Vinicius and reptiles | Football | Sport

Conspiracy theories are for losers in the truest sense of the word. Those who have lost money, influence, freedom, an idea, beliefs, a leader, a loved one, even those who have lost the Ballon d’Or are all looking for something or someone to explain the loss. And the culprits could be the CIA, the Lizard Cabal, the Illuminati and UEFA. No matter, creating a narrative with scapegoats to blame for the loss helps calm existential anxiety, like Lexatin without the side effects.

Writer Naomi Klein says conspiracies are a practical solution to injustice. “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong, but they often get the feelings right,” the author writes in his book. Doppelganger: Journey to the Mirror World. This feeling he describes is “the feeling that all human suffering is for someone else’s gain.” When someone loses, someone else usually wins.

Look at the case of Jose Mourinho, a true specialist at squeezing out a sense of injustice from his players and rallying them around it. He does this by always selling them an unbeatable story: us against the world. Against everything, against the referees (his favorite option; remember the list of 13 mistakes he made at the press conference after the game with Sevilla in 2010), against the calendar, against the press, against the grass, against opponents, against international organizations. Javi also has a degree in conspiracy theories covered in excuses. In fact, all of us who have been touched by football have at some point blamed our failures on a higher power. Usually we blame the judicial system, and this is the simplest and, as a rule, more correct. We can almost imagine secret meetings between the torches, led by a hooded Medina Cantalejo, with loyalty tests and a list of banned commands.

This is exactly what some Madrid fans are doing now, reflecting on how an action organized by UEFA, Ceferin, the entire journalistic union, France Football or even some force of nature deprived Vinicius of a well-deserved gold award. Maybe they are right, maybe they punished Vinicius to humiliate Real Madrid. Of course, football is hostage to hidden interests. Or maybe it was just that the professionals who voted for the Ballon d’Or liked Rodri better, who some left at the level of a sixth-division regional footballer for supporting Vinicius. Be that as it may, Real Madrid like to see themselves not just as a team or commercial giant, but also as something of an aristocratic football institution, and the absence of any representative at the gala was a childish tantrum that did not fit that category. I like to think that no one went to the ceremony as a social initiative to avoid a public tantrum from Vinicius, like when you take away a drunk friend’s cell phone to stop her from texting her ex.

Conspiracy theories are powerful for two reasons: the first is that denying them is almost counterproductive, since it only makes the conspirators more convinced that they are right. What I said before: The world is against us! And secondly, because unless they’re about something health-related, like the anti-vaccine movement, they tend to be so ridiculous that they even seem harmless (even though they’re not). Talk of an orchestrated campaign to stop Vinicius winning the Ballon d’Or won’t hurt anyone and, at best, will cause some debate in the comments section of the opinion column. Who doesn’t like a good fable, even if it has little moral.