Me and football
The love story that never happened
When you think about Italians, you are probably thinking about a lot of things. I do not need to write those things: you all know what I am talking about. One of the modern things making the Italians who they are is Football. Or is it Soccer? Once I read that this word has a derogatory meaning (sort of). If you know more about this, please help me out in the comments, it will be very much appreciated. In Italy everyone loves football, and even those who don’t are magically entranced by the TV screen when the national team is involved in the FIFA World Cup. Needless to say, the fact that the Italian Team didn’t make it to Qatar 2022 was a national tragedy.
However, not everyone loves Football in Italy, not everyone is rooting for a specific team (La squadra del cuore or the team of the heart - poetic, isn’t it?). Unfortunately I am one of these heathens. The Unfortunately is not ironic, and here comes the confession about my early years in this world.
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to like football, to play football, to be football. Apparently, my will was not good enough. As a player I was not good. I mean, I wasn’t awful, but I wasn’t anything special. No big deal, I could live with that. Yet, I was fascinated by the stadium this modern day temple where the rite of football was performed every Sunday. No church could compete with the grandiosity of the stadium, not even in the day devoted to the Holy Mass. So one day I asked my father to bring me to the Stadium and be part of the rite. It was the 4th of March, 1979, and the match was Roma - Catanzaro. Spoiler alert: I was rooting for Rome and the team did lose (badly), but that was not the point.
No matter how much I wanted to like the match, the stadium, the supporters, the colors and the sunny day so close to spring, I was going to face the uncomfortable truth: I was utterly and hopelessly bored. Picture a kid who really wants to like something and discovering in horror “This is not for me”.
It happens all the time, it is not a big deal, however it felt like an exclusion: everyone is liking this but me. When you are excluded by something you are going to choose one of two roads: you might think you are not good enough for something (football) or you might think that the thing (always football) is not good enough for you. In time I went through both roads, and they are both wrong.
Some people even think that football is incompatible with being an intellectual, or a (wo)man of letters, of culture. Some think that if you don’t like football you are by default more interesting, with lots of different passions, maybe an artsy type. I used to be charmed by that notion as well, but now I can see it is not accurate at all.
It is well known that Pier Paolo Pasolini (writer, director and Italian cultural icon revered by almost everyone) loved football, calcio. Very few remember that he wrote a wonderful article where he compared the 22 feet of the players to the letters of the alphabet. The 22 feet, with their infinite combinations, give life to a new language, known only to the audience and to a new form of poetry. Every great football player of the time is compared to a specific style of poetry (there is even Mariolino, a player who has in common with me my second name, Corso). What is goal in this unique perspective? It is a subversion of the code, the most poetic act of all. Another poetic act, is the dribbling, this is way the perfect poetry would be the one where the player dribbles everyone and then scores. This, however, happens very rarely.
Even if I still don’t like football, I like this article very much and yet again I am sorry for not liking this sport. And then again who knows what the future holds? Maybe my son will love football when he is old enough and I will get a second chance, through his eyes.
Foto di Dominika Roseclay: https://www.pexels.com/it-it/foto/foto-ad-angolo-basso-di-un-ragazzo-che-gioca-a-calcio-2682543/