Football superstitions

We all know that football is an unpredictable sport. Great teams promised dazzling victories sometimes go astray in front of exalted amateurs, and champions capable of miraculous feats get caught up in melancholy and don’t do anything good; on the contrary, with their bad mood, they send the whole team down the drain.
We still haven’t figured out what spell plagues the national team Spalletti has brought to the European championship. Theoretically and in their respective teams, they are all thoroughbred players, between promising youngsters and more mature professionals. But an invisible hand seems to hold them back when they hurl the shot out of the goal, when the pass ends up between the wrong feet, and all rebounds are unfavorable. There is an invisible 12th man on the field playing against them. But no one can see him and expose him.

Therefore, we must search the world of the imponderable and the supernatural, verify that the National team has not by chance offended some unknown deity, as with ancient heroes, and, if necessary, make the appropriate sacrifice.

There is a smoky area of football symbology that is not explored enough but lends itself to esoteric readings: what coaches wear. The coach on the sidelines is always the unhappiest man there: he is a football player but doesn’t play and can be booked or ejected; at every action his people lead, he would have done differently, and he rants uselessly to explain this, but they don’t even hear him. This restlessness seeps into his attire. There is the coach in tracksuit and windbreaker, 1980s style, like the one from Scotland, who sits disgruntled among the reserves, also in tracksuits. He gives the impression of usurping the place and seems to have come there for a trek, but, in the end, it is his most honest outfit.

Then there is the vast panoply of coaches in suits, such as those from Hungary, England and Albania, who when overdressed look like they have escaped from a wedding, otherwise they look like economists from ancient COMECON, you can tell they keep that suit in the closet only for games and even from a distance you can smell the mothballs.

Then there is the array of stylish but “casual” coaches with a blue jacket over a white shirt, like the one from France, appropriate for a night out at the club but too much for a game.
Finally, there are those with unstructured outfits, such as the coaches of Spain, Albania, and Switzerland, with shapeless jackets over crew-neck shirts; the one from Albania with a Protestant pastor air; the Swiss-Turkish Murat, with a ballroom singer’s manner, the Spaniard all in blue like Captain Findus but with sports shoes to remind us that we are on the field anyway.

Traditionally, Italian coaches always favored the almost shameless elegance of customized suits signed by great tailors. Few have ever ventured with tracksuits. Sacchi sometimes did, but you could tell he was uncomfortable. In many tournaments, the Italian coach was the only one in the stadium to wear such a suit and tie that not even the king from his box would wear. And here comes the arcane that our shamans must explore.

Doesn’t this blue sugar-paper jacket worn by Spalletti with the word ITALY in a darker shade on the back bring bad luck? Doesn’t this dressed-up Italian bench, with shiny shoes and pens in their breast pocket, looking like a car rental “team” at the airport, defy the soccer gods and trigger retaliation? Spalletti waving on the sidelines as if he were at a fashion show, with that faux D’Annunzian air yet uniformly tanned even on his bald head, and the cotton Jersey flaps waving airily at his clenched fists but careful not to tear his armpit, since fashion today requires the “slim fit,” so the furious coach cannot gesticulate as he pleases as this cloying display of fabrics perhaps not please the goddess Eupalla, as Gianni Brera called her, who has her idiosyncrasies and seems to be somewhat angry with us.

English version by the Translation Service of Withub