Football

Football has been the favorite game of billions for decades. It is a leather ball rolling across grass, but it is also a mirror in which the world catches sight of itself. It has given birth to joys that outlived generations and sorrows that settled deep into memory. It has brought strangers together in embraces and left them divided in despair. At times, it silenced wars for a fleeting moment, as if humanity suddenly remembered that playing matters more than killing. More often, it has been used by those in power, eager to borrow the beauty of the game to conceal the shadows of their own making.

Politics has always walked alongside the touchline. Commerce claimed its seat in the grandstand long ago. And administrators who served the game by exploiting it are hardly a modern invention. Gianni Infantino did not begin this story. Before him came João Havelange and Sepp Blatter, men who spoke of football as though it were a temple while guarding the keys to the vault. Much can also be said about the host nations of recent tournaments: about stadiums rising from sand and silence, about nameless workers, about flags fluttering more proudly than the freedoms they purported to represent.

Every criticism is justified. Every question deserves to be asked. For those who truly love football cannot afford to spare it.

And yet.

As the ball begins to roll again this Thursday, I find myself hoping for beauty. For an unexpected pass that defies logic. For acts of sportsmanship that prove stronger than the cynicism of our age. For small gestures of resistance, moments when players remind us that a human being is more than a sponsorship deal or a vehicle for propaganda. I hope for goals that sound like poetry and saves that insult gravity itself.

I hope for drama in the Shakespearean sense: kings brought low, fools who astonish, heroes who stumble, and unknown men who become immortal. For football, on its finest days, is neither a business nor an ideology. It is a story writing itself before our eyes.

In the weeks ahead, I will write columns about football. Not about statistics, expected goals, or spreadsheets. Others can count the numbers. What interests me is the game itself and the life hidden within it: the man in the stands who hears his late father in a terrace song; the child who learns to dream through a dribble; the player who, after ninety minutes, discovers that victory and defeat are merely temporary visitors.

For somewhere between the opening whistle and the final minute, football keeps whispering the same secret: that despite everything, human beings continue to hunger for beauty.