El fútbol es una actividad banal para algunos pero es un juego técnicamente complejo. Su trama habla de un mordaz enfrentamiento del pie contra la mano en la conducción de un balón, de un gran esfuerzo y de movimientos corporales inusitados y hermosos, que los espectadores anhelan ver escenificados. El fútbol representa un fenómeno de sociedad extremadamente rico de sentido individual y colectivo que es necesario comprender. Algunos seguidores confiesan buscar en ese juego un placer erótico comparable al orgasmo, un sentido que parece chocar con la persecución de una confrontación física violenta y agresiva, anhelada por otros. En esta obra se aborda el fútbol desde una perspectiva original e inédita, todos los que siguen este inagotable juego, encontrarán en la lectura de este libro, nuevas ideas para vivir de otra manera su pasión por el balón redondo. La autora es una mujer que ha estudiado la importancia de la corporalidad y de la belleza en la cultura y en la sociedad actual.
Based on my empirical work in Colombia and in other countries, this essay asks about the nature of passions the “actors” say they get from football and tries to find answers to those questions. It starts with an analysis of the symbolic reach of the game of which the main goal is to do the apology of the foot skills against the hand skills to master an object as volatile and untamed as a ball.
Football brings an inadequate principle between means and end (foot on the ground against ball in the air) which requires deploying extreme physical abilities and huge effort spending. It spurs the emergence of unexpected corporal movements from the player’s part and contributes in animating the work of pulsions among partisans. The passes, moves and acrobatics are a sight of beauty capable of bridging bottomless promises of joy that are rooted in human archaic memory.
Football would work as an urban pre-text to actualize our specie’s vocation to surpass its limits and provoke the unedited in order to fill our quest of absolute and of fulfillment. Which brings the common association of the game to sexuality, the sacred, religion, to the universal language of life and other founding myths.
The work merges to anthropologic analysis some sociological elements that show the importance of secular ceremonies of collective re-linking in the midst of societies more and more individualists and broken by the power of cultural industries and, in particular, by the hegemony of a certain definition of masculinity.
Beatriz Velez proposes and original lecture of football. She is an academic woman without other filiations than the beauty of the game. It can seduce all those who, in the world, wishes to understand other reasons of the passion of football that is as multiple as life itself.
