Dribblers and Dragons: On the Myth of South American Football

If you had to spontaneously name one of the most famous, legendary soccer players in Brazil, you would probably always name Pelé immediately. French journalist and writer Olivier Guez begins his book In Praise of Dribbling. On the myth of South American football”, after a lengthy introduction, with another Brazilian who has basically been forgotten, also because he died in 1983, not even fifty years old: Garrincha.

What is the wizard Garrincha up to?

“What is the magician up to?” Guez describes him. “One, two, three leg changes? How many feints and jump starts before he stoops toward the goal line, hunched over as if searching for something? (…) The defenders tumble onto their backs or collide. Ridiculed, humiliated.”

Garrincha is the epitome of the dribbler, the supreme representative of passionate, playful, brilliant Brazilian football. It is logical that Guez remembers him, uses him as a prototype for what is best associated with Latin American football, with the Zicos and Socrates, the Messis and Maradonas and all the others who emulate them: dribbling.

Guez quotes Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano as saying that writing about football means “telling the story of a country and a city” and exploring a nation’s popular culture. That’s exactly what Guez is trying to do with his football book. His sights are set solely on Brazil and Argentina, the continent’s most successful football nations. Football is more than a religion in these countries, it is more important than going to church and going to confession on Sunday.

Of course, Guez uses the respective soccer World Cups, especially those from 1958 (when Brazil won the World Cup for the first time, four more titles followed) to 1986 (when Argentina won the cup for the second and last time) as a guide, because Brazil was actually the most beautiful at that time played football in the world and there was that Maradona in Argentina.

But the Alsatian, who was born in Strasbourg in 1974, mainly tells how football came to the continent, which was still “under the thumb of Great Britain” at the end of the 19th century. “The brilliant dribblers” are all descendants of slaves; Brazil was “one of the most developed and enduring slave societies in the modern world,” Guez quotes a historian as saying. And in Argentina, which was a diverse immigrant society in the early 1920s and 1920s, people tried to leave the mechanical game of the English behind and play creatively, passionately and with subtlety.

Here it is the “malandro”, there “el pibe”, popular figures from the populace with equally outstanding and self-destructive characteristics that represent the type of the new footballer with South American characteristics. There is talk of a “golden age”.

This becomes grayer and duller when Brazil begins to orientate itself towards the functional, sober football of European character and Maradona is replaced in Argentina by Messi: one a dazzling figure off the pitch, which he recently, like Garrincha, did far too early paid for his life; the other also brilliant, but an otherwise pale figure and a mirror not only of virtuosity, but also of the “emptiness of globalized contemporary football,” as Guez melancholy analyses.

Naipaul, Borges and Victor Hugo

It’s fun to follow Guez chapter by chapter, with her constantly new attempts to get to the bottom of football, all of which oscillate between football sociology, national history and the atmospheric color of the time. Guez has traveled to both countries many times, consults sources such as the anthropologist and Lévi Strauss student Roberto da Matta or the Nobel Prize winner for literature VS Naipaul, devotes a chapter to the Argentine writer-philosopher and football hater Jorge Luis Borges, reports on his meeting with the Endgame commentator Victor Hugo, who called Maradona a “cosmic dragon” (and could scream “gooooooool” for longer than anyone else).

Or he talks about his unsuccessful attempts to meet the 1978 world champion coach of the Argentines in his favorite café in Buenos Aires, Carlos Menotti. And, of course, Olivier Guez reassures himself in the introduction: how he got into football and why it never let go of him, an experience that he shares with so many of his generation, from filling panini scrapbooks to the first World Cup ( in Guez’s case the Spanish 1982), which one never forgets.

The only flaw in his book: the first part about Brazil was published in 2014. The World Cup there and in particular the 7-1 debacle of the Brazilians in the semifinals against the Germans are missing. One can assume that this has once again decisively changed the football soul of Brazil. An update would have been appropriate, as colourful, instructive and wonderful as the second and up-to-date part about Argentina is.

Nevertheless, and despite Guez’s sobering conclusion, since he thinks he can very briefly deplore the inflation of football games, the ever-more, the greed of those responsible; yes, and also despite the Qatar problem and the hesitation to get involved in this football World Cup: “Praise of dribbling” could be a reason not only to watch the German games, but also those of the Argentine and Brazilian teams.

You really don’t want to let Gianni Infantino and his friends drive you out of your love of football.

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