As soon as the sequins and colored confetti settle on the parquet floor, it will already be Monday. A Monday like any other. We’ll discover that whatever happened just hours before, whatever feelings we carry with us, will just be Monday.
One made of boxes already packed, perhaps containing a few happy memories and far too many sad ones. Of suitcases, vacations, and doubts. A Monday of homecomings, plane tickets, and food to consume before it spoils—or simply to avoid throwing it away. In women’s five-a-side football, some will be happy, others will be thanked “all the same.” That “all the same” that sounds damningly like “thanks even though you played like shit and lost.”
I’ve always chosen to look at people for who they are, not what they do. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are if you’re a terrible human being. Sure, talent sometimes lets you get away with it, but only for a while. If I were to watch these women play football purely for athletic ability, I’d probably be watching Lamine Yamal or Florian Wirtz instead.
I do it because I can connect stories—life stories—to what happens on the court. Without that connection, women’s futsal is just recreational football, or maybe even less. It’s the human being that defines the player, not the other way around. Knowing that 방탄소년단 plays through their headphones before the match rather than yet another pretentious Italian indie artist makes all the difference in the world to me.
It’s understanding the origin of that competitive rage glued to those braids, showing that to be a great player you don’t need to be an unattractive woman. It’s having watched someone eat more sushi than that body should have contained and collected confessions of dark weaknesses. It happens that you find sisters where you hadn’t even looked. Discovering that in certain silences hides a brilliant and funny mind.
Games are just games if you don’t notice that certain challenges that seem like mere play actually contain so much life. A desperate recovery is sometimes more than just a move—it’s trying to erase a past that won’t go away even if you scrub it with sodium hypochlorite. It’s knowing that player will cost you a final with yet another soft challenge on the wing that she’s been repeating since she was twenty.
Loving a sport isn’t about loving its rules, the field, the bounce of the ball. It never is.
It’s being able to read the faces of women’s futsal players.
Maybe on Monday you’ll be right to have thought that you can’t win here—but it depends on where that “here” is, geographically. Or maybe you’ll be wrong because you now have one more photo with a trophy. If that photo exists, it will only be because you wanted it. More. Perhaps the scars on your legs will make sense and will have become stories to tell.
Monday will be another Monday. One in which to gather the missed opportunities to know the stories of these women who, like Gray Cranes, will fly migrating in the opposite direction of the warm season. In which to understand why I should wake up at 3 AM the following Thursday to watch Juventus play against some team from the Emirates.
Monday will be that day when we remember that if you were just players, no one would really care about any of this. Nothing at all.
