This is just football, but enough because football is everything. It is politics, sociology, and economics. It explains a society, the anesthesia, it unites and divides, it urges us to put our arms in the trash and find the witch’s mirror, the one that tells us we are the most handsome, stupid, and generous, but, at the same time, that there are others just as handsome, stupid, and generous. And also, when the case arises, racist, irresponsible, and cruel. Belonging to a club, to a national team, these days defines us, integrates us, spares us from answering unanswerable questions, places us in rituals and calendars tied to curiosity, to the amazement of the game as a life lesson, its spectacularization.
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Although we wish it, Lamine Yamal explains nothing about us – just as Maradona, that other UFO, did not. Cruyff, Puyol, Iniesta, also Messi, did. Movements, desires, and values of a society, the Catalan in this case or the Spanish if we zoom out. But when you see so many kids on the street with their jersey, the 19 or the 10, you harbor the hope that when he retires, he will have moved something before our eyes. That not only – as now – have we disguised racism as classism. In the short life of the forward, there are many beautiful stories of love, friendship, complicity, help, individual and collective, but, for now, the message – petty and lucid – is that only success integrates the poor, those who come from places, neighborhoods, poor parents, if you are not white. The same ones who would not rent an apartment to Lamine before Lamine, now cheer him on, hoping he gives them glory this Sunday.
The same ones who would not rent an apartment to Lamine before Lamine, now cheer him on
All this seems not to matter to Lamine. Nor is he deceived. They say it is better to apologize than to ask for permission. It seems that neither option is in his plans. Lamine is inevitable. He is here. He stays. No one had foreseen it would be like this, no one expected him, this should be different. It is possible.
But he does not care the least bit what you, I, or the Taliban of the moment think about him. He will leave the party before they decide to throw him out. Of course. A party he has attended in passing, between one thing and another, because this is not about pleasing the masters but about not disappointing the kids, in the neighborhood.
Lamine is a gift – also a big game trophy – and, above all, an opportunity as a society
Lamine has had a gift with the ball since he was a child, with ease, with processing that game called football. This is a story that does not always end with the protagonist playing a World Cup final in New York at 19. Who knows if winning it, if scoring a goal. Hopefully yes. What a crazy script. There is the social elevator – long out of use – and then there are these undetectable geysers, that give no warning.
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He has shattered all age and success records, has made his own and forced mistakes, but nothing he himself did not know how to manage. But he has always been himself and among his own. And in this World Cup final with a heart divided between Messi and Lamine (and Cubarsí and Olmo and Oyarzabal and Rodri…), one wants Yamal to play well, for things to go his way, to score, to win the World Cup for him and for what he represents to many – without him wanting or championing it – he is hope in a world that is not his, to which no one has called or expected them, in which they have to live with looks and attitudes that are not sincere, nor perhaps fair, much less reassuring.
And also for the generosity of his play. For the times he tries. As Kobe Bryant said: “Every shot you miss is one less that remains to make.” Again and again and again. For thinking about the team and the teams thinking about him. For the faith and confidence without being offensive, but also far from that idea of false modesty as a Marian virtue by elevation. For the kids, the youth. Who see the color of his skin, who hear his story, who know his beliefs and think that maybe – just maybe – everything is relative, that there are no absolute truths that lead others to be wrong and you not. That one also has the right to be different.
Lamine is a gift – also a big game trophy – but, above all, an opportunity as a society. But all that is not him. He is Lamine Yamal, he is 19 years old and plays football. Damn well, I add, in case it was not clear. He was born in Esplugues de Llobregat. His father is Moroccan, his mother Guinean, and no, Mariano, this one is not French either.
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