Boca Juniors, River Plate, and the Allure of Violence in Sports
The recent events leading to the postponement and relocation of the Copa Libertadores final were shocking but not surprising. The tear gas, the riot police, the injured players served as a reminder that you cannot completely separate passion from violence in sports; it’s an essential part of the enterprise.
Here is what Alejandro Domínguez, the president of CONMEBOL, said to the media after it happened.
“What we went through over the weekend isn’t football,” he said. “It’s a disease that has to be wiped out.”
The two biggest soccer teams in Argentina, Boca Juniors and River Plate, had made the final of the Copa Libertadores, the club championship for all of South America. Boca and River are bitter rivals, and both are based in Buenos Aires; tensions had shrilled up into the stratosphere and stayed there. In the championship’s first leg, which was played at Boca’s home stadium of La Bombonera on November 11, the teams drew 2-2.
Before the second leg, which was supposed to be played on Saturday, the Boca team bus was driving across Buenos Aires toward El Monumental, River’s stadium. Its route took it down Avenida Monroe, a well-known prematch gathering place for River fans. As the bus tried to turn a corner, it met hundreds of fans in River jerseys. The crowd attacked. Fans threw stones, threw bottles, smashed windows. Broken glass showered down on the Boca players. The policemen accompanying the bus fired pepper spray to break up the havoc. The breeze carried it inside the bus.
”Violence has no place in football,” Domínguez told the media. “Passion should not equal violence.”
When the Boca players finally reached El Monumental, they petitioned to postpone the game. At least one player—Boca’s captain, Pablo Pérez—had an eye injury caused by broken glass. Others had cuts; all were rasping and coughing from the pepper spray. CONMEBOL, the governing body for soccer in South America, told them they had to play. The game was receiving major international attention. The president of FIFA was in town to watch. Fox had paid a lot of money for the broadcast rights. Two players who had been taken to the hospital, Pérez and Gonzalo Lamardo, were assessed by CONMEBOL’s doctors, who said they found nothing to justify canceling the match. Fans were allowed into the stadium.
Boca protested. River officials were also open to postponing the match. CONMEBOL delayed the kickoff time but refused to call off the game. They delayed the kickoff a second time, then a third time. The crowd grew restless. Outside, fans without tickets rushed the stadium and fought with the police. Finally, minutes before the fourth announced start time, CONMEBOL officials declared that the game would be pushed back to Sunday. Later it was postponed again, indefinitely, pending a meeting at CONMEBOL headquarters in Paraguay.
“Violence has no place in football.” This is the sort of thing people always say after violence has broken out in a way that would appear to prove the opposite, and it seems to me that anyone who says it is either lying or missing the point. Of course violence has a place in soccer. It has a place—a deep, foundational, ineradicable place—in every sport. Proximity to the roots of violence is not the only thing sports offers us, but it’s such an essential part of the enterprise that without it, I’m not sure what we’d be left to watch, or whether we’d want to. “Passion should not equal violence” is a meaningless statement in this context, because passion in sports is mingled with violence at its source. When you let in the one, you let in the other. We are a species that regularly longs to burn each other’s castles to the ground.
The question is not whether the “disease” of violence in sports can be “wiped out.” It can’t be, and the people who run things don’t even want it to be, because big-time spectator sports as it is currently constituted resembles one of those ancient Twitter jokes about making a fortune by doing something bizarre with no clear plan:
- Inflame the emotions of large numbers of people such that they would quite like to hurl stones at a set of arbitrarily selected enemies
- ???????
- Profit
Screaming for a goal, laughing at a player fight, punching a wall after a loss, dressing in the colors of a team—I imagine we’ve all done all these things. We’ve paid to do them, and we didn’t pay to do them because we are such gentle and peace-loving souls but because standing near the threshold of violence feels amazing. Watching the membrane that separates you from real insanity go translucent for a few hours is an exhilaration that can see you through the mundanity of any number of Tuesdays. This is why the idea of sportsmanship, for all that it’s been exploited to death by hypocritical patriarchs and maple-voiced TV commentators, is finally such a beautiful thing: because it says, in effect, that this is what human nature is like, and we can’t survive without accessing some dangerous parts of it, but we can construct a code, a kind of game within the game, that lets us do so without destroying ourselves.
The question, then, is how the violence that is the omnipresent subtext of sports can be kept from becoming the text. Not how do we eliminate this extraneous evil, in other words, but how do we manage this force with which we are in an intentional and ongoing relationship? How do we keep the feeling we are deliberately courting from turning into the action it wants to become? Tedious, unthrilling things are vital here: rules and procedures, clarity, consistency. Policies. Norms. Lists.
For that reason, the behavior of CONMEBOL around the Copa Libertadores final strikes me as a little worse than the exercise in low-grade craven greed it’s generally been judged as being. By misreading their relationship to violence, the soccer executives have almost certainly helped to perpetuate it. The atmosphere of uncertainty their indecisiveness created is precisely the one in which soccer violence tends to flourish. You can test limits in an atmosphere like that. You can push things and count on the mixed motives of the people in charge to keep you and your club out of real trouble.
Tuesday morning, after meeting in Paraguay, CONMEBOL announced that the final will be completed on December 8 or 9, somewhere outside Argentina. If Boca’s and River’s most hardcore fans can’t attend the game, it will probably go by without a replay of Saturday’s mayhem. That will keep the players safe, at least. But taking humans out of the equation is not really a lasting substitute for trying to understand human nature.
