Juan Villoro
In 2009, before the Champions League final, Pep Guardiola had his players watch scenes from the movie Gladiator to motivate them. They were playing in Rome. Barça triumphed in a coliseum reminiscent of the enslaved Athletics of another time.
In August 2020, Messi wanted to leave Barcelona, but his contract prevented him from doing so. A year later, he wanted to stay, but his contract prevented it. The best player in the world moved to the city where the Rights of Man were enacted without exercising his will. He cried at his farewell in Barcelona and smiled at his Parisian welcome. The society of the spectacle saw the contrasting emotions of a celebrity who enjoys all the privileges except that of controlling his destiny.
Soccer is a fertile field for speculation. Millions are paid for players who can break down in the first game, and no club is free of debt, no matter how rich. This delirious capitalism is better understood in the casinos of Las Vegas than by reading Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand that regulates the market. It is no coincidence that A bookmaker has sponsored Real Madrid’s jersey, nor that the latest management of a Barça president almost always consists of going to court or jail.
The big clubs depend to a large extent on parallel businesses. On one occasion, I met the CEO of Nike in Spain in the Barcelona box. It was rumored that Xavi Hernández would win the Ballon d’Or, and the executive gave me a lesson in sports economics: “He won’t win because he doesn’t sell T-shirts”. The media impact of a footballer is as crucial as his impact on the field. Suppose a manager (say, Florentino Perez) has investments in a certain country (say, Colombia). In that case, he does not hesitate to hire a player to serve as a commercial ambassador (say, James Rodriguez). This has even led to denying a person’s identity in Mexico. In 2010, Jesús Corona joined Monterrey, a team sponsored by a beer company. To his misfortune, the player’s last name was a competitor’s brand. He was hired with the requirement of using a nickname that alluded to another beer. Thus the sad nickname “Tecatito” was born.
Soccer players dispute the holy war of shoes (Adidas vs. Nike, with Puma under siege) and define consumer trends. Their influence is so significant that Cristiano Ronaldo managed with a gesture to make Coca-Cola’s shares drop by 500 million dollars. In June 2021, at a Eurocup press conference, he removed the bottles promoting the soft drink and replaced them with a water bottle.
In this carnival, the small teams depend on their box office first and foremost. The pandemic put them on the verge of bankruptcy and aggravated inequalities. As is often the case, the powerful discovered that the solution was to acquire more power and proposed the Super League, a European competition conceived as a superhero comic book in which only the wealthiest could participate. The dream collapsed due to the fans’ protests (Manchester United’s fans invaded the field to demand the departure of the Americans who took over the club and intend to run it according to NFL criteria), but it is still a possibility.
To curb the madness, in 2013, the Spanish League came up with a numerical version of the straitjacket: salary caps. Every team must have a certain balance between what it spends and what it earns. In the 2018-2019 season, Barça’s salary cap was €633 million; last season, it dropped to €348 million. The Blaugrana club had to cut 200 million to continue operating. And here comes the most exciting part. Once a player’s salary is set, it cannot be reduced arbitrarily. The measure exists to avoid phantom accounting. The maximum discount is 50%. Messi earned 70 million a year; therefore, the Federation could only admit a 35 million reduction. Considering the rest of the salaries, that was not enough to add up the figures, and Messi was signed by Paris Saint-Germain, which, despite its name, is not a local team but a company financed by Qatar.
None of this has anything to do with the infinite talent of the number 10, but with a world where the fate of gladiators depends on the emperor’s new thumb: money.
This was originally published in Spanish by Reforma on August 13, 2021
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