Boom and bust of euphoric narratives: Peruvian football and the neoliberal mentality

ABSTRACT

In this article we propose the category of euphoric narratives both to explain the construction of the sculpture ‘Monumento a los hombres del mundial’ (Monument to the Men of the World Cup) in Lima, Peru, but more importantly, to analyse a dynamic which transcends that situation and accounts for a set of cultural changes that have arisen in strongly restructured societies for the purposes of neoliberal policies. The Peruvian national football team’s qualification for the World Cup in Russia in 2018 generated a collective sense of optimism in the national community rarely seen in recent history. The article traces the interrelation between football, a rich site for the deployment of popular narrative strategies in relation to the construction of identities, the neoliberal rationality, which feeds on and manipulates (collective) euphoria for commercial and/or political gain and the specific socio-political Peruvian context in the run-up to the World Cup in Russia.

Introduction

On 10 July 2018, prominent journalist David Hidalgo published a photo that soon began to circulate in Peruvian networks. It featured a sculpture with two figures: one of Ricardo Gareca, coach of the Peruvian national team, and another of captain Paolo Guerrero. Both were gold in colour and on a pedestal. The sculpture (1.90 m high × 1.10 deep × 1.80 wide) is titled ‘Monumento a los hombres del mundial’ (Monument to the Men of the World Cup, figure 1.

Figure 1. Sculpture in the Parque Argentina (San Miguel). Photograph taken by the authors

The photograph of the sculpture became a viral phenomenon and was reproduced on many websites and in digital versions of newspapers that echoed the controversy which ensued. On the Facebook page ‘En nombre del Fútbol’ (In the Name of Football), which had more than 126,000 followers and remained active between 2015 to 2019, it gave rise to opinions for and against in a heated digital discussion about the suitability of the sculptural ensemble, its true purpose, and the way in which the political authorities had appropriated the enthusiasm of citizens for electoral purposes without a qualm. David Hidalgo was right in asserting that the national team had received multiple recognitions for its qualification, but none of this kind.

What led the municipality of San Miguel to erect such a monument in the Parque Argentina? Was it just political strategy by the then-mayor, Eduardo Bless, to capitalize on football and initiate the campaign for his re-election? Or was it a prime example of the absence of well-designed cultural policies in the country’s municipalities? What is the reason for the exhilaration experienced by Peruvian society as a result of the national football team’s qualification for the World Cup after 36 years of consecutive defeats? Could we say that we find ourselves, rather, confronted by a powerful symbol that explains a cultural pattern or dynamic lived by Peruvian society in recent decades?

In this essay, we want to propose the category of euphoric narratives both to explain an unusual event, such as the construction of the aforementioned sculpture, but above all, to name a dynamic which far exceeds that situation and accounts for a set of cultural changes that have arisen in strongly restructured societies for the purposes of neoliberal policies. In fact, the collective happiness for the Russian World Cup qualification produced a sense of optimism and hope in the national community rarely seen in recent history. Such acute feeling of elation and nationalism came into being through the most popular sport in the world, a cultural practice that goes beyond the football pitch, as it becomes ‘the site for the deployment of some of the richest and most effective narrative strategies in relation to the construction of identities’.¹

The euphoria generated in Peru after a long unsuccessful period is not only linked to the long-awaited World Cup qualification, but also to broader processes that point towards changes in Peruvian national identity. This takes place in the framework of a new affective, individualistic and market-oriented culture that, nevertheless, anxiously seeks new symbols in an attempt to reconcile with itself. Euphoria brings to mind images of ecstasy, elation and joy. It is frequently used in non-technical contexts, as a state of cheerfulness or well-being, especially one based on over-confidence or over-optimism. A euphoric state of mind is, necessarily, temporary as it is physiologically and mentally challenging to subject human’s body and mind to prolonged periods of euphoria. Western neoliberal societies are increasingly oriented towards short but intense experiences, seeking pleasure in the form of short-term investment (whether that is capital, love or entertainment). The neoliberal subjectivity grounded on the prestige of immediate emotions primarily compels citizens to one single mandate: success. Faced with this command that encourages competitiveness and consumption, society almost no longer exists, there is only the individual will.

