South american football. Unlimited passion

• Harold Mayne-Nicholls ^[1]
  1. [1] Chile FA
• Localización: Actividad física y deporte: ciencia y profesión, ISSN 1578-2484, ISSN-e 2659-8930, Nº. 31, 2019, págs. 32-32
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Trying to understand the last 150 years of South America, without paying attention to football, is an absolutely inofficiously task. It’s the equivalent of wasting time and energy in the analysis. To build under bases that a simple breeze will bring down and to believe without understanding the essence of different cultures.

    Sports competitions have always existed in the South American continent, even before the arrival of the Spanish, Portuguese and other cultures. As history indicates, sports were always played and sought to establish brands, and there were always passionate disputes to determine the winner.

    South America can be analysed until 1860 under an economic, social and cultural perspective. But from then on, you have to apply other variables, because since an unsuspected sailor descended from a English boat with a leather ball in his hands, everything changed.

    Soccer began to be present in every corner. So much so, that only two people had to appear to start a game; it did not matter if there were no goalies, nor if the ball wasn’t a perfect circumference. If you could identify two poles and some object that could be pushed with the foot, you could play. That was until today.

    Few escapes from this reality, ever since women started asking for their place in the game. This is what has allowed this continent to feed players to all leagues of the globe, developing skills that sometimes make it seem that players are true artists who do magic with the ball. It is what allows that in each corner dialogues always full of passion dominate in honour of colours that will be for life.

    This is the reality of this part of the southern hemisphere which forces us to say that it is impossible to understand the South American continent and its inhabitants without taking into account football; and that it is impossible to understand football without taking into account the influence that South America has had on the development of the game.