I have been going to football stadiums in Portugal for over four decades. I say this because it is the only honest way to continue this text, and because it qualifies me for what comes next.
When you go to a magic show, nobody genuinely believes the illusionist has powers. Reality stays at the door. There is a mutual agreement, a consent to be deceived. Nobody buys a ticket to watch rabbits or pigeons flutter out of a handkerchief. You enter the agreement waiting for the prestige, the third act, that moment when the impossible happens. You go deliberately to be fooled, and the pleasure lies precisely in that.
Guy Debord called something similar the Society of the Spectacle. The idea, simplified to its last letter, is that modern social life organized itself around the passive contemplation of representations that replaced real experience. The spectacle doesn’t deceive anyone by force. It is consented to, desired, and paid for.
Johan Huizinga, in his Homo Ludens, added a piece that is even more relevant to this argument. The game, he said, creates a magic circle, a temporary space with its own absolute rules, suspended from outside reality. Inside that circle, the cheater is tolerated. The other players are surprisingly indulgent with him because, at the end of the day, the cheater still pretends to respect the game. In reality, the cheater plays with the rules of the game and goes further, bending them. He’s the smarty pants who still pretends to be inside the circle. One last reference to the literature, and I promise this won’t go on longer than this: Umberto Eco was even more direct. He wrote that the hysteria of football and the endless discussions about sport conveniently replace political discourse. More than elaborating this as a metaphor, unambiguous confirmation of this diagnosis can be found several times a day, whether at the local bar or in the conventional media.
Portuguese football lives in an eternal suspicion with no resolution and no way back. This goes far beyond a mere escape formula for supporters of a club that didn’t win its last game. It is a culture so deeply embedded that it begins with five and seven year olds in youth football. Who hasn’t seen them finish matches in tears, convinced the referee wanted them to lose, that the result was fixed, that the others were being protected? Nobody convinces them otherwise — not out of stubbornness or dishonesty. Innocence seems to disappear at birth. Along with it, belief, hope, and sportsmanship are delivered stillborn. What they learn, before their time, is that this is how the systemic spectacle works and that rationality has no place here. “They’re all against us!” or “Us against the world!” are the vulgar slogans of the club regiment, or of the battalions of moms and dads who cannot accept that their child might lose a game or fail to be the next reincarnation of Cristiano Ronaldo. Debord would say that representation precedes experience. Before they play a single serious game, everyone already knows the script.
This is Huizinga in reverse. There is no tolerated cheater inside the magic circle. There is a system where the repetitive accusation of cheating by the other side is an unwritten escape rule, transformed into a near-religious mantra that everyone can recite better than any Hail Mary.
What results from this is that suspicion stops being a noise in the spectacle. Suspicion becomes the spectacle itself. Debord didn’t need to have watched a single football match to figure this out and distill it into theory.
Who benefits from this state of affairs? The three big clubs, first of all, as a permanent shield against accountability for their own managerial incompetence. When everything is suspect, nothing is analyzed. Shuffle and deal again. It serves the media and their employees, who have built entire careers on the inexhaustible fuel of conspiracy. It serves the club’s presidents, that remarkable class of which PC, LFV, and BC are merely the most photogenic examples. AVB, RC, and FV are light refractions of a light that came in crooked and left even more crooked. The angle changed, the distortion remained.
All of them have navigated for decades in a system where accountability is a foreign word that still has no practical translation. The spectacle needs recognizable villains as much as it needs heroes. Everyone plays their role and everyone knows their lines — throwing stones of infantile irony while hiding behind frameworks of morality, honor, and superior values that make an idiot like me blush with second-hand shame.
The endless discussions about the ‘tilted pitch,’ the ‘bought referee,’ about whether it is a red, blue or green shadow that casts over the refereeing establishment, the Federation and the League — all of this replaces management, ethics, transparency, and responsibility. It is a very efficient substitution.There is never any merit on the other side, and even when it is undeniable, there is always a “yes, but if…”
Referees are the centerpiece of this theater. Generally poor, corporatist, with documented cases of corruption and punishments that have never come close to being truly dissuasive. But the deeper problem is not refereeing itself. It is that nobody genuinely believes it can be any different. The culture has been in place long enough to become the reference point. If it has always been this way, if my father said the same thing, if the cases have been accumulating for decades without real consequence, then the question has stopped being moral and become pragmatic. This is how it is. Period. The supporter gets angry, loses their head when the club loses, and is entitled to that — it is their moment of legitimate catharsis, like someone who never swears but knows exactly what swear words are for. And then it passes. And they come back for the next game. Because the individual surrender of each one of us is what keeps the system standing. This “there’s no changing it” is a choice that repeats itself a hundred thousand times every matchday.
Then came VAR. The promise was transparency, objectivity, the end of doubt. What was installed was more sophisticated and infinitely more perverse. Now there is technology confirming the decisions, which makes them simultaneously uncontestable in form and even more suspicious in substance. Debord could not have written a better argument. The spectacle reached its moment of greatest perfection when the technology created to demystify it became its most effective instrument.
The Football Federation and the League watch on. They are the father who never finds fault in his son, and when he does, shrugs it off, blames the circumstances and the behavior of his friends.
The supporter, that voluntary idiot, and I say this knowing full well that I am one of them, is completely complicit. Suspicion passes from father to son as family inheritance, confirmed at the dinner table, sedimented across generations of certainties without evidence and evidence without consequences. Nobody deceived us. We walk in knowing what we’re getting into, leave our rationality at the coat check, and proceed deliberately toward the deception. Exactly like the audience at a magic show.
The difference is that the illusionist is honest about what he does. In my lifetime, Portuguese football never has been. Suspicion is installed as the primary product, sold as drama, monetized in television rights, commentators, season tickets, and jerseys. And so the problem endures. Not because there is no solution. Because there is no will to find one. The Chinese or the ancient Arabs would say that any problem has a solution; if it has no solution, it is not a problem. What a mess we’ve made of this.
The “magic solution” would bring uncertainty to the outcome, and the seats of power would no longer guarantee the usual crumbs to the same people as always. The illusion is reaching that third act, the prestige, without even needing to confirm whether it’s a rabbit or a pigeon coming out of the hat. The suspense of this societal spectacle is knowing whether the animal is red, blue, or green.
Without the spectacle there is nothing. No big clubs, no media, no historic directors, no corporatist referees. This entire cast of players and bit-part actors needs a guaranteed future. Competence, like rationality, has no place here either. What really matters is the maintenance of an old and unshakeable status quo, with one simple guiding principle: keeping idiots like me willing to spend thousands of euros a year to walk into a room where they already know they are going to be deceived.
What an idiot like me believes, with that deep and genuine belief that makes your fingers ache from how tightly your hands are clasped, is that the ball is round. Sometimes it does things gravity doesn’t anticipate. It’s the only part of any of this that still seems real to me.
André Domingues
