Ceci n’est pas une pénalité
FOOTBALL is life. Fans around the world live and die alongside the clubs and the teams that they support. (Sadly, this has far been too often literally the case.) If you want to better understand the world that we live in, and you want to do so through the games that we play, there really is no other sport than soccer that really matters. Baseball and cricket? Sure, those are in the same vague realm of discussion. But soccer is king. It is endlessly fascinating, and also endlessly infuriating.
Soccer has always been a game of the masses, the poor and the working class. Indeed, when you hear complaints nowadays about the wildly popular, multi-billion entity that the English Premiere League has become, the majority of the complaints you hear center on the idea that the EPL has lost its connection to the fans. As the prestige of the league has grown since the EPL was formed in the early 1990s, the players have become even higher-priced, facilities been upgraded, the English game has been beamed on satellite TV around the globe, the pounds and the dollars and the euros flowed in, and the potential for more pounds and dollars and euros been monetized. In the process, some would argue, the game has gone about pricing out the average Joes who helped make the game what it was in the first place. These were originally clubs, first and foremost, they were representations of unique groups of people. (Never forget that Manchester United began as a sports club for railroad workers.)
A good number of these complaints which are the loudest from longstanding Chelsea faithful – they’re certainly glad to see their Chelsea Blues winning EPL crowns and Champions Leagues, of course, after the London club dabbled in mediocrity for most of its existence, but the games at Stamford Bridge are no longer catered to them, instead targeting the middle and upper classes, the ‘fair weather’ fans if you will you go to Stamford Bridge less to see than to be seen – the sorts of people who don’t, in fact, live and die with the fates and fortunes of the club. Chelsea’s fortunes changed dramatically, of course, when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich decided to poor a large amount of his fortune into the club after purchasing it in 2003. Abramovich has spent untold millions of his own over the past decade for players – the club itself didn’t post an operating profit until a modest, £1.4 million showing in 2012 – and the result is one of the best and most popular clubs on earth. But that definition of ‘popular’ is a curious one, of course – the Chelsea F.C. brand maybe worth up to £200 million worldwide, but the general narrative thread pervasive in England is that they and another recent darling, Manchester City, owe their success entirely to deep-pocketed, Johnny-come-lately ownership, whereas the real clubs in England – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur – have built more than a century of tradition and success through their hard work and good old fashioned English ingenuity. A narrative which was probably rubbish to begin with, and is even more so now that Man U and Liverpool have American owners while Arsenal’s fate continues to be in the hands of a Frenchman, but we are all susceptible to our own mythology. But the argument put forth frequently and repeatedly is about how, in the process of making billions and transforming middling mid-table clubs like Chelsea and Man City into global brands, they know longer identify with the supporters who have backed them for generations, and there is some merit to that. Identity is crucial in understanding football, understanding those who fervently follow it ... and understanding those who have put up with the kind of bullshit that we saw on the pitch on Sunday night in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Part of why the supposed homogenization of the EPL Football is troubling to many is that soccer is, and always has been, a game of the working class. Games should, in theory, be diversions from real life, they should be escapes and pastimes. But that’s not true and it’s never been true. It wasn’t true a decade ago, a century ago, it wasn’t true 2,000 years ago when 200,000 Romans used to go to the hippodrome and root on their favourite team in the chariot races, an event which usually involved drinking too much, gambling too much, rioting after their team lost, rioting after their team won, keeping detailed statistics about which riders were good and which horses were good, etc., etc. (Hell, for all we know, there was a Roman Natus Silvicus doing his DMMMVIII analysis.) Not much has changed, really. And as we’ve said before about soccer, the game’s origins, when traced back to its ancestors in Latin America, have always shown it to be a game with massive popular appeal – but also a game bankrolled by enormous sums of money and power. That unstated power struggle and tension between the classes is innate to the game, and always has been.
Soccer is not an escape from life at all. In fact, it’s more of a microcosm of life than any other sport. It’s part of why it’s endlessly fascinating. Soccer is not fair, and the results are often not just – much like life, in fact. Soccer is a game where getting a draw – simply breaking even and getting by – is an acceptable result. Both of these notions I just put forth run counter to the fundamental optimistic ethos of America, which is why, I suspect, the game hasn’t fully caught on here (at least not yet, anyway, but that’s a further discussion we can have at a later time). And when Guatemalan referee Walter López decided to award a nonsensical, nonexistent penalty to Mexico in the 123rd minute of its scoreless CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal with Costa Rica, it tapped into another value that working class football fans can relate to both on the field and of: being screwed over by The Man.
