The World Cup is coming to an end. Like all large-scale sporting events, he provoked another wave of talk about how important sport is, and especially football, in the life of mankind. I was always confused by the abundance of sublime rhetoric around this quite mundane sphere of life. The fact that people consider it a national humiliation the defeat of their team in important competitions and the national achievement of its victory seemed absurd. In our country it is absurd in a square. Dirt in public toilets, the abominable neglect of porches, the deplorable state of hospitals, the wretched state of libraries, and the dubious state of all domestic science - this is still here and there. But the lag in the field of football is positively impossible to put up with. The central press, television, the power that is holding itself with a beast of some seriousness reflect on the causes of our chronic lag. Why are we still worse than Cameroon and Mexico? Socio-economic, political, psychological, mental and other reasons are called. What is the root of trouble? And what's the trouble?
The ancient Roman plebs longed for bread and circuses. The present yearns for them. Football matches in the modern world - this is the analogue of gladiatorial fights. Their, so to speak, euphemism. Without blood and sacrifices. We are, of course, better and more moral than the Romans, who lived in a declining great empire. However, in something worse. In their free time from gladiatorial fights, the Romans at least worshiped the gods, and not the gladiators themselves. We, the children of Christian civilization, deify "celebrities" everywhere. We are idolaters who carefully monitor what haircut Beckham did to make himself the same. In prime time, in the news programs of the central channels, we are told how such and such a football player was bought out by such and such a club for some millions, and instead of being horrified by a world where a hardy guy who knows how to handle the ball is paid amounts comparable with those allocated for the most important scientific research, the observer, and after him the average man groan with delight: well done, Real Madrid (or Chelsea London)! What a gladiator you got!
When refined intellectuals condescendingly explain to me that football is a great art, I start to grit my teeth. I, too, you know, not a stump. I perfectly understand that football is not just a manifestation of brute physical strength. I can, if necessary, reflect on its compensatory function and the charged drama in it, which delighted such a genius as Anatoly Efros. I know no worse than yours that football is not only a battle of one team against another, it is also a great fight of a man with Fortuna. What you need to think with your head in this game and that it has its own great strategists, tactics and virtuosos. But all this does not cancel the amazing logical substitution. Football is an excellent sight, but it is not an art. For the task of art is to comprehend the world, its secrets, its laws. Art is a dialogue with the Creator, which is even conducted by the artist who denies the very existence of the Creator. This dialogue can be exciting, or it can be boring, uninteresting, but if there is no attempt at dialogue and an attempt to comprehend the mystery, there is no art itself. Everything that remains in football minus this - high technology, crazy drive, unparalleled courage, Fortune's amusements - can also be found in gladiatorial battles. It also had its own military tricks, its own virtuosos, its own ethics and even its own aesthetics. But such fights always and invariably appealed to the base instincts of the crowd. It was a basis. Everything else is an add-on. So football has the same basis. The superstructure has become higher, more sophisticated. The industry is more powerful. The audience has gained a planetary scale. But the essence remains the same. That is why no art form, including cinema, can ever be compared to football. It is more difficult to break into the sublime in us than to the lowly. What is good for the soul always requires the work of the soul. And from the point of view of a lazy soul, a person is always more boring.
Have you ever seen the enlightened faces of fans or football players during a match? I never. Distorted seen often. Here the Mexican striker, scoring a goal, tears a shirt on his chest and, putting his thumb in his mouth, expressively sucks it. There is no need for adult readers of Izvestia to explain what his gesture means. The crowd roars with delight. Ah, how wonderful it is! What a power of passions! Oh sport, you are the world! What the hell is the world! What the hell art! Have you ever heard that people coming out of the crappiest, moreover, the most aggressive performance, go to burn stalls, smash windows and beat someone’s face? In football, this can happen after the most beautiful and technically perfect game. So let us at least not dissemble and speak of low things lofty words.
Football is a great game. But this is just a game. Passion for him naturally. His deification is disgusting. Light and sometimes severe hysteria around him, like all hysteria, is a disease. But few people realize it as a disease and that is why no one is going to treat it. So a person suffering from lupus takes a painful redness of the cheeks for a healthy glow. So the ancient Roman plebs and the patricians who joined them believed that, as long as there is bread and circuses, we can assume that life was a success. We, the new pagans of Christian civilization, think the same. And the flag in our hands, the ball in our feet, how are we satisfied with ourselves.
Maria Davydova