“Soccer and the earth have something in common: they are both a ball,” said Sócrates, a wonderful Brazilian soccer player who also lived up to his name by being a sort of philosopher of the people, a committed guy who contributed so much to the king of sports as well as the society of his country. Soccer as a mass sport, as a great influence in the world, also serves to tell the story. This is how Víctor G. Muñiz understood it a few years ago, a soccer history teacher who, as a team -made up of the illustrator Stelladia, the designer Román Casado, the colorist José A. Martín and with Vero VCS at the head of marketing- developed Victories and defeats. history through the ball, a multidisciplinary and multimedia project for educational purposes in which one of its pillars has just come to light: the publication of a book in comic format. A truly spectacular work that shows how, indeed, many nuclear chapters in the recent history of Humanity can be told through football.
The book, whose edition has been made possible thanks to a patronage campaign carried out on the Ego platform, is a delight for the senses. For fans of football, history, comics, and anyone with a modicum of interest in any of the fields, it is a find. Always with a teaching spirit, the project had and has a clear purpose: the comic as a support for a ‘History’ book makes it more enjoyable and light without neglecting the importance of understanding the past. Victories and defeats approaches certain events that changed society; and it does so in a rigorous way but with a new language, a different formula for awakening interest in the past and doing it in an attractive way, especially for the youngest.
With a wonderful narrative pulse and splendid illustrations, the book Victories and defeats collects a dozen football-historical episodes that make up an extraordinary fresco on the most recent history of Humanity with football as the protagonist, actor, medium or background of the events. It opens with the chapter ‘Football Battalion. From the state to the First World War’, which explains the participation of British soccer players of the time in the Great War; and among others, there are chapters such as the one that, not because it is better known, is less revealing: it is ‘Christmas Truce’, which tells the fascinating story of the peaceful parenthesis lived in the trenches for a few hours so that the British and Germans, in Instead of killing each other, they’ll have a soccer game.
There is a rather special chapter, insofar as it concerns national football, and it is the one that alludes to the epic, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, of the football team that represented the Basque Country on an international tour of Europe shortly before the Old Continent was involved in the hell of war, and by several Latin American countries.
‘Victories and defeats’ also emphasizes, in different chapters, the role that the beautiful game played in countries that at certain times in their history were under the martial boot of a terrible dictatorship. The fascinating stories of the legendary Chilean player Carlos Caszely and his challenge to Pinochet or the propaganda manipulation of the Videla dictatorship in Argentina during the 1978 World Cup played in the country of silver are wonderfully collected. As well as Corinthian democracy in Brazil, that dazzling movement led by the soccer player from Rio de Janeiro (and doctor and philosopher and full-fledged man) whose name was Sócrates Brasileiro Oliveira. Nothing is missing: the book echoes fascism in Italian football, the football war between El Salvador and Honduras, Gaelic football in a burning Ireland or the battle of Maksimir which was the beginning of the end of that country called Yugoslavia.
More than a sport. “Since the birth of football in the 19th century to the present day, this sport has been a benchmark for society. With its lights and shadows, foot-ball is intrinsically linked to historical events in the contemporary world. In this journey through of the 20th century with Victories and defeats you will be able to discover the union between these events and the ball, a different way of approaching History and its intrigues.small chapters in which several of those historical episodes of the last century are presented in which the sport king becomes a vehicle or weapon for struggle, confrontation or vindication.Football is not only a sport, it is a propaganda tool, an ally of power or revolt, a historical element that we will approach from a didactic framework and with brief historical brushstrokes in each section”, explains Víctor G. Muñiz in the introduction to the work.
–
