Soccer Therapy
Galeano, Eduardo
The Upside-Down World Eduardo Galeano Soccer Therapy In 2002, Clint Mathis, American soccer star, announced that his team was going to win the World Cup. It was only logical and natural, he...
...Were it not for the gold promised by professional soccer, fathers would prohibit their daughters from wearing these indecent outfits required by a satanic sport that leaves women sterile...
...They wear over them their colored jerseys and are still able to make goals...
...In each player, a whole crowd plays...
...These silent women laugh and laugh more throughout the game and continue laughing uncontrollably throughout the banquet...
...Where the Baghdad stadium once stood, now there is a military base holding American tanks...
...But the testimony of those admirable people working against death does concur about one fact...
...Sports, especially soccer, is one of the few places that can provide shelter to those who have no place in the world, and it contributes significantly to reestablishing bonds of solidarity broken by the culture of alienation/separation that is dominant in today's Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of world...
...I do not mean only the communion the fan experiences with a team each Sunday from the stands of the stadium, but also, above all, the game played in the paddocks, in the little fields, on the beaches, the few public spaces still not devoured by urbanization run amok...
...Or maybe when they play, they lose...
...It is ranked among the top in the world...
...The Iraqi team trained in fields where flocks of sheep grazed...
...Women play soccer in the towns of the high plains without taking off their numerous skirts...
...There is no magic potion that can act as a cure...
...They are all teams that in some way represent peoples who don't have the right to be what they want to be, that suffer the damnation of living in submission to a foreign flag, stripped of their sovereignty, bombed, humiliated, pushed to desperation...
...The occupation's troops, which at this point have already forgotten the pretext for their criminal invasion, have converted sports arenas into cemeteries or hospitals...
...The winning team is given a sheep...
...There, the native languages do not have a word for suicide for the simple reason that suicide did not exist in aboriginal life...
...Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of "The Open Veins of Latin America," "Memory of Fire," and "Soccer in Sun and Shadow...
...Terek used to play in the Grozny stadium, which has been closed since the Chechen independence fighters planted a bomb beneath the seat of the country's Russian-picked president...
...Enthusiasm and delight are the drugs for this cure...
...In 2004, a Palestinian team was the champion of Israel for the first time in history, and for the first time in history a Chechen team was champion of Russia...
...Little by little, women's soccer has been carving a larger space for itself in the sports media, where for the most part men cover men and don't know what to make of this invasion of women and girls...
...And as if this were not enough, all three are modest teams, poor, nearly or completely unknown, and without any famous players...
...Every game is a party...
...These are rituals of affirmation of the humiliated, both men and women, boys and girls...
...The leading country in everything finished eighth...
...But in soccer, at times, this rarest of events does happen...
...In the Olympics, the soccer team of Iraq-convulsed in war-won game after game and made it to the semifinals, in a series of surprises, against every prediction and all evidence, and was the The Arab team, Bnei Sakhnin, and the Chechen team, Terek Grozny, have certain things in common with the Iraqi team...
...Maybe so...
...They celebrate together, the winners and losers...
...In soccer, rarities occur...
...it contains an energy that can greatly help the scorned to love themselves and save them from the solitude that they feel condemns them to being perpetually incommunicado...
...The eleven players of each team are many more than eleven...
...So is the losing team...
...In a world organized around the daily confirmation of the power of the powerful, nothing is rarer than the coronation of the humiliated and the humiliation of the crowned...
...In the end, they accept it, though, because soccer is a sin that can bring them fame and save their families from poverty...
...Out of respect for religion, they say...
...It is not a chemical miracle...
...It was only logical and natural, he explained: "We're pretty much the lead country in everything...
...They are errant teams, playing in foreign lands and before empty stands...
...In Nigeria, the women's team is a national treasure and source of intense pride...
...This sport is a shared endeavor, played in teams...
...However, a few centuries of racism and marginalization and the violent eruption of consumer society and its implacable values have succeeded in making the rate of suicide among aboriginal youth and children the highest in the world...
...And in Iraq, there are battlefields instead of soccer fields...
...Across the ocean, in Bolivia, there is no problem...
...They play barefoot...
...The men refuse to play against the women...
...Enrique Pichon-Riviere, an Argentine psychiatrist and passionate student of human pain, can confirm the efficacy of soccer as a therapy for the illnesses born of scorn and loneliness...
...This article is published with permission of IPS Columnist Service...
...In this regard, the experience of Australia and New Zealand is revealing...
...Whatever the reasons may be, collective dignity has a lot to do with the passage of a ball flying through the air...
...The village of Sakhnin, in Galilee, never had anything like a stadium, though the Israeli government promised one a number of times...
...In Zanzibar and Sudan, the brothers of these female players, guardians of the family honor, administer beatings to punish this mania of their sisters who think they are men enough to dribble a ball and commit the sacrilegeofrevealing their bodies...
...But in the Muslim north of the country, men are against it because the sport draws maidens into depravity...
...Soccer is a free space open to these women, prolific in children, overwhelmed by slaving in the fields and mills, and subjected to frequent beatings by their drunk husbands...
...On a professional level, the development of women's soccer today has found a certain resonance...
...A powerful symbol, a great mystery: No one knows why (though theories abound), but in today's world many people find soccer the only area of identity in which they recognize themselves and in which they really believe...
...But there is no echo, or only enemy echoes, from the men's game...
...The results of this therapy are quite surprising: It seems capable of reviving lost feelings of fraternity and belonging...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