Neoliberalism is not only an economic project, but also a form of governmentality and a cultural dynamic that seeks to become common sense. Under this logic, it is not a question of discussing the best way to achieve ‘social justice’ or the so-called ‘common good’ but rather of the deployment of a set of technological rationalities that appeal to the mere management of individual interests. For Brown, it is, in effect, a guiding and normative rationality that colonizes social life, converting the political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.² Peru’s neoliberal policies were established in the early nineties under the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. Not only was this one of the most corrupt periods in the country’s history, but the degree of destruction of the institutions was of such a magnitude that thirty years later the effects are ongoing, and Peru is still unable to build state institutions capable of fulfiling the basic needs of its citizens. It is true that the country achieved good levels of macroeconomic stability, but it is even more true that the deinstitutionalization promoted by neoliberalism has proved most fertile ground for corruption to reach unthinkable levels, and for public services to continue to deteriorate. The highly informal character of the Peruvian economy, according to González Olarte, also contributes to creating a society of individuals where the most important law is the pursuit of individual interest.³

What does, then, happen to the community when everything has begun to deny it? From where does it return as an unfulfilled promise? What kind of needs – conscious and unconscious – are present in the construction of a statue such as ‘Monumento a los hombres del mundial’? We propose the category of euphoric narratives as a tool to account for new social processes that are capable of transforming what seems a simple illusion into a euphoric narrative marked by an excess of fantasies of social harmony and wrapped up by market strategies that exacerbate what Žižek has described as ‘the imperative of pleasure’.⁴ If, according to Stuart Hall, popular culture is the ground in which the transformations of a capitalist society are worked out,⁵ then we are interested in reflecting how, in this case, it is through football ‘the central instrument in the imaginary construction of socio-cultural identities’⁶ that we can observe a set of significant cultural changes in contemporary Peru. Needless to say, the academic bibliography that analyses football as a field in which structures, developments and changes in society are staged, has grown exponentially in recent years.⁷ Our interest in this article is the relation between football and collective emotions and the potency of football to elicit euphoric narratives that seemingly unite the nation in a context of acute social and political crisis. Sullivan has defined collective emotions as manifestations of widely shared feelings, which are different from individual emotions because of the emphasis on acting and feeling together as a group.⁸ Von Scheve and Ismer analyse collective emotions stressing the importance of the synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object.⁹ For the purposes of this piece, we propose a definition for the analytical category euphoric narratives as a symbolic matrix within the neoliberal rationality that projects an over confident social imaginary between bodies and objects invoking the nation in the context of acute internal social and political conflict. These euphoric narratives a) seek an impact in the spectacular society, b) transform illusion into an euphoria, c) promise what is unattainable and d) emerge as compensation.

Peru’s qualification for the World Cup meant ‘a moment of national unity, of recognition, and of being part of the same community’.¹⁰ It produced a collective euphoria and community identification rarely seen in recent decades.¹¹ Peru’s qualification created a national affective atmosphere in which national feelings affected bodies and also became infectious.¹² After 36 years of recurrent defeats and failures, Peru returned to a major competition and this not only settled accounts with the past but, above all, it represented a turning point for Peruvian globalization in the world market. In fact, since the nineties, countless economic and public policy measures have purposely aimed at integrating Peru into the international market at any cost. The neoliberal model was imposed in an authoritarian way as the only viable alternative in the new international scenario at the beginning of the nineties and since then, Peruvians have virtually witnessed only an uncontrolled (and often corrupt) demand for passive obedience, at any cost, to the unequal mandates of the world market. As has already been noted by García Llorens, these policies have not had any interest in reforming the state institutions.¹³ Only businesses have been privileged and democracy has been reduced to technocratic knowledge.

Contexts

The recurrent failures of the Peruvian national football team contradicted and frustrated the possibility of symbolically embodying an economic (and political) project supposedly open to the capitalist world. It is in this context and after a qualifying stage full of ups and downs in which all indications were that the national team would be out of the World Cup for the ninth consecutive time, which the unleashed euphoria can be understood. Indeed, the Peruvian national football team’s recovery took place only in the last matches of the qualifying round, as the team began losing the first games. With only five fixtures to go, the team managed to hit hard, recover positions and achieve fifth place, which allowed for a final opportunity in the playoff against New Zealand.

