The instruments of communicative expression to which their movements can be reduced would be meaningless apart from the societal world that surrounds football matches, since these matches constitute an attempt to return to the original, direct, and ancestral language. The constant pursuit of greater authenticity demands skill and strength. It is said that football was a game, primarily of cunning and finesse, and that business football, imposed by the burning need for economic and financial results, is malicious vigor.

Miguel Herrera Figueroa, co-founder and rector of the John F. Kennedy University of Argentina, social psychologist, sociologist, and professor. Former president of the Argentine Society of Social Psychology and former vice president of the Argentine Society of Psychology and the Argentine Society of Sociology. Excerpt from his essay: “Sociology of Spectacle.”

It is almost universally known that the Romans were, so to speak, the Chinese of antiquity: they copied countless things from their historical predecessors—Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Greeks—and then transformed and multiplied the skills and resources they had acquired, thus achieving their own merit. Readers are also likely to know, or at least agree with me, that the Roman character is in several respects more intense than the Greek, which is saying a lot. The Romans transformed the Greek festival into an unrestrained bacchanalia; The discreet promiscuity of Hellenism gave rise to a panoply of behaviors bordering on the aberrant, particularly in sexual matters, which the Roman community, especially the wealthiest and most powerful, enjoyed without any moral qualms, to the point that, unlike the ancient Greek cult, where a prostitute was summoned to celebrate a religious festival with intimacy and discretion, as was the famous summons in the name of Aphrodite, the Romans were fond of orgies lasting several days and of sexual exchanges in public, as one might share a glass of wine or a chicken leg, and the barbarities of Caligula (even worse, the aberrant sexual pathology and criminality of his uncle, the horrendous emperor Tiberius), have as far as I know, no parallel in Ancient Greece.

But I must admit that until I had the opportunity to visit the Ancient Greco-Roman Theater in Taormina, Sicily, I didn’t fully grasp the vast difference between these two great cultures of Antiquity. Let’s remember that theater, as a form of cultural expression, was born in Greece, specifically in Athens in the 6th century BC, with the fundamental purpose of engaging the population in spiritual experiences. The earliest theater consisted solely of religious choral chants, followed by the appearance of actors who wore masks to enhance the sound of their narratives, initially in honor of Dionysus, the Roman Bacchus, god of fertility and ecstasy. The Greeks believed that once the actor donned the mask, the deity he represented entered him, in a kind of possession that today we would call hysterical. In any case, participation in Greek theatrical activity was a civic and moral duty. Attending theatrical performances, especially dramas related to their gods and their connection with mortals, was intended to have a cathartic effect; spectators increased their level of reflection on human themes and enhanced their degree of affinity and compassion, foundational bases of civility.

How far removed all this is from the brutal Roman Circus! The theater I mentioned earlier, the one in Taormina, underwent a significant expansion under the Roman Empire, growing from 5,000 to 10,000 spectators. But what was incredible, difficult to comprehend, and morbidly spectacular was the shift in the purpose of circus entertainment: people attended the circus in the various arenas of the Empire to experience the full strength of Rome and to share the values ​​of virility and dominance that made their Empire indomitable and successful. They participated in the deadly games of the Roman Arena. On one hand, there were the gladiators who fought each other or all kinds of animals—elephants, lions, hyenas, panthers, and rhinoceroses, among others—usually to the death, hence the famous gladiatorial salute: “ Ave, Imperator, murituri te salutant .” Gladiators were expensive for their owners, not only because they had to be purchased at sometimes heated public auctions, but also because of the cost of their training. But the “disposable ones” were also summoned to this perverse spectacle: prisoners of war, slaves who had attempted to escape or rebel, and the damnati a morte , criminals already sentenced to death who were offered the chance to die in the arena for the public’s entertainment. Very rarely, if one demonstrated extraordinary courage and great combat skills, the poor man managed to win his freedom and even a considerable sum of money, since for the Empire, strength and combativeness were essential values ​​for maintaining its power.

Some engineer had the idea of ​​combining the sand and lime of the circus arena with crushed pieces of baked ceramic, creating a waterproof layer—a hydraulic floor—from which fabulous and bloody naval battles began to be staged, flooding the arena. Again, the purpose was to commemorate the exploits of Rome, so they repeated the naval battles, especially with their arch-enemy, Carthage, using much smaller ships with shallow drafts, flat decks, and no keel. Sometimes, the Circus technicians used small catapults around the fighting circle to launch stones and incendiary projectiles, thus exciting the unfeeling public. At the end of the day, any combatant who didn’t perish in the fighting died burned or drowned, since, upon falling into the water from the ships, the weight of their iron armor prevented them from staying afloat. In other words, a diabolical spectacle that very few Romans criticized. An exception among them was the great philosopher Seneca, born in Cordoba, in what is now Baetica, Spain, who had been tutor and advisor to Emperor Nero at the beginning of his reign. As Nero’s mental state deteriorated and his paranoia became extreme, upon learning of a plot against his life—although historians such as Livy and Cicero maintain that there was no clear evidence that the Stoic philosopher was involved in the assassination attempt—Nero ordered him to kill himself. Old and apparently suffering from very low blood pressure, Seneca did what so many in Ancient Rome did and cut the veins in his arms and wrists, but to no avail. He continued cutting the veins in his feet without further success until he asked his personal physician to give him hemlock to end his life, as another great philosopher, the Greek Socrates, had done years before. The hemlock has no major effect on Seneca, and finally they place this great man in a sauna with extremely high heat and humidity, and thus he ends up suffocating.

How distant the days of using Greek theater for religious, moral, and cathartic purposes seem compared to this explosion of violence applauded by most of the Roman people because it fueled their values—not those of compassion and empathy, but those of strength and “honor”—with a horrendous violence comparable only to that of the Aztec Empire, particularly within the Mexica culture, which I have discussed in another article. This is why most historians agree that the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 occurred primarily because a multitude of peoples allied to or subjugated by Rome realized that the so-called “barbarians” possessed more humanity and a greater sense of justice than the Romans. The same was true of the rebellious peoples of the Aztec Empire, essential allies of Hernán Cortés in the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century.

It is clear, from a psychological perspective, that children and young people raised in environments that glorify violence and aggression find it difficult to find alternative paths, be it frequent attendance at the Roman Circus, the dozens of hours that millions of young people waste playing at killing or committing crimes in their harmful video games, or the bad example the public learns from the horrendous power games that keep the world in incessant crises. And returning to football, in this broad historical overview I have taken, I urge spectators, fans, and participants of this, the most popular sport on the planet, to join forces to prevent anyone—not certain fan groups, not some managers, not even some players—from defiling the sport with racial rhetoric or senseless violence that kills it like hemlock did to those poor philosophers of Antiquity. Let us encourage a football of catharsis, a football of spectacle in the Greek style , not one of unrestrained imperial outbursts. Let us prevent what Herrera Figueroa aptly called “business football” and its “malicious vigor” from suffocating this beautiful sport and providing an ignoble model for our youth, as has happened in almost every human industry, from art to politics.