The journalist has premiered the series 'This is football' (Amazon Prime), in which he examines this sport as a mirror of the main features of the human condition
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Amazon Prime Video has premiered the series This is football . Its author, John Carlin, explains in this interview the motivation behind this documentary piece that examines football from a broad social perspective, based on stories from around the world.
How was the series project born?
It begins in a hotel cafe, in Gavà. I didn't know Raimon Masllorens and he called me to tell me that he wanted to make a series about football. We were going around it for months until we came up with the idea of talking about it as a mirror of the human condition. And the fact that it can be summed up in a single sentence is usually indicative that the idea can succeed. When we started looking for partners, we found one in England who just said this and told us he was buying it - we hadn't even been talking about it for thirty seconds. Starbucks also bought it from us, with very little persuasion.
It is one of the great global phenomena.
Football is the great human conversation, beyond family and everyday matters. Compared to football, politics is a minority sport. Surely, at this very moment as we speak, there must be fifty million people talking about football around the world, because it has all the eternal and universal elements of human behavior: love, vanity, pride, ambition, betrayal...
What sets it apart from other sports?
Luck is a very important factor. First, because of the rarity of the goal: in tennis, or in basketball, you score every 30 seconds. Not in football, and that generates a lot of intensity. There is no other team sport in which the luck factor has such an effect. And so, in no other sport do you spend days, months, or even years debating whether or not the team deserved to win. There are many random elements, starting with the referee. We have spoken to mathematicians, people who have watched tens of thousands of hours of football, and they say that 50% of goals are a fluke. Well, the older I get, the more I see that I am not a product of my will, but of circumstances. People are not happy according to what they deserve. This is the great lesson of football. Football is full of injustices and life is a great injustice because in the end we all die.
He dedicates a chapter to the genius of Messi. According to a mathematician, only one such player comes along every 74 years. Aren't you afraid that Cristiano Ronaldo's fans will get mad at you?
We chose to talk about Messi, in part, because it is my particular religion. He is a genius, a great artist. Like Mozart, Da Vinci or Pavarotti, he was born to do what he does, just as a salmon is born to swim upstream. Cristiano Ronaldo does not interest me, there is no possible discussion - it is something manufactured by the media to maintain a debate. Anyone remotely serious knows that there is no comparison and that Messi is superior. In fact, the mathematician says that Cristiano Ronaldos come out once every 30 years.
And of what circumstances has the Messi miracle been found to be the product?
We didn't want to be didactic and explicit, and that's why there is no narrator, but one idea that comes out is the importance of origin. Just as a great wine can only be created in a certain area, by a confluence of rain, sun, soil... what in French they call terroir ... Rosario is a terroir . Many great footballers have come out of there. It could not have left China; not nowadays anyway.
He analyzes Messi from many approaches and with many interviews, but he does not speak. Because?
I insisted from the beginning that we not interview him. Not out of any dislike. It's simply not the issue. The point is to see him play. And grasp how the whole world looks at him. Two people who, on the street, would kill each other talk about Messi and that unites them.
The series is a love song to football, but in the name of football, there is violence and corruption.
If we did more chapters, we'd probably do greed or betrayal. Football is like Shakespeare: it has everything. But it's true that for this series we did think about more positive things and put aside FIFA or the ridiculous and extravagant life of players who end up buying 50 cars.
He has written often about the Process. Are the relations between Catalonia and Spain more like a Barça-Madrid or the supposed twinning of La Roja?
Barça-Madrid is the great metaphor! My friend Lluís Bassets, from El País , says that there is a lot of talk about the politicization of football, but that in reality we should talk more about the footballing of politics. For better or for worse, football is a political instrument that could be put to better use. In the film Invictus this was shown in the case of South Africa. And there is something similar in the chapter of This is football from Rwanda.
Do you see football as a force for good, then? Given the analogy with the human condition he draws, I suppose it's the same as asking him if humans are good by nature.
Yes and yes! Having traveled a great deal, I believe that there is much more to be admired in the human being than to be despised. Most people are pretty, everywhere. And football can be used to inflame certain passions, but I am convinced that it is a force for good. It is a universal language, which unites regardless of races, ideologies and religions. And this goes against the polarizing trend we see in the world today.
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