I’m not going to go into intimacy, I’ll just say that it’s hard for me to get up early. Noon is my usual awakening (as the president of Atlético de Madrid del Coco Basile, at that time the mattress coach, once said: “Our schedules do not coincide: when he goes to bed I get up”). But I think that a history of early mornings could be traced because of the National Team (I leave out, for not integrating that typology, my favourite, one of the best days of my life: the dawn of Boca-Real Madrid, with the two Palermo goals in November 2000).
The first ones I remember were the Youth World Cup in 1979 (I was 12 years old) in Japan, with Ramón Díaz and Maradona. To the delight of the night owls and the misfortune of the soccer fans, in 2002 Bielsa ensured that Argentina lasted only three games in the World Cup, in which he barely scored two goals: one with a header after a corner, and another from a rebound from a penal. None of play In Qatar the first match against Saudi Arabia was also played at a painful time. If Argentina hadn’t been world champion, that defeat would have been the most trashy in history (and I don’t know if it isn’t anyway).
Well, with all this background and others that I don’t mention to save paper, how expensive it is, last Thursday I got up more or less early (the game started at 9, at least not at 7 or something like that). And when I was in full yawn, a minute into the game, high pressure from Enzo Fernández (registered trademark of this Selection), stolen ball, pass to Messi, into the corner and bye. I could go back to sleep in bed. But my journalistic responsibility made me continue in front of television and radio (I like radio stories better).
The first 10 or 15 minutes were brilliant, it seemed like they were going for a win, although in the end it ended 2-0, comfortable. And while he opened one eye (the other was still closed), when Messi and his team embraced for that first goal, I noticed that the names of the players on the shirts were written in Chinese. According to the Google dictionary, Messi was something like 梅西. And also that the Chinese, in the stands, mostly wore the Argentine shirt. Well: the Argentine team is already a global brand. What in marketing is called “a hanger”: a product to which anything can be hung, and everything can be sold.
Argentina, a country that only exports raw materials with no added value, now has a group of millionaires who play soccer very well (which is precisely why they became millionaires) going around the world, generating a business as a brand like never before. Before, precisely, there was Maradona. The business was him, earning and squandering, and then going on tour or living in those places that had never seen it before, that is to say, that had never seen it fully (like those rock that were famous, but now in decline come out on tour in the third world, where they fill stadiums). But this is not Maradona. It is the National Team, Messi’s National Team. Both together, partners in the same business.