But even before the playoff, the atmosphere was filling with excitement and hope (figure 2 and figure 3). The media, politicians, advertising spots and common citizens began to wear red and white, which meant, for example, an increase in sales of the national shirt throughout the country. It was not, of course, the official T-shirt, authorized by the Peruvian Football Federation and commissioned to the transnational Umbro, but those made by the ‘Gamarra’ commercial emporium, the most important symbol of popular capitalism in Peru. We do not have space here to analyse the positive and negative dimensions of this space (modernization from below but accompanied by a lack of labour rights; permanent lawbreaking; slavery in some cases and mafias of all kinds), but it is worth bearing in mind that if an official T-shirt could cost up to 130 American dollars, one made at Gamarra was for sale in the streets at 15 soles (5 dollars).

Figure 2. Municipality of Miraflores. Photograph taken by the authors

Figure 3. Euphoric hotel in Miraflores. Photograph taken by the authors

The exponential increase in T-shirt sales had already changed the face of the country (at the university itself many students attended lectures wearing them), and all radio and television programmes did nothing but talk about it over and over again. In Melbourne, the national team drew 0–0 and then the final match was to take place in Lima. That day, limeños were surprised to see and hear two fighter airplanes, Mirage 2000s, owned by the Peruvian Air Force, which began to carry out elaborate, very loud manoeuvres along the bay of Lima, and above all, in the surroundings of the hotel where the rival team players were staying. ‘The noise pierced our ears’, said journalist Michael Burgess, a New Zealand Herald correspondent.¹⁴ In fact, this was one among many occurrences in a context of joyful celebration across the country, a real carnival, which started several weeks earlier and the night before the final match translated into public rituals of witchcraft against the rival team, fireworks during the night and countless reports that dominated the programming of all media, especially television, in which the programme hosts did not appear formally dressed but were wearing the national team’s shirt. On the night of 15 November 2017, the Peruvian team, playing well, defeated New Zealand 2–0 and qualified for the World Cup after 36 years, unleashing an extraordinary civic party.

Nothing stopped the euphoria. Not even the punishment to captain Paolo Guerrero for having been found with traces of cocaine in his body: a metabolite of benzoylecgonine. Rather, his struggle to prove his innocence and be forgiven, became almost for the entire continent (and much of international football) a true soap opera with an incredible and relatively happy ending. Nor did the sudden death of sports journalist Daniel Peredo stop the euphoria, which was experienced as a true national tragedy. Peredo was a broadcaster who had earned the fans’ affection not only for the intensity (and euphoria) with which he recounted the goals of the Peruvian national team, but also for his unwavering faith in qualifying despite the defeats. Peredo died of a heart attack playing a football match with his friends just four months before the start of the World Cup. The tributes were many, a mass was celebrated in the National Stadium, one of the press booths was renamed in his honour and several murals and graffiti with his best-known phrases began to appear in different parts of the country.

Despite the pain of Peredo’s death, the euphoria continued always on the increase. Three months before the World Cup, the Panini album and figurines craze turned Peru into one of the countries in the world with the highest sales of the product. The demand for figurines was so great that there were problems of shortages causing, on the one hand, the anger of consumers, but on the other, the organization of networks to create massive exchanges of figurines in different parks and squares around the country. In statements to Radio Programas del Perú (RPP), the company’s manager, Óscar Pizarro, said that in the first days 140 tons of figurines were sold. ‘You have to be calm’, he said; ‘we are in the first week of April and the World Cup begins in June. We can guarantee that the supply will continue. On April 10th a new lot arrives, the 12th another one, the 14th, the 16th, the 18th and the 20th too and they are all airborne’.¹⁵

Politics

It is worth bearing in mind that the last stage of the playoffs and the final match took place in the context of an acute political crisis produced by the revelations of major acts of corruption carried out by the Odebrecht construction company in the ‘Lava Jato’ case. In Peru, disclosures of scandals had been going on for several months and had begun to involve both the country’s main economic groups (the construction company Graña y Montero) and all the presidents who had governed Peru after the return to democracy in 1980. At that time, one of the most outrageous events was the revelation of a bribe of more than 20 million dollars to Alejandro Toledo (ex-president of the Republic, currently escaping justice at Stanford) for the purpose of assigning the concession to build the southern inter-oceanic highway. But there were also many signs that involved Alan García (who committed suicide on 17 April 2019 before he could be captured), Ollanta Humala (already in prison at the time) and none other than the president at the time, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was embroiled in networks involving illegal economic benefits. Despite having denied his ties with the Brazilian company and after sending two public messages to the nation, his lies came to light and caused a dramatic political crisis in which, to the astonishment of everyone, the Congress of the Republic asked the president to resign.

