Gone — The Reason Behind Football’s Nostalgia
Football players are idols. They shaped up many childhoods across the globe, figures that might be morally decadent, but figures that continued to inspire through their unique touch to the Beautiful Game. Totti, Kaka, Iniesta, Messi, Ronaldinho, Özil, Ronaldo Nazario, the names are many. There’s many names I did not mention, I know. The reader surely has thought of a couple of dozens already. Everything was better, right?
Here’s the twist: Footballers have not become less unique, robotized, or just ‘less good’, as it is often read on ‘X’(Formerly Twitter). Instead, here’s another theory: There’s too much football, there’s too much to watch, there’s too much noise, there’s too many matches, too little time to enjoy. Football’s reality is that it increasingly has flown towards a fourth dimension, a dimension of ultra-capitalism. And no, this is not the unborn child of Lenin and Karl Marx speaking. This is a hurt soul speaking up.
In late August I wrote a piece warning about the danger of an overload of matches for players, explaining why football is suffering so many injuries in the past years, especially in a dystopian post-pandemic era. But there’s another dimension to injuries, which hurts the fans more than anything: An attachment to players.