No official in any sport has more power to influence the outcome of a match than the referee does in soccer, simply through his ability to award a penalty – the success rate of which is upwards of 80% – in a game where scoring is otherwise so damn hard. There is but one of them on the pitch and he is judge and jury, his word the rule of law – and to the rank-and-file, worker bees making up the soccer-following faithful, many of whom live in nations where judge-and-jury types declare themselves presidents for life, that authority figure is deemed to necessarily be corrupt. He is a crook! He is a cheat! The other team has him in their pocket, which is why he gifted them that penalty. He won that game for them, the blasted ref! He is as crooked and dishonest as our opponents!
Now, The Lose is fundamentally opposed to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe there are grand master plans being orchestrated behind the scenes to deny certain teams – in this case, the team from Costa Rica – advancement in certain tournaments – in this case, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the regional championship. I don’t really want to go down that road, and so I’m going to be objective here and look at this particular play once more.
Upon further review, that call sucks. That’s not a penalty. That’s a terrible call. Given the situation – a scoreless game in extra time – and given the consequences – giving Mexico the opportunity to win on what is essentially the last kick of the match – it just might be the worst call I’ve ever seen. Why Walter López and his team of apparently blind as bats sideline officials felt such a sudden urge to exert such profound influence over this match (especially when they didn’t do it 10 minutes earlier, but we’ll get to that) is something that conspiracy theorists can only dream about.
I mean, come on here. That’s not a penalty. Look at that play again. The ball is a foot above Mexican striker Oribe Peralta’s head as he goes flying and flailing through the air. He cannot reach that ball. Whatever contact came between he and Costa Rica’s Roger Miller looks incidental at best, and the ball is as good as past him when he starts with his “I can fly” routine. You can’t call a foul on that play. You just can’t, unless there is some little known statute in the rules by which Miller impeded Peralta’s ability to spontaneously grow 12” taller. It’s not impeding progress to the ball when the ball can’t be played. That’s just dumb and stupid. Peralta only half-heartedly tries to influence the call, and watch the video again. He and his El Tri teammates are surprised and bemused by the spot kick being given.
Saying this is a bad call is an affront to other bad calls. If you’re going to be awarding a penalty in the 123rd minute of a game, and as much as handing the game to one team in the process, you’d better be 100% certain you got it right. López had no idea what was going on here. It was the 4th official who ‘spotted’ the infraction, but he’s not in any better position to see this play unfurl, either, and let’s not pass this off on some sideline guy. It’s the referee on the field’s decision, and he blew it. He flat blew the call. There is no other way to say it.
And referees do that sometimes. They make mistakes. Unfortunately, moments decide matches, since the moments when the ball does actually go in the net are so few and far between. I maintain that a pivotal moment in the transformation of the U.S. as a nation into USA FC came in South Africa in 2010 – not in the moment where they won, but in the moment where they should’ve won but got screwed over by a clueless referee, because a lot of sports fans in this country got justifiably outraged by it – although defacing the guy’s Wikipedia page was probably not cool. When have Americans ever been up in arms about soccer? And that was a classic officiating mistake, one which budding American soccer fans didn’t understand but all of them should’ve, since it involved a concept – the make-up call – which runs rampant in the American sport of basketball. And if you don’t remember the play I’m talking about off-hand, it occurred late in a 2:2 game against Slovenia and the referee, Koman Coulibaly from Mali, made sort of an iffy call which gave the Americans a free kick. Now, this sort of scenario plays out a lot in soccer. A referee makes an iffy call, realizes it’s an iffy call and then, on the ensuing free kick, immediately blows his whistle and points the other way, indicating that some sort of a foul has been committed. You don’t have to explain the foul, you just point the other way. And you can get away this is in soccer, because nothing ever happens, anyway. It’s not like the free kick you iffily awarded resulted in a goal or anything, because no one ever scores in soccer.
Except, of course, that the U.S. did score.
But the whistle had blown and the goal was disallowed. There wasn’t anything even remotely close to a foul committed by an American player. In fact, there were about three Slovenians grabbing ahold of American players. (Not that it did much good. That play looks like a jail break.) There was no foul. It was a phantom call. A make-up call. Coulibaly got outed, and you could tell that he knew it. How could you tell? Because after the game was over, Coulibaly was understandably subjected to a verbal barrage from American players, and rather than flee the scene, or just start flashing red cards about, Coulibaly just stood there and took it.
Welcome to the footballing world, America. You’ve now been jobbed at the game’s highest level. Congratulations, you’ve arrived.
And speaking of being screwed, one of the first narratives which arose from the El Tri faithful was to resurrect that no era penal bullshit from last summer, when they were knocked out of the World Cup in a 2:1 loss to the Dutch thanks to a somewhat marginal penalty being called late in the game – never mind, of course, that the Mexicans blew the lead, and never mind the fact that the official missed an even more egregious foul in the first half which should’ve given the Oranje a spot kick. And another narrative which arose was that Mexico was the better team in the game and had created the better chances, so they deserved to win. Well, if you’re supposedly the better team and supposedly create the better chances, but the score is still nil-nil, you probably don’t deserve to win since your finishing is so poor. I don’t really care who ‘deserved’ to win the game, and I don’t really care what happened in Brazil in 2014 or South Africa in 2010 or what have you. On the night of the 19th of July in the New Jersey swamplands in a game between Mexico and Costa Rica, that call by Walter López decided the game and THAT WAS A TERRIBLE CALL.
