It is still curious that one of the most celebrated sports documentaries of the year has as its protagonist Luis Enrique, a coach (today of PSG) frequently mistreated by the press and hostile towards it. A distant and sarcastic relationship that has led to exquisite audiovisual work for which, in addition to the quality of the journalists, the absolute generosity of the coach has been needed: doors open even for the most intimate conversations, the intestines of elite football placed on air in a way that a fan can only celebrate. This is how a locker room and a technical team run by a club coach who has won everything (with Barça) and a home that experiences the team’s upheavals like its own earthquakes works, because the press (not even the French press) does not forgive.
‘You have no fucking idea’, commercially placed as ‘You have no fucking idea’ due to a question of modesty or prudery or the categorization of the film for all audiences – I don’t know, not even I who have titled it similarly (maybe for not fighting on the phone with the editors; I just hope those horrible censorship asterisks don’t become fashionable) – is a tense and happy documentary crossed by its final minutes, which are only in presence because in spirit they appear from the beginning: The Luis Enrique that he is today is made, like everyone, of his experiences, and is the result of the passage through his biography of many people, such as teachers, mentors, family and friends, whoever. But it is the giant step of the nine-year-old of Xana, his daughter who died in 2019 from osteosarcoma, an aggressive and rare bone cancer, that puts everything into perspective: soccer, which is a game, first of all; life, which is not, fundamentally.
There is a profound message that Luis Enrique Sr. gives in the final minutes of the documentary and that has to do with a philosophy that can be shared or not, but how good it is to be able to do so. It is a way of facing death, as a misfortune – this way is inevitable – or as a misfortune that ends up helping us; a misfortune, even if it is, from which to draw life lessons. There is always an alternative to not suffering the death of a child: not having one. Xana’s nine years, the X years of any boy who has died amid the suffering of his parents and friends, are in some way a gift; We could not have had them, there could not have been that friend who left us at 20, or at 49, or at 7. We can say that someone has died, we can also say that they have lived.
Death is shit (sorry: shit), and the death of a child is that shit presented in the cruelest and stupidest way, the harshest and most useless suffering in the world concentrated on the weakest and most vulnerable people. . To achieve, through pain and tears, that Xana’s death is a source of extra energy, a way of being in the world that implies that things are done in it because Xana has passed through here, starting with the Xana Foundation and passing through its parents and brothers, it is a beautiful and vibrant lesson not only for survivors but for those who have learned to manage pain by turning it around, and from there the figure and the documentary of Luis Enrique are better understood – completely understood. You imagine someone – difficult – wanting to hurt you, or someone in a newsroom thinking “we are going to screw this up tomorrow”, and it only produces tenderness. We really have no fucking idea, and I hope we never will.