos and destroy themselves over ethnic issues, for the resurgence of political hatred, the settling of accounts of a nationalist and racial politics that they do not understand but to whose atavistic and beastly furies they remain linked. Yes, there is another contradiction in the contradiction of the European Football Championships: that once these continental tournaments served to recognize European diversity, today it is the opposite. In the homogenization of consumption, of landings, of ways of thinking and of prohibiting thought, in the same national representatives now indistinguishable from each other, even in terms of somatic traits, one would say that a championship is needed to recognize oneself as being different to some extent and thus fight each other, slaughter each other.
In the post-war period and until the 1990s, let’s say until the collapse of the Wall and the transformation of football clubs into joint stock companies, sanctioned by the communist Veltroni, international matches had something mysterious about them, those who followed them could almost perceive by breathing the difference of the places as by projection or by vibrations from the television screen, if you play in Eastern countries you get that colorless squalor, ice, and you thought how lucky it was to be born and live in Italy; if they transmitted them from Brazil you were surprised to envy a life of sun, of dances, of mythologies that were completely far-fetched but as tenacious as dreams and imaginations are. Now the stadiums are all the same, the places, the cities are identical and the players are perfectly similar. All without differences and without atmospheresall frigid like the EU and those who represent it and govern it.
So it ends up that, to rediscover the diversity that unites us, all that remains is to cross paths as in Barletta in 1503, Italians against the French. But the Mbappé and the Thurans think they can solve everything by inviting boycott Marine Le Pen, the fascist, enemy of progress, of civilization. And Macron.
Max Del Papa, 17 June 2024
Nicolaporro.it is also on Whatsapp. Simply click here to subscribe to the channel and always be updated (free)
Did you like this article? Read also
Follow us on our channels