This happened in mid-December, a month after the World Cup qualification, but Kuczynski was miraculously saved thanks to the abstention of a sector of the left in order to avoid granting greater power to fujimorismo, whose ties with the mafias and corruption had once again become evident. The truce, however, was short-lived (two days) and the little sense of stability faded instantly when Kuczynski decided to pardon Alberto Fujimori (convicted of crimes against humanity) on Christmas Eve, unleashing the wrath of half the country and leading to new widespread political chaos. New revelations pointed out conflicts of interest and in April 2018 (only two months before the start of the World Cup) Kuczynski had to resign from the Presidency of the Republic. If years earlier, Fujimori had resigned by fax from Japan, a fugitive for several years, now the Peruvian people witnessed another journey, but in this case it was a return trip: vice president Martín Vizcarra, at the time ambassador to Canada, had to take the first flight home and, to the confusion of himself and everyone else, assume the country’s leadership.

Euphoric narratives

Euphoric narratives arise in contexts of generalized crisis as a kind of fantasy of unity that embodies self-confidence and faith in collective progress. A euphoric narrative recovers the feeling of ‘the collective’ in a context where it seems to have been lost. Its aim is to create the illusion of social harmony, underlining that community does exist.

They emerge as compensation for the shortage of identity models, in a context lacking exemplary figures to produce fertile identifications for the society.¹⁶ The Peruvian national team’s qualification served to construct a fantasy that proposed the existence of a true common project and a sense of the collective in Peru. This occurs in the absence of trustworthy authorities and referents which can act as guarantors for social life, that is, in an atomized society that fosters the most extreme individualism, where many are willing to violate the law in order to achieve economic success.

The national football team, through a change in focus and purpose, embodied that sense of the collective. Villena Fiengo argues that national team footballers playing abroad may be ‘deterritorialised’ and hence debilitate the national project identifying these players with their citizens.¹⁷ This is applicable to Peru as the sporting success of the national team was entrusted to their Fantastic Four, as the yellow press called the players Pizarro, Vargas, Farfán and Guerrero. Despite their international standing, all four playing in major European clubs, the national team did not qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and Peruvian citizens felt a break up in affective terms. The players were seen as successful but disconnected from Peruvian reality. They were considered skilful but lacking commitment. The national team’s affective suture with the fans happened because of a change of strategy. First, the international players started to be seen as markers of the increasing improvement of Peruvian commodities abroad.¹⁸ This shift is congruent with broader processes of nation branding in Peru which, among several strategies, it has focused on Peruvian national ambassadors, using sports personalities such as the surfer Sofia Mulanovich (2011), the sailor Alexander Zimmermann (2016), but not yet football players. Second, the collective was strengthened through a revalorization of poverty, understood as precariousness, as the ability to economize on resources and build a team. Juan Carlos Oblitas, the sporting director at the Peruvian Federation of Football, declared that the new coach, Ricardo Gareca ‘could work from poverty’.¹⁹ In this process it was as important to rebuild self-esteem and tackle the losing mentality as to internalize the new coach’s vision that a player, when playing for the national team, ‘represents a whole country, millions of people, children, parents, mothers, grandparents; they provide an illusion because they need to feel proud of their country’.²⁰

Furthermore, represented by the Peruvian national team, the community became a repository of certainty and illusion, confronted with a crisis of identity lacking leaders and models of authority that could set an example and a new course. Faced with a very serious political crisis, and a moral crisis in which repeated femicide cases revealed a deterioration of the most elementary human connections, the football euphoria, fed by the mass media and the opportunity to do business, grew non-stop.

