The reader may ask: but what does this have to do with football? Nothing and everything. Because, for me, the essence of football is the ability to bring people together – whether those on the other side of the world or those sitting next to us in the stadium.
It marked me the first time I entered a football stadium, the old Estádio da Luz, which was packed just a few minutes before the start of the Portugal-Brazil match in the Under-20 World Cup final, in 1991. I was ten years old.
The stadium had a capacity for 120,000 people, but in the days when there were no seats, 127,000 people were at the game. I went in dazzled by all those people, I left anxiously to go to the bathroom after 90 minutes, because my uncle had forced us (me and my cousin) to drink almost a liter and a half bottle of water because we couldn’t go in with it. And we ended up not going back in and not seeing the end of the game. Result: we were entering the house when the rest of the family was celebrating the fact that Portugal had won on penalties…
This is the football I like, the one that unites families and unites strangers, in a cry of joy or a tear of defeat. Not the one that is increasingly designed to make money.
Be it empty seats because the cheapest tickets cost more than a hundred dollars and then the dynamic pricing system came into play.
Be it the “hydration breaks” at 22 minutes of each half – read, advertising break in an America where, one of the highlights of the American football final, are the advertisements.
If America can’t go 45 minutes without seeing an ad, that’s their problem. But FIFA doesn’t remember to extend this rule to all competitions. They can ruin the soccerbut leave football alone.
And long live Tim Payne!
