Pardon the apocalyptic tone, but these are the times that they are. Unless Joan Laporta signs Bruce Springsteen
As in the case of French fries and Christopher Columbus, everyone wants to be the birthplace of the prodigy. In this case, from the first ball game without hands. Between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, in China there were military games of this kind. It has not been proven that Jordi Alba already played with them. The game consisted of kicking a ball against a net made of various materials. The thing was complicated by being a military thing, placing rivals who, violently, tried to take the ball away from whoever was carrying it. In Japan, centuries later, something similar arrived, but more ceremonial and boring, like a game in Cornellà.
In Rome and Greece, in the Amazon, Alaska and Oceania, male cenutria hurt each other with something similar to a ball and with the difficulty of not using their hands. It was with the sophisticated idea of introducing a player who could use them and even retain the ball, that the memory enters allegorical territory, recalling a hunting scene. The goalkeeper would be the enraged beast that has no limitations –feet, hands, head– to save his life while the herd fires its weapons –gathered in the same ball– to win the stake, killing him. Soccer was born from those who thought it was funnier and less kooky that the goalkeeper – in black, remember, like a spider – tried to avoid our happiness in the form of a goal than to satisfy the homicidal desires of the hunters. This theory is pure literature without any support, but literaryly it is the best, and you know that football and stories have come to rescue us from life.
