Atlético de Madrid-Real Madrid is a match with all the ingredients that make football great. Time and proximity have been working on the rivalry of the two teams. There is plenty of background to put an emotional accent on the match and technical arguments to enhance the spectacle. Also some proper name, such as Vinicius, who these days turns on higher voltage cables that should be handled with care.
Let’s talk about Vinicius, a player of such a level that he determines the result of a match. The footballer is ranked according to his talent and here we are talking about one of the main candidates for the “Ballon d’Or”. Bigger words.
Vinicius taught us how much play, pleasure and persistence there is in the construction of a talent. Permanent positive and negative feedback that pushes the intelligent footballer to improve. In his case, the journey was painful because when he put on the Madrid shirt the inaccuracies in the definition earned him major criticism. Criticism has always been a typical product in a club like Madrid, but now there are new vehicles for disrespect expressed in messages and memes on the networks. Vinicius’ football was strengthened by the fortitude of someone who knew how to go through these difficulties without giving up. Fighting and competitiveness are part of their nature. If there wasn’t a soul in the stadium, he would still be struggling. Which is why you have my admiration.
Those episodes having been forgotten due to the evidence of his great performance, Vinicius is now plagued by other misunderstandings and prejudices. Some affect players in general. Because of the power conferred on them by the fortunes they earn, many people think of them as footballers, as winners, as famous, as poor people who became rich, as rich people on the verge of becoming idiots. But not for a moment do they think of them as people.
Much less the people who gather in the stands, those “anonymous and irresponsible crowds”, as Gustave Le Bon defined them in Psychology of the masses. People who take their frustrations to the stadiums and who follow slogans of all kinds with bovine obedience, including antisocial ones. No club is safe from these excesses, which are as old as football.
Now, the only color that should count in football is the color of the shirts, but for the mob, racism is a temptation and Vinicius was the protagonist of a sequence of unpleasant events in different stadiums. The player, accustomed to drawing energy from a well of rage, continues to maintain the level. As for the person, he decided that these episodes gave him moral authority to raise the flag against racism, with the support of the club, his country and all decent citizens. But it is not easy to stop that wheel because some of his statements stepped on sensitive nationalist calluses that irritated fans. Also because Vinicius, installed in the role of victim, considers his rivals, the referees and the fans enemies and gives his protests an irritating expressiveness, even for many Real Madrid fans. A new test to overcome.
The match against Atlético will be a test bed. Vinicius must put all his energy into playing divine football and the fans should put all his energy into cheering on his team with the passion that Cívitas Metropolitano usually does. It is not about asking that the protocols of diplomacy be respected, because behavior in football is so lax that we accept insults as part of the show. It is simply a matter of not touching those high-voltage cables so that the game does not end up blowing up.