What’s all the more galling from the Costa Rican point of view is that the play involved Peralta, who shouldn’t have even been on the field. At 113’ Peralta committed this nasty, scissored, prison rules sort of challenge and should’ve seen red:
That sort of a play breaks people’s legs. It also gets you punched out by the opposition. That was a cheap and dirty play which fortunately resulted in no injuries, but Peralta only saw yellow from Walter López. And in attempting to look at this play from the most honorable and noble point of view, what I can deduce is that López only showed yellow because, in sending Mexico down to 10 men at this point, he would be unduly wielding his influence over the game. But then, of course, he turns around and awards a dubious penalty three minutes into stoppage time, giving Mexico a near certain win on the game’s last kick (I say near-certain for a reason), so that notion I suggested just went out the window. Hey, I’m trying here. I’m trying to give the referee at least a little benefit of the doubt.
And the Ticos handled this with a surprising amount of class and restraint. They said their piece to the referee and they were done with it. They opted to take the high road when, clearly, it would’ve been easy for them to fly into a collective rage. Reaction was a little stronger within the country of Costa Rica, meanwhile, with everything up to the current and former presidents weighing in on the injustice. (To be fair here, a good number of members of the Mexican media were also rather skeptical.) But there was no comment on the matter from the head of the Costa Rican FA, Eduardo Li, primarily because he’s in jail in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to the U.S. as part of the Justice Department’s wide spread probe of CONCACAF’s corruption and misdoings, some of the allegations of which center on this very tournament.
And this is where Walter López has really dug a deep hole for himself. He’s also dug a deep hole for the Mexicans, who can’t win – they did win the game, after all, yet the legitimacy of their win is called into question. It also checkers the entire tournament, because not only does this call look like an act of complete incompetence, but it also looks like the work of corruption in a region of the footballing world where corruption has clearly run amok.
For those of you who have no idea who Peter Prendergast is, he’s the Jamaican referee who made this awful call which cost the Belgians dearly against Brazil in 2002. CONCACAF has a decidedly unfavourable reputation in the footballing world, in spite of the fact that confederation, as a whole, has had far more international success than its African and Asian counterparts. CONCACAF are perceived as jokers and fools. It’s viewed as a confederation having three big countries – only two of which matter and neither of which they particulary like – a bunch of Central American countries no one can name, and a merry band of corrupt Caribbean would-be kingfish looking to use the game to line their pockets. Uncle Sepp and his FIFA cronies were quick to say the Justice Dept. probe wasn’t their problem at all, it was obviously a CONCACAF problem and that the confederation was obviously full of sleaze and graft and shysters. And sadly, they weren’t totally wrong in saying that. And yet it’s also grossly unfair – ridiculing a country’s FA, or a wider confederation, as being incompetent and corrupt also often implies that somehow they want it that way. But so long as you have Jack Warner lining his pockets with contributions to nonexistent football foundations, and Geoffrey Webb using his 10 Rolexes as collateral to post bond and get out of American jail, the notion of corruption and cronyism in North American football is hard to deny.
The CONCACAF Gold Cup is already something of a strange tournament, given that it always happens in the same country – the United States. There simply aren’t the resources to hold it in most CONCACAF countries. As cool as it would be to hold a joint Carribbean Gold Cup in Jamaica and T&T et. al, it’s not really viable. This year, they deviated from the norm in having the Canadians ‘jointly’ hosting – they played two games in Toronto, which begs the question as to why the Canadian home football grounds were available for this tourney but somehow not for the Women’s World Cup. You could hold it in Mexico, of course, but Mexico prefers the tourney being held in the U.S., since the short distance is enough to insulate them from the media and their zealous domestic fan base, while they can bask in the adoration of the enormous throngs of Mexican fans who live in this country and attend any El Tri match in America en masse. Which is cool by me. I live in a primarily Hispanic neighbourhood where Mexican expats and immigrants are my neighbours and I respect them tremendously, knowing that they are a part of this nation and have been a part of this nation for generations. They are vocal and enthusiastic supporters of El Tri and I have no problem with them showing their support for their side here in their home-away-from-home. I’ve always had a problem with the nonsense the USSF used to do pre-1990, when they would do things like schedule critical World Cup qualifiers against Mexico in the L.A. Coliseum and 60,000 Mexican fans would show up and it would be virtually an away game for the U.S., the USSF caring far more about the gate receipts than they did about the fortunes of its national team. Quite a few former American players have talked about how they felt they were betrayed by their own federation, and rightfully so. And in the case of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, it ends up being this weird sort of hybrid tourney where the Mexicans are essentially second hosts (and, this year, the third hosts), but Mexico’s fans always turn out in droves, often outnumbering American fans in the final attendance numbers for the event.
