The football that we used to know no longer exists. We called it modern football, and its time began about 20 years ago. Back then, the Bundesliga clubs built new multiplex arenas that all looked the same. Players switched clubs for the first time for tens of millions. Paying stations and sponsors were pumping ever higher sums into football, and some older people were slowly losing track of things. „Trapattoni feels strange in the modern football world, ”wrote the „Spiegel“ 1999.
This year we experience football postmodernity. It is a dystopia, because this is how culture pessimists at the turn of the millennium imagined the future of football. The multiplex arenas are empty. There is a silence that is so oppressive and loud that you have to mute the TV. The players cheer for goals like remote-controlled toy cars. Field reporters with protective masks are standing on the sidelines, holding out telescopic microphones to trainers with protective masks. And then 1. FC Heidenheim is close to its first promotion to the Bundesliga, while Werder Bremen could move back to the second division after 40 years.
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„Then I go somewhere else and continue playing there, very simply. ”
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But the worst: Claudio Pizarro, 41 years old, stops playing football. The key witness of the past 20 years. The man who saw the very old football in its end, then the turbo capitalism, the perfecting of the game on the pitch, the greed behind the scenes.
He was there when great careers started and ended again. He played with Dieter Eilts or Julio Cesar, footballers who were born shortly after the war. When Miroslav Klose made his professional debut for Kaiserslautern, Pizarro had been in the Bundesliga for a year. When Klose ended his career, Pizarro was once again a beacon of hope in Bremen. He was already 37 years old at the time, so we also asked who should be able to tell him to stop: „Only I can do that myself, ”answered Pizarro. What if the trainer does it in front of him? „Then I go somewhere else and continue playing there, very simply. ”
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It is inconceivable that this time he will not go anywhere else. It’s like the Rolling Stones got rock ‚n‘ Roll zurücktreten.
Rarely has the end of a football player’s career made me so wistful. Pizarro didn’t even play for my favorite club, Hamburger SV. On the contrary. He ran for the so-called north rival and for the south rival. And he almost always met HSV. With Werder he shot Hamburg out of the Uefa Cup, and when Bayern won 9-2 against HSV, he scored four goals. „I haven’t played in a long time. Four goals today – wonderful, ”he said afterwards, while his goals, one with a pick, flickered across the screen. I would have insulted other players on TV, but at that moment I just thought, well, somehow really wonderful. Pizarro grinned at the camera as if he was thinking about his own picaresque novel. He was 34 years old, even then an older man in the football business. Actually.
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Pizarro was still there
Maybe I’m getting melancholic because Pizarro reminds me of my own age. I was born in 1977. During my fan life, I was younger than most football professionals or at least the same age. I remember when I joked with friends that the first eighties were appearing in the clubs’ ranks, sometime in the late nineties. When players entered the Bundesliga stage after 2000, I got a fright. Fiete Arp, Joshua Zirkzee, Jadon Sancho. You only know the 1990 World Cup, a key event of my generation, only as a black and white story of your parents and grandparents. One grandfather tells about war, the other about Lothar Brehme. Or what was the name of the guy again? Oh whatever.
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I was very old. An old man almost. I was now sitting in interviews with young professionals who wore trendy hairstyles and knew modern expressions, and I wondered whether I was acting on them like Heribert Faßbender at the time or Ernst Huberty on me. People who, in my imagination, had never been young and were born with a parting crown and mediocre suits.
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But then I quickly thought of Claudio Pizarro. It was still there. Born in 1978. Only a year younger than me. As long as he swept through the penalty area, I lived with the illusion that I was young and fit and somehow up to date. In theory, I could even be a professional soccer player.
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