Soccer is mortally wounded. Time is already running short for the game, it is already marked by misery and vulgarity, being attacked ruthlessly from all sides. The deepmost corners of our prestigious game are under threat. This is a unavoidable reality and without doubt an unequal fight.
It is a case of David against Goliath. A faction of cheaters and liars, hiding behind the mask of big business, take refuge in the servile facade of the media to disguise their scandalous lack of scruples. Opposing this, we have those who will not surrender our game, we who want to re-establish this great cultural spectacle, starting out from the point of past traditions.
Soccer has, because of its glorious past, a great memory, a magnificent tradition. A sacred cultural heritage, ideas, values, knowledge, which we urgently need to re-examine, day after day. It is a heritage with deep-delving soccer roots that we need to nurture in order to be able to pass this treasure on.
And if we have to update soccer, then by all means update what is necessary to help develop the depth and richness of the game. What I mean here is to maintain the rich history, the wonderful legacy, which today is being falsified and disdained by the mercenary eye of big business.
It is clear what I mean when I talk about conserving: I mean safeguarding and preserving an historical past without which the road to the future cannot be prepared.
This does not mean maintaining a conservative no-change attitude, a negative stance to alterations in the game, change to which I am committed if it is necessary to elevate the stature of our beloved game.
We have an obligation to vindicate, to reconstruct and to protect the extraordinary patrimony which allowed soccer to break borders, to enchant and seduce the fans in the most unexpected of places, thanks to the emotion, the passion and the talent of its great artists.
We have an obligation to restrain the deliberate alienation which the procurers -- the pimps -- of big business are proposing, the manual labor of a cheap mind, which mercantile powers are using in their quest for domination and cultural disintegration.
Soccer can only be saved if it can preserve its past and not appeal to dogmatism or fundamentalist positions. Yes, it can be saved if it uses sincere conviction as the starting point for growth, like a transmitter of lessons, secrets and mysteries, which can lead us to to recover the essence of the game. Yes, if we use the game as a vehicle for encounter, a game with genuine properties.
These are serious times for soccer -- whether we must accept the twisting course that events are taking or whether it will be necessary to resign ourselves to the illusions or dreams of what made soccer such a fascinating game and a social phenomenon without equal.
Memory, heritage and evolution. These are the hope-filled keywords for the future, a signal to remove soccer from its intensive therapy, a banner call to integrate all the scientific and technical evolution which could enrich the game and generate progress, progress that does not consist of consigning today to yesterday, as some proponents of modernity insist on having us believe.
Little more than a year ago, Jose Saramago, Nobel Prize winner for literature, affirmed that, roughly translated, not to have memory is "to forget our very selves."
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