Where Dribbles Begin

I write this on the terrace of the only bar in my village, while I sip a soda and watch my son play alone on the small soccer field. The sun is slowly setting and the breeze is finally starting to blow. I can’t join the game because my right ankle hasn’t recovered from a recent injury, so I observe. He is 10 years old, wearing an Athletic shirt and passing the time hitting the crossbar and doing tricks while waiting for a friend to arrive. Occasionally, he glances at me, seeking signs of approval. I smile and give a thumbs-up. At times, I write. At one point, he calls for my attention: “Did you see that?!” I look up. I shake my head. “Watch, let’s see if I can do it!” “I’m going, okay?” And as he does, he tries to explain a trick to lift the ball spectacularly: he drags the ball with his right sole, hooks it with his left toe, lifts it with his right, sending it straight up over his head, and catches it with a stylish drop. He does it well. Very well. He looks at me, arms crossed and ball at his feet, waiting for my verdict. “Awesome, high fives!” I exclaim, and I ask who taught him. “YouTube,” he replies, in a tone as if stating the obvious, “I saw it there.”

Then I think: how did we learn tricks?

When I was a child, we didn’t have all the images of the world just one click away. Reality was something that happened live, without replays, real-time photographs, or videos. Everything was a carousel that passed quickly. What you hadn’t seen was irretrievably lost. Perhaps that’s why our gaze was more cunning, like a hunter’s, because only words allowed us to recreate the past. In soccer, from the stands or while playing on the field, tricks were like shooting stars: they happened unpredictably, leaving a trail of exclamations for those who witnessed them and a sense of irreparable loss for those who didn’t. The only way to recover that aesthetic miracle was through the words of witnesses. That’s how we heard about, long before seeing them with our own eyes, Pelé’s feint against the goalkeeper, Ardiles’ “rainbow” in Evasion or Victory, and the feats of Maradona. But also about more humble tricks, at least in scale, those from the village field, those from recess. Stories filled with hyperbole, where the line between reality and fantasy blurred at the whim of the narrator. In that bygone world, tricks existed in our imagination, where they took on mythical dimensions. Sometimes you were lucky enough to have a very skilled friend nearby, whom you imitated as best you could. But in general, we improvised. That’s how it went. Soccer was rougher, and the skill was often left to South Americans, whom we adored as children while adults looked upon with suspicion.

So, if kids today have thousands of videos that they can use as Ikea-style instructions to perform impossible tricks, why does all the data show that skill is becoming increasingly rare at the elite level? I lift my gaze from the computer. On the field, there are already several kids of all ages playing a casual game. My son is among them. There are five. An odd number. They play into one goal. Two against two, with one goalkeeper. The space is small. They invent. They improvise. They perform tricks. They make mistakes. They try again. They laugh. They tease each other.

It’s not that skill has died, I tell myself. It’s that in many places, it cannot be born. Skill is like a marvelous animal that needs specific conditions. It’s not a matter of screens, or lazy children, or those who are less creative. The problem lies in the use of public space. In cities, streets are not for children. In parks, the ball is prohibited. Public squares are nonexistent. The space to play has shrunk, just as nature diminishes in the face of asphalt. While I type, something happens on the field that prompts exclamations and applause from the children. I look up; my son high-fives a long-haired teammate, like a miniature Kempes. They’ve scored a goal, apparently after a prior move against an opponent. I missed it. What a shame. I close the computer and focus on the game. We are very lucky. We live in a village. Here there’s a field.