In the year 2015, a guy named Clive O’Connell, a gray-haired English lawyer, with black horn-rimmed glasses, a neatly shaved beard, rosy cheeks, a blue linen shirt and a black The North Face jacket; A neat-looking, middle-aged man to whom you would trust your divorce and custody of your children, addressed a television camera after a match at Stamford Bridge and said that Liverpool fans were “scum.” He said it with true fury. Days later he was fired from his job for the offensive outburst.
It’s quite likely that O’Connell would never have attended a company conference, with his name printed on a plaque on the table, and launched into those rants with the microphone on. But he wasn’t at work. He was in the stadium. And under the circumstantial cover of a match, immersed in that degree of temperamental unconsciousness, he furiously shouted that all Liverpool fans are scum.
Football causes that. Rage. Swear words. Abuse. Indignities. Gonna. Instant outrage. Violence. “Football brings out the worst in us” is a frequently repeated phrase. You can almost imagine football as an imp embedded in your brain whispering in your ear to make you go crazy. Football almost as an excuse from personal responsibility. But is it football or is that the true character of the fans?
Soccer simply eliminates inhibition. It’s not that some people are normal and become temporarily racist, sexist or violent during a game, it’s that these people are racist, sexist and violent. The thing is that society is racist, sexist and violent. There is, in reality, a coherent transition between football culture and the rest of society. Football is an imperfect mirror, but a mirror, with the reflection amplified by the ritual and anesthetic state it provokes.
Something else happens. Many people, gentlemen dented by routine or frustrated kids, look for a transgressive experience in football. They are not satisfied with just watching a game. It is about remaining completely erased for two hours, even for a whole day if the previous one is good. Drink, sing songs, shout a hymn, shout slogans, insult your rival, put on a communal t-shirt, wave a collective flag, free yourself from corsets and rules, express an identity and return home with an anesthetic experience with which to face the rest of week. Until the next game. A football season ticket is considerably cheaper than weekly therapy with a psychologist.
Something, however, seems to be changing. If not in the reprehensible behavior, at least in the reactions. There is no longer applause or indifference. Quique Sánchez Flores sat in the Coliseum press room on Saturday and said that “here part of the public believes that they can come and say whatever they want, that is what is happening in football. We are workers, we have to be respected. “In these times, they pull us back and tell us things that go beyond any space of coexistence.” From the stands they had called him a gypsy. They had yelled at his player, Marcos Acuña, that he comes from the monkey. The same Saturday, the Rayo Majadahonda players refused to play the second half of the match after the racist shouts that their goalkeeper, the Senegalese Cheick Sarr, received. He had been sent off after fighting against those fans and the referee.
Rather than banning football, as if Judge Pedraz had just discovered it, we should start by changing it. That is, we should start by changing ourselves. Because let’s not be cynical, football is not the only problem. Just enter any social network to check it.
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