The masked ball begins that will lead in May to the election of a new president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation after the professional death of Luis Rubiales, the man who will go down in history for dying from two causes theoretically incompatible with each other: suicide and murder.
These elections always end up being an auction to the highest bidder for the support that the candidates require to access office. You don't have to promise crazy and everyone, as in political elections. It is enough to successfully compromise multiple particular interests until the sum of wills is sufficient. This is always the case when a president is elected by an assembly of “notables” (the quotation marks emphasize that this noun should not be taken literally).
There are many hares calculating whether to come out of their burrows to compete for the presidency. And the first to resolve their doubts was the journalist Carlos Herrera. What seemed like nothing more than a joke from Cope's star announcer is now a fact. And with no time to lose, the man is already breaking down the central ideas of his project.
Beyond its real possibilities, its emergence is most interesting from a discursive point of view. And Herrera has decided that his campaign will be against the “caste” that has made soccer a private business. And if he is elected, he takes on the mission of returning football to its rightful owner: anyone who knows what a ball is. Carlos Herrera cloning, bridging the distance and the objectives, the terminology of Podemos. True things, friend Sancho.
The picture that the journalist paints is that of a pure fan, an outsider from the web of economic interests woven around football who seeks to reinject the air of popular sport into the ball, in opposition to the entertainment industry that only thinks about money and in the salaries of its executives.
As the character arouses philias and phobias due to his vehement radio homilies, it is difficult for the fan to make a clean reading of his candidacy that does not include a priori and prejudices. But beyond each person's opinion, what is symptomatic is that the first voice heard in this electoral race does so with markedly critical notes about the weight that pure and simple business must have and what transfers are acceptable in favor of the growing demand for monetization.
Regardless of its success or failure, its emergence announces without saying it the arrival also in football of a very fashionable word throughout the West: protectionism. As the commentators say, it has come to stay and not only in economic or border matters. There is a growing demand for the preservation of the original meaning of everything that is understood to be blurred by excesses of all kinds. Also in football, the echoes of the same drums are beginning to be heard, although less strongly. Herrera, the fan who now wants to be president, as an example. At least in words.