To counteract the permanent state of crisis²¹ euphoric narratives are anchored in a nostalgic real or imagined past that acts as narrative guarantor against a deteriorated present. That is why during those months many books about the history of Peruvian football began to appear, such as the collection of photos – a coffee-table book – edited by Antenor Guerra García. Other books published were El camino a Rusia (2018), by Umberto Jara; Hola Rusia. Manual para disfrutar a Perú en el mundial (2018) by Joana Bologña; Con todo, contra todos (2018) by José Carlos Yrigoyen; El ojo de tigre (2018) by Pedro Canelo; the series ‘Mundialistas’ (from the newspaper El Comercio) with prominent photos from its archive and, finally, the Guía política del mundial (2018) by Bruno Rivas. Furthermore, Movistar, a division of Telefónica (a company that has been facing serious tax lawsuits for several years, and that today is involved in another scandal for having hidden information in investigations targeting corrupt politicians) sponsored the documentary on Peruvian soccer titled Largo tiempo, which was repeated many times before and after the World Cup. Weeks before the World Cup, everyone was talking about the national team and about the assured triumphs to come. Television reports told different stories of euphoric fans (such as the famous Israeli fan) and, shortly before the start of the World Cup, the football players’ mothers became the most sought-after characters on national television. They participated in a fashion show and were interviewed and invited to appear on countless television and radio programmes.

Euphoric narratives seek an impact within the so-called spectacular society. Many of the big companies took advantage of the moment to transform their merchandise into a pure football image. In fact, many everyday consumer products were dressed in red and white. From milk cans to beer bottles, from sweets to sliced ham wrappers (figure 4 and figure 5). As Guy Debord had argued, the final form of merchandise fetishism is the image, and the spectacle is the ultimate form of capital accumulation.²²

Figure 4. National symbols and euphoria in groceries. Photograph taken by the authors

Figure 5. Household products supporting the national team. Photograph taken by the authors

Above all, a euphoric narrative brings with it a cynical component, because it is a discourse that promises what it cannot give. It is cynical, because it acknowledges the excess it has generated, but still lets itself be carried away by it. During those months, Peruvians began to be guided by the ‘imperative of enjoyment’ that demanded a lot and could not stop. Already in the fifties Lacan had explained that the superego began to change course and that contemporary society, rather than repressing enjoyment, forced it.²³ In the run up to the qualification stages, the Peruvian national team began to play football better and, in the preparation matches, all Peruvians could observe a better constituted team with good achievements, but speculations on the World Cup participation engendered completely disproportionate fantasies of what the World Cup performance was going to be. From different angles and with different interests, everyone took advantage of the opportunity to promote a euphoric narrative and continue to push the imperative of enjoyment – enjoyment with the national team, the enjoyment of fantasizing community, the enjoyment of the spectacle – and in so doing, increase business.

In other words, in the context of a profound degradation of daily life, society as a whole began to perform community when it seemed it had been lost. ‘The national team has united us’ said many famous (and absent-minded) journalists, with a resigned president of the Republic (Kucynzski), another prisoner (Ollanta Humala), and several scandalous revelations of corruption everywhere. The sense of unity seemed to forget the terrible news of femicides, such as the death of Evy Ágreda, on 1 June 2018, thirteen days before the start of the World Cup, and the attack on Juana Mendoza who was also burned by her partner in the city of Cajamarca and died on 8 July 2018, seven days before the end of the World Cup. The cynics are no longer deceived: they know perfectly well what they are doing, and they are doing it, according to Žižek.²⁴

Beaten in World Cup 2018 … but success in Copa América 2019

Peru’s participation in the World Cup was short-lived. If a euphoric narrative creates the illusion of social harmony, this can only be done by repressing and hiding existing antagonisms. These, however, continue to press, and little by little they return even stronger, weakening the constructed illusion. All this euphoria began to deflate after a missed penalty kick 44 minutes after the return to the World Cup. Although the national team had some ‘bad luck’ (or inexperience) during the first two matches and that they only won the match in which they played the worst, it is clear that the euphoric narrative (as well as the majority of economic projects that guide the Peruvian economy) is fundamentally short-sighted. However, when the national team was already out of the World Cup, the well-known Spanish actor Antonio Banderas wrote a message that very soon went viral (also euphorically) through all social networks:

Perú queda eliminado practicando un juego noble y sin miedos en este campeonato del mundo, pero sobre todo respaldado por una de las mejores aficiones que jamás se haya visto en un mundial. Ante ellos me quito el sombrero. ¡Grande selección de Perú! ¡Grande Perú!

