“Football has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organised not for play but rather to impede it. […] Luckily, on the field you can still see some insolent rascal, who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”
- Eduardo Galeano, in Football in Sun and Shadow
“The world turned its back while Guatemala underwent a long
Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del
Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with
knives; in Piedra Parada, they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala, they
were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was
stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of
Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed
were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine gunned as they emerged,
their bodies thrown into ravines.”
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America:
“In victory, the players suddenly stopped looking like rich,
pampered superstar athletes and became, instead, innocent young men bright with
the realisation that they were experiencing a great moment in their lives.”
- Salman Rushdie, in a New Yorker article ‘The People’s
Game’
“...So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting
moment as their best. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and
barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less
potential for unexpected delirium.”
- Nick Hornby, in Fever Pitch
THE 2026 World Cup is now only two months away. Before even
a ball has been kicked, the joy millions take from the “beautiful game” will be
literally stomped upon by the “foul, for-profit priorities, violent classism
and discrimination” that characterise world football. That other shame on the
game, the European Super League episode, which revealed oligarchic designs to
turn clubs into cash machines, and the popular backlash exposed mass anger
against billionaire rule.
The late Uruguayan author and activist Eduardo Galeano would
have a field day writing about it and other football-related developments. Although
I am pretty sure even Galeano would struggle with the modern game's growing
commodification and gentrification. Kerry Olsen, although not in the same
league as Galeano, writes in a recent Financial Times article:
“On the shores of Lake Como, where Roman emperors, silk
merchants and Hollywood actors have long embodied discretion and excess, a once
provincial football club is rethinking the game. After multiple bankruptcies
and a 21-year absence from Italy’s uppermost football league, Serie A, Como
1907 now finds itself near the top of the ranks as the season closes. Just two
years after it rejoined the league, a lucrative Champions League place lies
within reach. Yet for some, the most striking part of Como’s recent turnaround
lies beyond goals on the pitch.
Club executives have been positioning it less as a
conventional football team dependent on match-day successes and more as a
global lifestyle brand that has Lake Como — and fashion — at its heart. Under
the club’s chief brand officer Rhuigi Villaseñor, a seasoned fashion industry
creative director and club shareholder appointed in 2024, Como works with four
high-profile brands on lines for fans, including Brioni for formalwear, Rhude
on casual and streetwear, Hublot on luxury timepieces and Adidas on its technical
kits, including a sailing collection called Lago di Como. The team also offers
luxury lake experiences and has launched a private members’ club called, well,
Club on the Lake.”[1]
Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow is not just a literary
celebration but contains within it a social diagnosis. He records the joy, myth
and cruelty of the game while exposing how class relations, commerce and power
shape football. The task of the reader is to combine Galeano’s humanist
impressions with a scientific, historical-materialist analysis so that feeling
is linked to explanation and to strategy.
While the book contains aspects of romanticism, Galeano is
no fool and understands that “Professional football does everything to castrate
that energy of happiness, but it survives, that’s the best thing about it – its
stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats programme it down to
the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to
be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible
occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black
man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”
Eduardo Galeano
While football fans in general live one game to the next,
which is understandable but not forgivable, Galeano was not like that. One of
his best traits as a writer and historian was his gift for “remembering the
past of America and above all that of Latin America, an intimate land condemned
to amnesia”.
Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) was a Uruguayan historian,
journalist and writer whose work reached a vast international audience with its
powerful combination of literary form, historical narrative and moral
indignation. He gave the people a voice and helped them understand the
beautiful game and the world around them. His books — above all Las venas
abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) and the three-volume
Memory of Fire — synthesise colonial and capitalist plunder, anti-imperialist
resistance, and the lived experiences of workers, peasants, and indigenous
peoples.
Galeano is not a Marxist theorist in the academic sense.
Still, his writings are an invaluable entry point for a reader's political
education because they humanise structural analysis and help develop the
historical imagination needed for revolutionary politics. Galeano’s work is a
bridge to political activism. His use of the genre “People’s History popularized
a deeper understanding of the history of exploitation. Galeano is an
indispensable literary and political voice for understanding the lived
experience of oppressed peoples in Latin America.
Galeano’s narratives show how the logic of profit, foreign
control and local elites shape societies. Those themes remain central today as
Latin America confronts revived imperialist competition, debt politics and
resource conflicts. Galeano’s work is useful in that it connects past plunder
to present-day phenomena — privatisations, debt conditionality, and
geopolitical rivalry — and exposes why petty-bourgeois nationalist solutions
inevitably fail the working class (through an analysis of the “turn to the
left” and its limits).
For Galeano, football should be experienced as a source of
joy, community, and identity, and fans should have their day in the “sun.” His
writing is lyrical and humanising. Galeano lets us feel a child’s first contact
with the ball, an old supporter’s devotion, or the sensory celebration of a
goal. But he is cognisant that it also casts deep shadows of nationalism,
commercialisation, state power, and the coercion of migrant labour. Galeano’s
use of the genre of “People’s History is compatible and complements a
scientific, historical-materialist method, which explains how the game’s social
forms arise from capitalism’s development and political struggles. Galeano’s
succinct critiques of commodification, nationalism, or corruption in football.
A recent example of how Modern football is dominated by criminality
and transnational capital, debt, and financial instruments was a German
football team's coach bus, which was hit by roadside bombs. On April 11, 2017,
three explosive devices detonated as Borussia Dortmund’s coach left the team
hotel, wounding a player and badly damaging the vehicle. From the outset,
official and media narratives raced to pin a “terrorist” label on the attack.
But the immediate need is to understand this event not as an isolated mystery,
but as an expression of social and political forces—above all, the sharpening
contradictions of capitalism and the state’s readiness to exploit fear for
political ends.
The initial police rush to invoke an Islamist motive, and
the subsequent exposure of inconsistencies in the so-called claim of
responsibility, demonstrate how quickly the state and media attempt to frame
such incidents according to preexisting agendas. As the WSWS reported at the
time, investigators found letters at the scene purporting to claim the attack
for the Islamic State. Yet, these letters contained linguistic oddities and
demands that echoed far-right political positions—pointing to the possibility
of deliberate misdirection or false-flag signals rather than a straightforward
Islamist attack.
The attack happened two years after Galeano passed, but
there is no doubt that he would have written that soccer had become a “sad
voyage from beauty to duty. When the
sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play was
torn out by the roots. In this fin de
siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless
means not profitable.
Galeano gives us the sun — the passion and stories of the
people. Galeano teaches sympathy for players and fans; however, Marxism teaches
who profits from their passion. Combining the two gives revolutionary clarity:
the fight to reclaim sport—its stadiums, clubs and culture—must be waged as
part of the broader struggle against capitalist rule and for working-class
democratic control.
[1]
Balls, boats and billionaires: Como 1907’s lifestyle brand aspirations- https://www.ft.com/content/dfd3320f-492c-478c-81f1-e1b47ec58d7f
