Mixed “Golden Ball”
The Ballon d’Or is, more and more, proof that football is becoming declassified. Police guarding the trophy as if it were a relic, players dressed as actors about to receive an Oscar, intruders from the commercial world… Luxury comes to tell us that football ascends the social scale. However, there is a historical anomaly: having considered football popular, having forgotten about women until very recently. But there was Aitana Bonmatí, still opening for Messi, but with the intelligence, the commitment, the control that authorizes her talent and, like all of her generation, her status as a pioneer. And finally, Messi raising his eighth Ball. The audience standing applauding, the relaxed attitude of someone who no longer owes anything, the speech looking back. The word “goodbye” was implicit in everything.
The “Golden Boy” wants to get older
In the same way, the word “hello” was implicit in Bellingham’s mere presence at the gala. In a month he will receive the Golden Boy, but after winning the title with Madrid in record time, he asks to sit at the seniors’ table. He came from the classic, where Gavi, with that soldier’s face coming out of a trench ready for anything, had subjected him to fierce surveillance. Bellingham never loses his cool and, like someone attending a date with someone who is late, he waited for his moment. These guys don’t measure things like others. They need a second, a meter, a slight carelessness from the rival to score a great goal and turn the game into something else. In the end, when the score seemed to have been decided, he returned to the game as if he had forgotten something, filtered through a space that only he saw and scored the second goal.
Replacement time
It is not surprising that this discoverer of empty spaces was looking for one on the gala stage for the coming seasons. He brought a smile over to Mbappé, who was sad. Let the Frenchman be careful, because this trophy is not given to melancholic people. Haaland seemed more threatening, always armed with his sympathy and his machine gun full of goals. The three were stars of the gala, but everything seems to indicate that stronger emotions await them next season. Now without Messi in stellar circulation, a casting for a new time and football never lacks talents with new ways to surprise. The candidates who come are tall and powerful, physically functional to the athletic and methodological football that awaits this evolutionary game that, like everything else, has been rushed.
Change to continue reigning
If everything changes, why won’t football, which society has always mirrored, change? It is true that everything, from the money players earn to the price of tickets, speaks to us about a new status for the game. But at the same time, since culture adopted emotions within its scope, football is increasingly a reason for political-social reflections by intellectuals who had ignored it as a field of reasoning. Of course, without the fans leaving their tribal bunkers, where they unleash their feelings. Which is why football does not need a cultural pantheon, the corner bar is enough, where it establishes itself as the first producer of conversation, giving another example of its status as popular culture. Simply, the place where those who do not have access to Culture with a capital letter find beauty, the different, the epic.
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