A lover’s quarrel with the beautiful game

“When good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.� - Eduardo Galeano

There are few phenomena on this planet that truly transcend culture the way soccer does. Few phenomena so universally divide people either, of course. But for this one month every four years, literally billions of people will be glued to televisions in living rooms and bars and shop windows at all hours of the day, finding ways to skip work, losing their voices cheering on the teams that bear their flag - or perhaps even just the teams they’ve picked to win their brackets.

This year they say that one in two people in the world - 3,413,350,000 of the 6,826,700,000 of us - will watch at least part of the Cup. Here in the United States, where we’ve been a bit slow to catch the fever, ABC/ESPN paid $100 million for the English language broadcasting rights for this year and 2014. Univision, meanwhile, paid more than three times that amount to broadcast in Spanish here.

A couple of years ago I read a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. I thought it would be an impossible soccer book to top, but I just finished Soccer in Sun and Shadow by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and I must say it comes quite close.

I originally understood the title to refer, in a culturally critical way, to the different sections of the stadium - the cheap seats in the blazing sun, the luxury boxes in the shade - and the way in which soccer, such a unifying force, still finds ways to perpetuate the socioeconomic divide that so permeates Latin America. But Galeano, who writes elsewhere about that sort of thing extensively, seems to be aiming at something different here.

The book, made up of mostly one-page essays, features Galeano’s reflections on a number of general themes (like “the idol� and “the goalkeeper� and “the fan�), but is mostly a chronology of the sport, and particularly of the World Cup. For each Cup he paints the picture of what’s going on in the wider world - dictators rising and falling, wars beginning and ending, and of course, each time “well-informed sources in Miami� were announcing “the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.� Through the thematic reflections and chronology, Galeano celebrates the bright spots of the world’s game, but doesn’t shy away from its blemishes. And that is what he means by “soccer in sun and shadow.�

He reserves some of his harshest criticism for the commercialization of soccer - turning sport into industry, taking on the values of efficiency and effectiveness, at the expense of creativity and passion and beauty.

So this year I watch the games with his ideas swirling around in my head and occasionally leaking out into conversation. But I’m conflicted. Because one of the factors leading up to the Cup that most filled me with anticipation for the celebration of all that is best with the sport - precisely that passion and beauty and yes, creativity - was a three-minute Nike commercial that is unlike anything I have ever seen before.

What would Eduardo Galeano think of it, I wonder? Would he see in it a bit of a recapturing of the bright spots, or merely just a further demonstration of the shadows? Maybe a bit of both.