(Peru has been eliminated playing with a fair and fearless style in this world championship, but above all backed by some of the best fans ever seen in a world championship. To them I take off my hat. Go Peru’s national team! Go Peru!)²⁵

The Peruvian fans in Russia captivated the attention of the international press because the group was one of the largest attending the World Cup. Citizens from different parts of the country and Peruvians living in many parts of the world juggled their finances so as not to miss the supposed success of the Peruvian national team. The media also invested a lot of money sending not only sports journalists but also show business figures who, suddenly, became reporters and appeared in Russia covering the World Cup. Many people today accused of corruption (congressmen, supreme judges and different authorities) asked for a licence to attend the World Cup and unashamedly published their photos on Facebook or Instagram. Sometime later, Peruvians learned that the Peruvian Football Federation distributed and resold courtesy tickets in exchange for political and judicial favours from Peruvian politicians.

This spectacle seems very fitting to reflect once again on the processes of national identity construction and affect. In a context of social and political crisis, popular culture is the field where this journey is sublimated in the midst of broader processes within the neoliberal society. Neoliberalism, to be hegemonic, must simulate and perform the existence of community. Although it is clear that its entire economic and cultural project aims at weakening the community (through the destruction of social organizations, privatization, and the transformation of all social life into a market or, in other words, the pure reification of life via the merchandise exchange value), neoliberalism also needs to produce the fantasy of identity and social harmony. In fact, Alfredo Ferrero, a former minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism, went so far as to maintain the following:

Hay dos cosas que unen al peruano: la gastronomía y el fútbol. Es un tema de mercadeo del país, es un tema de las lecciones que nos puede dar el fútbol para los niños en el tema del trabajo en equipo, en el liderazgo y la inteligencia emocional.

(There are two things that unite Peruvians: gastronomy and football. It is a marketing issue for the country, it is an issue of the lessons that football can teach children in relation to teamwork, leadership and emotional intelligence.)²⁶

However, less than a month after the end of the World Cup, the Peruvian political situation was once again immersed in another serious social crisis. Not an example of ‘teamwork’. A prominent research centre (Ideele reporters) was bringing to light audiotapes that revealed new types of corrupt deals. The added problem was that among those implicated was none other than Edwin Oviedo, President of the Peruvian Football Federation, who (currently in prison) is today accused of being the mediated author of the murders of two union leaders of the Tumán sugar factory in northern Peru. The prosecutor’s office verified that the criminal gang known as the ‘Wachiturros del Norte’ (Northern Wachiturros) engaged in shooting practice on properties belonging to Oviedo and that the only one who benefited from such deaths was he himself, a very successful businessman. Moreover, everything became even more dramatic when another of the audiotapes revealed that Teófilo Cubillas, the most famous figure in the history of Peruvian football, interceded with a well-known magistrate (now detained in Spain) in favour of Carlos Burgos, one of the most corrupt mayors of recent years, sentenced to 16 years in prison, but now on the run and whose whereabouts are unknown.

And yet, after 44 years, Peru made it to the Copa América’s final, only to lose 3–1 against the host nation, Brazil, in the Estádio do Maracanã in July 2019. But let’s return then to the beginning of this essay: the sculpture of coach Ricardo Gareca and the player Paolo Guerrero is, in short, a symbol that is not only linked to a football success in qualifying for the World Cup but also to broader cultural processes in a fractured society with several crises and antagonisms. We maintain that the sculpture, like any euphoric narrative, operates as a compensation and a mandate. As compensation, because it proposes to imagine the community in a context of disintegration, and as a mandate because, in the framework of a sharp social deterioration, it tries to guide the citizens, in a disciplined and seductive way, through a teleology of success and pleasure under the neoliberal paradigm.²⁷

Conclusions

In July 2018, we asked a group of neighbours at the Argentina Park about the sculpture. The sample included four boys aged about 15 who were playing football in the park; a 45-year-old man and a 75-year-old man; a 40-year-old woman; and a couple of women aged 36 and 24. To the boys, the sculpture seemed like a ‘good idea’ because they felt part of that narrative of optimism and collective effort. However, the 36- and 24-year-old women argued that the sculpture personified too much in the coach and captain and that the rest of the players had become invisible. They then reflected on the future of the sculpture when the World Cup was over. What meaning did this sculpture have for neighbours and the country after the euphoria of football competition? These interviewees reflected on how it was not, in fact, about people who had achieved a remarkable success for the nation, but a bet for the future based on a non-existent certainty.

