Before the era of football’s commodified “gentrification” at the end of the twentieth century, the intellectual world almost refused to speak about the sport. In many cases, it even regarded football as its enemy, as a social phenomenon existing only to lull the very consciences it supposedly sought to awaken. Yet this intellectual class never did, and never will, encompass the whole of the artistic world – people of letters and spirit who observe the world and wish to express, in their own form, the phenomena unfolding around them: the struggles to be fought within them, the shape they themselves envisioned, and the experiences they created. In short, it was an elitist intelligentsia – one that refused to live as the people of the world lived – which turned its back on football. But it was never this intelligentsia that concerned Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan journalist and writer who dedicated his life and work to telling the truth of his continent’s peoples, and who clashed head-on with the harsh, usually American-backed, dictatorships.
Born on 3 September 1940, Galeano grew up in a middle-class family in Montevideo, but from adolescence onwards he was already working, his first steps in journalism leading him to El Sol, a weekly paper of the Uruguayan socialists. Growing up in Montevideo, Galeano became a supporter of Nacional, one of the country’s two great clubs. Yet through his fandom – which he never denied – he also recognised his unfulfilled need to love football as a whole, forced as he often was to admire the players and feats of the otherwise hated Peñarol, Uruguay’s traditional working-class club. This inner conflict perhaps led him to a deeper intellectual pursuit of the phenomena surrounding the game, which found its first literary outlet in Su majestad el fútbol (“His Majesty, Football”), published in 1968.
Almost three decades later, Galeano was already a writer of immense prestige, having left his mark on Latin America’s intellectual tradition with works that were a red rag to authoritarian regimes, above all Las venas abiertas de América Latina (“The Open Veins of Latin America”). By 1995, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, he decided to return to football – but this time with a different aim: to rearticulate the language of the game through the cultural identity of Latin America. The project took shape as a series of short texts, each devoted to a single word or event. In this way, Galeano, in a prose that feels almost spontaneous, captured his own artistic definitions of football’s phenomena. These pieces – or rather their collection – were published under the title El fútbol a sol y sombra (“Football in Sun and Shadow”).
From the table of contents, the reader already realises that the book is an alphabet, its structure resembling an encyclopaedia. With titles such as “The Player”, “The Goalkeeper”, “The Idol”, “The Fan”, but also “The Theatre”, “The Language of Football Doctors”, and “Choreographed War”, the texts arrange thematically the elements Galeano considered to be the building blocks of the great football phenomenon. His approach is purely artistic, not technical. Even though the book contains many fascinating historical notes about the early years of Latin American football, these are not offered as history in the academic sense but as facts serving to illuminate the bond between the pitch, the stands, and society. The players are not only those who wear the shirt: they are also the ones who walk the streets, who work, who live in the same neighbourhoods as the people. The fans are not merely those who shout from the terraces: they are those who live and feel the pulse of football daily, even as they struggle for their livelihoods.
Among these historical references we learn about Uruguay’s first black footballer, about the “Olympic goal” (scored directly from a corner kick), about the cultural identity Latin America felt compelled to display once liberated from European colonisers – by mastering one of their own inventions, the most delightful of them all. In one passage that I have often quoted myself, Galeano offered the most beautiful and concise definition of football’s transformation: from a property of the ruling class to a canvas of creation for the people. “Like the tango, football blossomed in the poor districts. It demanded no money and could be played with nothing but sheer desire. In fields, alleyways, and on beaches, local children and young immigrants played spontaneously, using balls made from old socks stuffed with rags or paper, and two stones as goalposts. Thanks to football’s language, which soon became universal, workers expelled from the countryside could communicate perfectly with workers expelled from Europe. Esperanto of the ball linked the native poor with the damned who had crossed the sea from Vigo, Lisbon, Naples, Beirut or Bessarabia, carrying their dreams of building America – laying new roads, hauling cargo, baking bread, sweeping streets. Football had made a wondrous journey: first codified in the colleges and universities of England, it then brought joy to South Americans who had never set foot in a school.”
In his book, Galeano attacks the intellectual elite that scorns football, highlighting instead those intellectuals who did the opposite – for they too had taken an unconventional, dissenting stance towards a society whose power relations they refused to accept. He shows the reader, for example, that Gramsci described football as “this open-air kingdom of human royalty”; that Camus, writing about his time as a goalkeeper, remarked: “I learned that the ball never comes where you expect it. This helped me a lot in life, especially in large cities where people don’t tend to be what they say.” Galeano also relishes ridiculing the ruling class, as when he notes that at Colombes stadium (at the opening of the 1938 World Cup), French president Albert Lebrun took the ceremonial kick-off: he aimed for the ball, but struck the ground instead. Elsewhere, Galeano devotes a whole section to dismantling the cliché of football as the “opium of the people,” counterposing the game to religion and calling it, memorably, “the only religion without atheists.”
The book unfolds in a chronological sequence, mixing vignettes with the World Cups, from 1930 through to 2010 in the later edition. In this way, the reader also perceives how the game itself evolves – an evolution that Galeano, as a romantic, did not welcome. Instead, he exalted those qualities of football which he believed truly revealed its essence. In his World Cup accounts, two lines recur, repeated at every tournament, demonstrating the long historical life of phenomena often dismissed as fleeting, yet which leave their imprint on everyday conversations as much as on political attitudes. The first: “Well-informed sources in Miami announced the imminent fall of Fidel Castro. It was only a matter of hours.” The second: “Israeli tanks were toppling Gaza and the West Bank, so that Palestinians could continue paying for the Holocaust they had not committed.”
Yet the most beautiful, poetic description of the football phenomenon lies at the book’s end, where Galeano closes by distilling its essence into words: “Sometimes football is a pleasure that hurts, and the music of a victory that sets the dead to dancing sounds a lot like the clamorous silence of an empty stadium, where one of the defeated, unable to move, still sits in the middle of the immense stands, alone.” Art exists to inspire – whether towards a new reality, or through the creation of new emotions grounded in the experiences of the present one. Galeano’s gaze may appear overly romantic to some; yet, as those final lines of his book show, it was forged without hypocrisy, from the very reality which at times conceals the ingredients of stories more wondrous than the most famous of fairytales. That is what the working class finds in football: a few hours of its own fairytale, denied to it outside the stadium – and which Galeano, in his own words, set out to paint.
