Footballers live in another world, by John Carlin

“You have to work hard.”

Leo Messi

A week ago I spoke on the phone, for the first time in many years, with a great friend of school and the university. I was sad after the call. We had so little in common, our lives had traveled on such different paths, that I almost had the feeling that we talked two different languages.

I remembered the conversation a few days later when I started reading The sports journalist of the American novelist Richard Ford. It has a couple of pages in which the protagonist reflects on the interviews that journalists make to athletes. Two worlds live, two different mental spaces conclude. Two languages ​​speak.

Not all journalists will agree, in particular perhaps those who move in sports orbits every day. But my experience, especially when it comes to footballers, is that of Richard Ford’s fictional narrator. “You can ruin everything with them if you speak to them in your usual voice, a voice may be full of doubts or irony,” he says. “Because they live unambiguously, without self -reflection, in favor of a pleasant and absorbed one -dimensionality, which is what generates results in sport.”

Exact. I do not speak to you in my usual voice. I pretend to be another person, less complicated than I am. “How will they win this game?” “We have to go out and play the best we can and with a little luck we will win.” This was told by former midfielder Paul Scholes, one of the great brains of the English team, before a match against Brazil. But it could have been any of thousands of soccer players who have said exactly the same, always, on the eve of a game.

The journalist and the footballer inhabit different worlds, two different languages ​​speak

It is so banal what they say, either before or after an encounter, that a journalist might think that they are expressing disdain. I don’t believe it. Indifference, yes. But, unless they feel offended, which rarely occurs, there is no emotional component in the relationship between the two species. Athletes are action people, no – ours – of words. Talking with a medium is a procedure that the club or sponsors demand, but it is not theirs. They do it in autopilot.

As Ford’s narrator says, you would like to believe they are concentrated in you but they are really thinking of a girl, or a car, or a beer, or in a roast. That is why it is that the two times I interviewed Messi and the time I interviewed Zidane did not particularly bothered me his manifesto boredom, the minimum interest they expressed for me as a human being.

They have their objectives very clear, in contrast to normal, scattered people

There are those who hide it better. I think of Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldo (the Brazilian), Raúl and Beckham, although Beckham is a different case because he was not only a footballer, he was a public character, as an actor. But there is usually a moment when you see with absolute clarity that these guys live in a parallel world. It happens when a teammate passes by suddenly and tells them something, a usually shared joke that makes the difference between its sphere and that of the journalist, and the two laugh. That’s when the mask is removed and you see that they are understood, speak the same language and have an impenetrable complicity for those who do not belong to their sect.

Therefore, I think, that television channels have been hiring former players for several years to talk to those who still play. Thus there is a certain possibility that the defenses are going down and behave as they really are, that it is not usually very interesting, by the way. Which does not mean that it feels an intellectual disdain for the cracks of the world of football. On the contrary.

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On the one hand, I see an admirable purity in the simplicity of their feelings and in the clarity of its objectives. The opposite of dispersed, as we usually be normal people, the focus is the sine qua non of its professional existence. On the other hand, perhaps for the same reason, I see them as superior people – who are, of course. For my part, he conceals a certain equality when I am with them, I intend to introduce myself as the colleague, but if I could see myself from the outside I would think: “What most pathetic show.” Because the sad truth, I know, is that I am not worthy of licking the soles of the boots.