Cogito Ergo Sud: Football must be popular

If it is rhetoric to line up against a ticket price of 89 euros (at the 100th ring and with a web in front of our eyes), we want to be recognized as masters of rhetoric, we want to be professors of populism. But, I know that the worst rhetoric is that of anti-rhetoric, the one of the "intellectuals at all costs" who search super-original visual corners in order to be scratchy and acid, good only to piss you off, desecrating truths that are certified, compulsory and incontrovertible. Because it is even science not to accept a ticket for 89 euros for a guest sector or one for 60 euros for home matches. For those who are thirsting for pillory, the ones that say "write this also to AS Roma!", read the first line or the newspaper of three days or six months ago, or a random copy of these six months, because you would read continually "things written to AS Roma". We do not do anything else. We would not do anything else. We won't do anything else. You will find us always on the same side, the one of the fans. Full stop.

The manifesto in these parts is clear: football is and must remain a popular sport. Ancient as the world is, it would be said echoing the man who more than anyone else has embodied the emotion and the example of how to live football and how to be a Romanist: Agostino Di Bartolomei. Ancient as the world is, it is something inside the heart. There is no craving for progressism, I personally regret the possibility for the goalkeeper of taking the ball with the hands after a back-pass, but it is not sterile "nostalgia", it is something that does have sense.

Football has its rules, its traditions, and a bigger concept, which contains them all: football belongs to people. And if that it is true in social life, in the social media the concept of people is less current than the one of a Tyrannosaurus: in football people are there and must be there. Football must be popular. Otherwise, it is better that football does not exist at all. And we like feelings, even those who are inside that "What will be, will be". Nothing particularly original: Pasolini wrote this thing more than fourty years ago ("football is the last possible sacred representation"). Pasolini had fallen in love with the suburbs and with this game, because he had found there a hope of authenticity, and therefore of passion, of commitment, of humanity.

Football with only seats, football of the forced applauses, football of the remote control, football of the Ministry of the Right Manner that regulates if, how and when you could go to watch a match and that asks you the authorization to say I love you, or even a very healthy "f**k", asking through a fax for an authorization to feel an emotion: that football is an expired product and a good mould for only few years to come of television rights and scenic views included in packages planned for sheikhs, but then nothing more. Then, they will do nothing else with football, especially if they continue to puncture its ball.

Please, do not touch football and Roma. The market has its rules and this is normal (we cannot be "luddites of the footprint"), but leave us a space, a sector (popular precisely), leave us the dream of a normal ball that goes to get stuck under a car. Zero cost. I would never change the grease on the hands that you have when you recover a ball under a car (stretching without seeing) with a salmon to taste on an observation deck from the "thousand-star" Champions tribunes. Even more, I would pay for not having this privilege. Because, in the end, the dialectic is always the same: - Spritz and + Borghetti. Back in the days when you paid them with 5,000 lire and you received three of them. Back in the days when you did not spare emotions when you went to the stadium.