I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no soccer

Watching your favourite soccer team win is one of life’s great pleasures.

To see them dominate the rivals, score goal after goal, make no mistakes at all, soccer just makes everything better in life. Now it seems forever since the last time I experienced that kind of pleasure.

To be honest, I can barely recall the last soccer game I watched; probably it was when Atlético de Madrid kicked out the defending Champions Liverpool in the UCL. A game that we should’ve talked about for the whole year, but now, it’s kind of forgotten.

All stadiums around the world are empty, there are no bars full of fanatics screaming and celebrating a goal of their team. There are no journalists typing every moment of a match as it occurs. There are no more chantings outside the stadium, no more curse words to the referee, no more crying for a loss. There is no more soccer.

It is true, the world right now is not thinking about who is the leading scorer in La Liga, (Messi with 19), or how many games Liverpool needed to become champion of the Premier League after 30 years of waiting.

Either we are thinking about Real Madrid signing the next generation of ‘Galácticos’ in Kylian Mbappe or Erling Håland.  We are not even thinking about the big soccer tournaments that were due to take place this year like the European Championship, the Copa América. No, we are all thinking about when that good news will arrive saying that this pandemic has ended.

As a sports journalist, this life is complicated, there’s barely topics to talk about it; at least no new ones that would shock every one of us as they used to. In Mexico, we need soccer so much that Liga MX created the ‘eLiga MX’, where we are supposed to cheer up the players of the real teams, while they play FIFA 20.

But the truth is that we don’t even support our best friend while playing a video game. There is no root, no emotion, no feeling, nothing that makes us sit down every weekend in front of the tv to watch this ‘League’.

Not long ago I saw an article from a fellow journalist, Jorge Giner, where he talks about a life without football. In his note ‘Live without Life‘ speaks perfectly of what this last month has been:

"It has been more than 30 days without seeing a ball roll and it is clear that they were right. You can definitely live without soccer.Jorge Giner, paneka.org, 04/21/2020"

As Giner, and that photo he’s talking about said: ‘it seems that I can live without soccer after all’. The problem is, that I don’t want to live without it. Today I wish I could shout at a player, through the tv, that he does not know what he is doing and that he should leave the field, although I would be a thousand times worse in his place.

Today I wish I could shout out the victory of my favourite team through the air. Today I wish I could cry with rage because the rivals tore us to pieces and we didn’t even put our hands in. I wish I could make fun of a friend of mine because his team is doing even worse than mine. I wish I could be able to simulate that I raise that cup just as those 23 subjects on the other side of the screen do. I wish… I wish sports come back.

I know that when all of this ends, life will go back to normal- if there’s such thing as normal- and we will be cheering our favourite team once more. We will be able to scream when the ball cross that goal line and we win that game that makes us go to the championship game or even better, makes us champions. I know there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

After so much thinking, it has been less than two months without soccer, and I miss it as if had been without it for years. In the end, it’s not about whether if we can live without soccer, it’s about if we want to live without it, and I don’t. I want soccer to be part of my life, to be a part of my every day because it makes us forget our daily routine and that for 90 minutes, nothing else mattered. I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no soccer.