We could say that, in a similar way to the functioning of the stock markets, a euphoric narrative is in charge of carrying out a kind of future stock exchange operation based on a predicted profit. Trust in a company or a product needs first the engineering of consent. In the case of the sculpture, then-mayor Eduardo Bless took advantage of the rising value of the football team to make a risky and, even more so, cynical bet. Ultimately, the weakness of institutions are today presented as an unequivocal symptom of the transformation of the state into a ‘zombie’ entity.²⁸ The Peruvian state has become an increasingly impotent and dead category, but that is kept alive in the political discourse.

In any case, one fact has caught the attention of the public and the press in recent months: during the social protests that showed support for prosecutors committed to the fight against corruption, that is, in the midst of citizen demonstrations against the congressmen that repeatedly shielded corrupt prosecutor Chávarry, the Peruvian national team barra (fans), known as ‘la blanquiroja’, decided to take the streets and be part of the protests. In their Twitter account they published the following:

Está prohibido callarse, prohibido mirar. Hoy se alza la voz y se protesta. Rescatemos la democracia y la justicia: Con nuestro país no se juega. Somos Perú y estamos de vuelta. Toma la Calle. Fuera Chávarry.

(It is not allowed to be silent, not allowed to watch. Today you raise your voice and protest. Let’s rescue democracy and justice: You don’t play with our country. We are Peru and we are back. Take the street. Out with Chávarry.)²⁹

While barras bravas are the most important when investigating hooliganism as they are continuously at the forefront of violent events in football in Latin America,³⁰ the Peruvian barra’s social commitment joining the demonstrations against congressmen questions, precisely, violence as the only common denominator that defines them. This is but an example of the cultural identities elicited through sports, pointing towards football as a tool for social transformation.

The nation takes shape through celebrations in which glory and/or suffering are shared (Renan), but football demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to overflow that process to the field of euphoria. As Carlos Aguirre has pointed out in his analysis of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary, citizen participation was ‘important but not particularly euphoric […] the commemoration of the 150th anniversary did not generate a wave of nationalist enthusiasm comparable, for example, to that which Peruvians had experienced only a year earlier as a result of the national team’s footballing successes’.³¹

We can conclude, then, that a euphoric narrative sets the scene for several differentiated dynamics: it signals a mandate, sustains an ideology associated with an economic project, shows a set of cultural tendencies but, above all, emerges as a kind of symbolic compensation in a state of acute social crisis. When the Head of Education, Culture and Sports of the Municipality of San Miguel, Carlos Pino, was asked about the meaning of the sculpture, his response was as follows: ‘Beyond an expense, we believe that the statue is something inspiring, which allows us to tell a story.’³² Through this essay, we hope to have contributed to enrich this story.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Patricia Oliart for her insightful comments in the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement no. 645666.

Notes

1. Alabarces, ‘Football and Stereotypes’, 554. Football in Latin America has been analysed as one of the most potent unifying devices in the region. If we take the case of Colombia, presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002), Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) and Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) faced a common social and political crisis marked by the negotiations between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ongoing fight against the drug cartels. Watson (2018) has argued that of the three presidents Santos developed the most effective strategy, using football as a model for collective life. The ‘footballisation of society’ (Bromerger) unfolded through a series of campaigns, such as ‘Golombiao’, ‘Fútbol por la paz’ (Football for peace) and ‘Me la juego por las víctimas’ (I play for the victims), but, crucially, through passing legislation responding to revelations of criminal and paramilitary involvement in football clubs as well as fan violence in and around stadiums. Watson argues that the legislation included the Ley del Fútbol (Law 1445, 12 May 2011) and the Plan Decenal de Seguridad, Comodidad y Convivencia (2014–2024). The Santos government has sponsored several social projects widening opportunities for the young through education and football, cleverly using Colombian football stars influence playing abroad, such as Real Madrid’s James Rodríguez, to develop initiatives promoting sports and peace, which benefit all parties involved. This purposive political investment in football as a tool for social transformation has demonstrated football’s potential for social development, although according to Watson, this can only happen when everyone involved in engendering a more patriotic sentiment through football (the media, commercial interests, politics and the public) can benefit either politically, economically or socially. Hardly anyone would question football is a national symbol in Peru. There are plenty of emotive feats such as the 4–2 win against Austria in the 1936 Olympic Games with a racially diverse team outraging Hitler in the audience, or the 1975 Copa America’s win. But it is still to be seen if the political investment in football has a similar transformative potency in Peru.

2. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 17.

3. González Olarte, Neoliberalismo a la peruana.

4. Žižek, El sublime objeto.

5. Hall, ‘Notes on deconstructing’, 443.

6. Panfichi, Fútbol: identidad, violencia & racionalidad, 18, our transaltion.

7. See among others, Aguirre 2013; Bellos 2002; Goldblatt 2008; Ismer; 2011; Llopis Goig 2008; Miller and Crolley 2007; Quiroga 2013, 2017; Panfichi 1994, 2018 [2008]; Wood 2005, 2017; Wood, Elsey and Brown 2018.

8. Sullivan, ‘Collective emotions’, 383.

9. Von Scheve and Ismer, ‘Towards a Theory of Collective Emotions’, 406.

10. Panfichi. Interview by Juan Cominges, 27 June 2018, accessed 8 May 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJZZqVBqyKs.

11. Panfichi, ‘Otra mirada deportiva’. For some, this announced the third golden era for Peruvian football as Witzig (2018) predicted: ‘There is a gap of 31 years between the first epoch (1933–1939) and the second (1970–1978), therefore the next golden age could begin in 2009; just before the 2010 World Cup’ (existen 31 años de diferencia entre la primera época (1933–1939) y la segunda (1970–1978), por lo tanto la siguiente época dorada podría empezar en el 2009; justo antes de la Copa Mundial 2010), 325.

12. Stephens has studied in ‘The affective atmospheres of nationalism’ the London 2012 Olympic Games as an ‘extraordinary atmosphere’ that generated a short period of happy flag-waving.

13. García Llorens, ‘El discurso del Perro del hortelano’, 2010.

14. See article in El Tiempo and notice the signs on the fighter jets: ‘Vamos Peru’. https://eltiempo.pe/jets-la-fap-vuelan-cerca-del-hotel-donde-se-aloja-nueva-zelanda/.

15. See Pizarro’s comments here: https://rpp.pe/lima/actualidad/representante-de-panini-en-10-dias-hay-una-situacion-de-escasez-porque-no-habia-manera-de-calcular-esto-noticia-1115101.

16. Alejandro Quiroga (2017), in an article analysing the sporting successes of the national football team in Spain (European champions in 2008 and 2012 and World Cup winners in 2010) in contrast to the precarious situation in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, uses the term ‘narratives of success’ (narrativas de éxito) to refer to these as emotional palliatives and compensation mechanisms.

17. In Watson, ‘Colombia’s Political Football’, 605.

18. Wong and Trumper in Watson, ‘Colombia’s Political Football’, 605.

19. Jara, El camino a Rusia, 29.

20. Ibid., 52.

21. Bauman and Bordoni, State of Crisis.

22. Debord, La sociedad del espectáculo.

23. Lacan, Los escritos, 161.

24. Žižek, El sublime objeto, 55.

25. Antonio Banderas’s comments are available here: https://depor.com/mundial/seleccion-peruana/seleccion-peruana-antonio-bandera-elogio-aliento-hincha-peruano-mundial-rusia-78396. ³³

26. Alfredo Ferrero’s comments available in Peru21: https://peru21.pe/voz21/rusia-2018-seleccion-peruana-alfredo-ferrero-hay-dos-cosas-unen-peruano-gastronomia-futbol-413873.

27. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria.

28. Beck and Willms. Conversations with Ulrich Beck, 51–52.

29. The comments available here: https://diariocorreo.pe/edicion/lima/barra-oficial-la-blanquirroja-apoyo-protestas-contra-el-fiscal-pedro-chavarry-862349/.

30. Duke and Crolley, ‘Fútbol, Politicians’, 99–100.

31. Aguirre, ‘¿La segunda liberación?’, 64–65. Peru reached the quarterfinals in Mexico’s World Cup, losing against the eventual winners, Brazil.

32. ‘Más allá de un gasto, creemos que la estatua es algo inspirador, que nos permite contar una historia.’ El Comercio 11 July 2018. https://elcomercio.pe/lima/obras/san-miguel-invirtio-s-20-mil-estatuas-paolo-guerrero-ricardo-gareca-noticia-535023.