Kissinger’s Goal

Football has filled literature with brilliant pages. The author’s personal pantheon includes Osvaldo Soriano’s story *The Longest Penalty in the World*, Nick Hornby’s *Fever Pitch* and Ferran Torrent’s *Espècies protegides*. Nobel laureates have also contributed, including Peter Handke, Camilo José Cela and Albert Camus, who played goalkeeper in Algeria.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who played left wing, created a grammar of football built around the “podema”, each kind of strike made against the ball. He compared it with the linguistic phoneme. Players and their movements formed the discourse, while passes became words. Pasolini divided footballers into those of prose, practitioners of catenaccio, and those of poetry, lovers of the dribble. Every goal was poetry, and the leading scorer was the best poet of the year. By that measure, Lamine Yamal should win the Floral Games.

Yet some Argentines have disliked football, most famously Jorge Luis Borges. He once gave a lecture on immortality while Argentina was making its World Cup debut in 1978, against Hungary. Argentina won 2-1. In his entire life, Borges watched only 45 minutes of a match. Someone invited him to an Argentina-Uruguay game, but at halftime he assumed the match had ended and left.

The author turns to Juan Villoro’s *The Match at the End of the World*, a collection of the Mexican writer’s football journalism. Villoro recalls the idea that perfect matches would all end 0-0, and notes that football is the only sport not governed by anatomical tyranny. Its stars have been short, stocky and even bow-legged.

The darkest example is the visit by dictator Jorge Videla and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Peru’s dressing room before its 1978 match against Argentina. Argentina needed a four-goal victory to advance and won 6-0. Journalist David Yallop later listed Argentina’s alleged gifts to Peru: 35,000 tonnes of grain, the release of a $50 million credit line, smaller bribes to officials and payments to at least three players.