Diego Costa
The Today striker of Atletico Madrid, Brazilian footballer Diego Costa is in their country of birth order to stoning. Your decision to want to play the World Cup next year in the selection of Spain and not in the country that “gave all” has become among his little less than an outlaw. The most common adjective that is blamed is “traitor” and is reminded that it is not just “spit on the dish that fed him when he was hungry.”
Other, less likely to feed what an editorial in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo criticizes as “sectarian nationalism” even prefer to see the universalist attitude Costa as an “antidote to the old sin of nationalism.”
In Brazil writes that Atletico Madrid is a traitor because he had said that since childhood “his dream was to play in the Brazilian national” and now, “money”, has betrayed his old desire.
Some prefer to think that the wave of antipathy and verbal aggression against the player should be, above all, to go to contest the Cup with Spain, one of the most feared teams in the Brazilian team. “If it had decided to contest the World Cup in an unknown African team had nobody interested in it,” says El Pais journalist who has worked on television and now prefers to sell homes because it “pays more”.
However, if Costa has served to awaken the eternal theme of Brazilian nationalism, which they say has persisted since the days of the Empire, and that may be one of the reasons that Brazilians feel in any way Latin Americans. Nor Europeans. “We felt that, Brazilians,” they all say.
How to reconcile this strong sense of nationalism, which has advantages such as ignore some bloody rivalries between regional states as far apart as China Paris, with old inferiority complex coined by Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues as ” complex mutt “?
Is that one of the anomalies of a country not easy to understand or analyze, a rich and contradictory country at once, full of fascination with its load of humanity and strong accent of superiority when compared with its neighbors.
Folha’s editorial, which warns during the war raised against the Brazilian player, remember that there is even a contradiction between the heads of the national team, as coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, who seems to forget, in their Costa criticism, that he coached Portugal team after winning the Cup in 2002. And his colleague Alberto Parreira has coached four foreign teams.
Brazil is a country where old lingering nationalism are being nullified by the emergence of globalization in all fields. It is a modern country, a place where people from over one hundred nationalities, where all world cuisines can be savored and where they are at ease and at peace people’s different faiths and ideologies. Why keep it remnants of old nationalisms?
Diego Costa’s case, his “globalized” could act and should be read as a sign more than a few times in which true civilization should move away from the virus of nationalism and borders that separate people. Have not you said that football and sport in general, should be the modern substitute to old wars? And what greater antidote to war gesture Diego Costa of winning the World under a flag that is not his birth, but the universality of a world like no other photo ID badge and belong the human race?