And to CONCACAF officials, those attendance numbers are all that really matter. Only 37,000 turned out in Baltimore for the Yanks’ laughable 6:0 quarterfinal win over Cuba on Saturday. For the Mexico-Costa Rica game in Jersey on Sunday, the attendance was probably double. Mexico’s presence in the semifinals is likely to guarantee a sellout for the semifinals at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, whereas a Costa Rica-Panama matchup was likely to be sparsely attended. The great complaint within CONCACAF, of course, has always been that decisions are made solely to try to maximize the number of Mexican fans in the seats. The Mexicans counter this by saying that their numbers of fans are important to the confederation, but yet all of those guys from small Caribbean countries vote in a bloc so as to negate Mexico’s greater influence over the game. In any case, the presence of the two big guys on the block in the semis, with the chance alive for them to meet in the final next weekend in Philadelphia, is in CONCACAF’s best interests all-around.
Cue the conspiracy theories.
If you’re a referee, nothing makes you look more like a lackey or a stooge than awarding dubious, late-game penalties. As I said before, soccer is a game loved by the poor and huddled masses and yet controlled by the rich and the powerful, and The Man on the field is perceived to be doing the rich and the powerful’s business. Scores of Italian soccer fans have decried and documented in dossiers for decades the number of times Juventus has been awarded curious 90th minute penalties on their way to Serie A championships – Juventus being owned by the richest industrialists in Italy, of course, who’ve been thought to be bribing referees much like they’ve been thought to be bribing corrupt Christian Democrat politicians all these years. This interesting Grantland article about the disgraced Dynamo brand – Dynamo having always a name attached to clubs run by the secret police in Eastern Europe – comes complete with an appropriate 90th minute penalty enabling Dynamo Berlin to clinch an East German title. (It’s strange that Houston chose Dynamo as a nickname, but having worked for a company owned by the owner of Houston Dynamo, I can say with great authority that yes, he really is that out of touch.) Those sorts of curious coincidences have been plaguing the game for decades. Far too many critical matches, in far too many places, have wound up being decided by referees picking strangely convenient times to influence the outcomes. It happened far too frequently for people not to suspect foul play, and a fair number of those times, those suspicions have been shown to have been with merit. Just earlier this year, in fact, the African Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea descended into farce, and the spark for that tire fire was a last gasp penalty awarded to the hosts for a flop in the box against Tunisia, with the Tunisians incensed and feeling cheated as a result and chasing the referee off the field. Let the chaos and the confusion begin.
And don’t kid yourself – Mexico reaching the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final is in the confederation’s best interests, whereas the Ticos were a great story in Brazil in 2014 and have a hell of a good team but are still a small country that no one has ever heard of. Had Walter López decided to lose his mind and make that terrible at 123’ against Mexico, giving the Ticos a penalty kick, it would’ve been looked at as being gross incompetence. But since it happened the way it did – given what was at stake, given what it means in terms of attendance and TV ratings, and given the backdrop of rampant corruption throughout the confederation’s administration – and Walter López’s call looks far, far worse. It looks crooked and corrupt in a region of the world where flying right and playing it straight on the football pitch is probably a good idea right now.
I’m someone who is always going to assume that incompetence until there is conclusive proof otherwise, but even this one had me wondering. My hope is that you can ultimately chalk this up simply to stupidity and no other outside influences. I don’t have any earthly idea what Walter López did or didn’t see – and contrary to the Sports Illustrated joke tweet from before, I suspect we won’t be seeing him officiating at this level again. In general, if you screw up that badly as an official, and you bring the game into disrepute in the process, you aren’t ever officiating at that level again. That’s not to say soccer officials are expected to be perfect, of course, but mess up so badly as to overly influence a game to its detriment, and that’s likely the last time you’re going to be seen on that stage. (People in Seattle, Portland, and all of American soccer will rejoice if that’s the case after this 11-on-7 nonsense from the U.S. Open Cup, some of the worst officiating ever seen on an American soccer pitch which I would give more time to if the competition wasn’t so small-time and amateurish by nature.)
In the end, this was a shitty way for Costa Rica to lose a game, maybe the shittiest way to lose imaginable – one which reminds that, for all the good you do on the football pitch, it’s easy to be undone by one particular individual who is entrusted with ensuring fair play and yet who may or may not have an agenda, may or may not have a fat wallet, and who may or may not have a clue. The soccer official has a tough and thankless job, but a good rule of thumb in the business, across all sports, is that if you’re officiating a game and we come to know your name as a result, you really kind of fucked that one up.
