Lorenzo, after discovering glory, realised that the next step was, inevitably, to go back down. The seven-year-old boy was sitting in front of the television watching the Spanish national team players lift the Euro Cup when the production cut from those celebratory close-ups to a general one of the stadium so that the magnitude of the fireworks imploding in the sky of the Olympic stadium in Berlin could be seen. Lorenzo, full of tender innocence, blurted out:
-Let’s see if they can be seen from the window!
The little boy returned to the living room, upset. From that little balcony there was nothing but the horizon of the Victoria beach in Cadiz. It was the middle of the night. A dark mass that completely obscured the child.
That same afternoon, a dull-faced man named Joaquin, but nicknamed Fini, He announced at the start of the match, propped up on the bar of a betting shop, that he had “put 20 euros on England”. “Come on, Fini, you’re wearing the Spanish shirt!” the owner told him. The man used an argument, in his opinion infallible, that left his companions stunned. “Tonight, what is certain is that I am not going to lose,” he said. Fini, who was watching the match with the rest on a television that was five seconds ahead of the rest of the establishment’s, said that he had been a great playmaker in local football in the area, one of those wayward left-footers that the home and away fans adore. That exquisite reading of the game on the pitch that he boasted about in front of the rest is what he tried to apply that night to his own luck.
There is a common denominator in those who want, like Fini, to seduce the goddess of fortune: in their next move lies the definitive victory. Doubts, the man thinks in small committeeare for others. That is what these kinds of places profit from, from the great certainties of those who are most lost. Because deep down, Joaquín, like everyone else, had a small victory in his heart from time to time, whatever it was. After losing so much, which is what we are talking about here, he decided to take the last path left to him: bet against himself. And he lost again, of course.
This past weekend, La Liga resumed and so did the ruin of many in this recently champion Spain. September will soon arrive and by then Lorenzo will have already decided who his favourite player is. One dressed in white, blue, yellow, green or stripes who, with a bit of luck, greets him every morning on the way to school from the entrance of a games room as if inviting him to come in. The latest fashion is to install a doormat with the inscription “Welcome” in gold letters. The footballers, who according to many should not talk about politics, show off their most irresistible smiles from these shop windows, even though on the field they look like caged beasts.
In this inevitable downhill slide that comes after glory, little Lorenzo will have 3,752 gaming halls, 481 betting parlors and 55 casinos throughout the national territory, according to data from 2022, in the form of a legal opportunity to descend into hell and join the list of losers.
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