An Old Joy: Bolivia and the World Cup
As the Bolivian national team prepares for a pivotal playoff match against Iraq, the novelist Rodrigo Hasbún reflects on La Verde's mythical qualification campaign for the 1994 World Cup
Editor’s Note: We are sharing this week’s post a few days early, ahead of Bolivia’s intercontinental playoff final against Iraq. As always, you can support us by donating or buying a copy of our magazine here. Thanks for reading.
By Rodrigo Hasbún, translated by Lily Meyer
It was the middle of 1993, and Bolivia had never qualified for a World Cup through the gauntlet of South America’s qualifiers. Our little team had to face the neighborhood giants every four years, including Argentina and Brazil, countries that had won several World Cups already and would go on to win more.
We Bolivians, seven million at the time, had accepted our rung on Latin America’s ladder. But we still suffered with each defeat, still lived in hope of a rebellion against reality. Everyone knows that in sports, as in politics, the intensity of a supporter’s loyalty has less to do with results than with anticipation and promises. At the start of each new qualifying round, our hope resurfaced intact.
That year, we began by destroying Venezuela 7-1 in their stadium. What could have been a fluke, as random as it was surprising, became something else when, at home a week later, we scored two last-minute goals against Brazil and became the first team to beat them in over four decades of qualifiers. It gave our team swagger. Coached by the Basque Xabier Azkargorta, they met all challengers as equals. For the rest of us, so accustomed to going through life with our heads down, not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable, it was an unusual sight.
Next they beat Uruguay, Ecuador, and Venezuela, all in La Paz. After each match, the streets turned into a party, and the Bolivian teenagers—who’d dreamed for years of being Baggio, Gullit, Matthäus, or Cafú—added Erwin Sánchez, Marco Etcheverry, Carlos Borja, and Milton Melgar to our list. Soccer was good for that too, I guess: believing in ourselves, stretching our ambitions, loving ourselves a bit more. (I’m not using the plural lightly. Soccer creates a rare union between team and country, pressing the sense of belonging onto even nationalism’s greatest skeptics.) Our fever extended to pickup games everywhere, eager arguments at recess and in class, the happiness of not feeling so little after all.
We had three games left. If our streak continued, we’d get to USA ’94 no problem. But Brazil got their revenge, scoring six goals on us on their home turf, and Uruguay beat us on theirs 2-1. Our chances hung on our last game against Ecuador. We were visitors for that one, too. It was our last shot, which heightened everything. Bolivians’ desires, ordinarily diverse and in conflict, converged on the single thing we wanted from our team: one point. When they brought home a nice, respectable 1-1 tie, it united us like nothing before.
Thirty-three years later, Bolivia has a chance to qualify for the World Cup a second time. I’m forty-five now, not twelve, and I’ve lived abroad for nearly half the intervening years. Maybe that’s why I haven’t watched a single one of the games that got us to this point, why I can’t name a single player, but I suspect that my disdain has other sources. I’m going to risk naming some: how quickly my days go by and how shockingly little time I have, as well as the ever-less-hidden brutality of the powerful nations, whose wars and massacres have, in recent years, taken away my desire to sit through a whole game, regardless of the sport. FIFA’s highly questionable alliances and dealings are a factor too, as is soccer’s general drift toward tactics, its subjugation to politics, technology, and the market.
I wonder if today’s teenagers are experiencing this moment with the same fervor my generation felt in 1993, or if soccer fandom is murkier for them, too. For my part, I get an unexpected jolt of euphoria from reading online that Bolivia will face Iraq in the intercontinental playoffs for a place in this year’s tournament. The imminence of that game gets me excited. It reawakens in me the golden age of the rebellious team that refused to stay in its place.
Maybe I’ll give my skepticism and my adulthood a break, I tell myself in the shadow of that old joy, and see what happens. Maybe I’ll give myself the chance, so rare lately, to be twelve again, an age when soccer was soccer and nothing more.
Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Affections (Simon & Schuster) and The Invisible Years (Deep Vellum). He teaches Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.