In Street Football, Playing Is Winning
 David Vargas - IPS
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Asunción, Paraquay - Football can cause excitement and euphoria, or anger and even aggression, but the Second South American Street Football Championship taking place this week in the Paraguayan capital puts the emphasis on solidarity, fair play and social participation.
Teams from nine South American countries, and two specially invited teams, one from Europe and one from Africa, are participating in the tournament in Asunción where, according to the organisers, the sport is only a vehicle for promoting values that matter more than who wins or loses.
Street football has no referees flashing yellow warning cards or red cards for expulsions. Players must solve their differences on the field through dialogue, with the help of facilitators who are there to remind participants of the spirit of the game, and mediate in analysing moves that are hard to call.
Unlike professional football, where women are confined to the grandstands, in street football, the teams are mixed, with a minimum of one woman on each team.
There is another key difference, too: the team scoring the most goals does not necessarily win the game, because other things matter more than the actual results. Teams agree beforehand on behaviour standards on the field, and points are earned during the match for good conduct, fair play and mutual respect.
In a "third half", the behaviour of the teams is discussed and points are given to the team that showed more solidarity, or committed fewer fouls. Therefore, a team that loses a match on goals scored may collect points if it played well, respected the rules and conducted itself well on the field.
"We’re trying to use football as a means of understanding life, and street football can be an opportunity to build quality of life for young people," Luis Ramírez, the head of the non-governmental Centre for the Development of Intelligence (CDI), which is part of the South American Network of Street Football, told IPS.
The Network is made up of 350 organisations involving more than 18,000 young people in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. South Africa and Germany are also playing in this tournament, as special guests.
The championship is sponsored by the Football for Hope movement, promoted by the International Football Federation (FIFA), and part of the global streetfootballworld network, which has a membership of 250,000 young people worldwide.
The Paraguayan version of street football is called "Partidí" (instead of "partido" or match), a local slang term referring to a spontaneous neighbourhood game with few rules.
The CDI started the Partidí project in 2005 in the Asunción slum neighbourhood of Bañado Sur, on the banks of the Paraguay river.
Gerardo Niela, one of the project’s coordinators, told IPS that during its two years of work there has been a remarkable change among children and teenagers in the local community. "There is less violence in the games they play, they are more interested in school, and respect for women has increased," he said.
"Including women in all aspects of life is important. They start to relate to men as equals. These are fundamental indicators of the essence of what we’re trying to do," he said.
The magical attraction of football, the world’s favourite sport, for all ages is the basic tool used to promote a different set of values among children and young people involved in the project, such as rejecting drugs and alcohol, motivation to take up studying again, looking after one’s body and taking an interest in the community.
"I really like football, but I could see that there was a lot of aggression on the field. Then this street football game appeared, and I got hooked," Luis Enrique Giménez, 18, who got involved with the project with some other friends in the barrio of Santa Ana, on the outskirts of Asunción, told IPS.
Giménez is the current coach of the Paraguayan national street football team, made up of seven boys and two girls. They are defending the South American title they won in the First South American tournament in Buenos Aires, in November 2005.
His experience vouches for him. As well as playing on the winning team in Buenos Aires, he also played in the First Street Football World Festival, held in parallel with the FIFA World Cup in Germany last year.
"We’ve been training every Saturday for a month," Giménez said, although he pointed out that the important thing in this second South American championship "is not winning, but learning. It doesn’t matter if we lose, the main thing is to learn self-control and learn to respect your fellow players. The best thing about it is the experience, meeting people and learning about other cultures."
Every national or international tournament has a slogan, and for the South American championship it is "Everybody plays. Everybody wins."
Apart from the sport, there are artistic activities, a seminar on "Football and Social Transformation", a project exhibition and a Latin American folk festival as the closing event.
The standard-bearer for street football in the region and the world is the Argentine Foundation Defensores del Chaco, which was formed 12 years ago in Moreno, 35 kilometres from Buenos Aires.
"We started on a street corner, with 12 youngsters who were hanging around, just watching life go by. That’s when the idea arose that the barrio could get organised and give them some support," Fernando Leguiza, the national coordinator of Street Football in Argentina, and a member of the Foundation, told IPS.
"The worst of all drugs, apathy, ruled there," he said. Through organising and their own initiative, the young people transformed a waste lot used as an illegal rubbish dump into a cultural centre, with three rooms for workshops and a theatre seating 250 people, with a regulation size football field and a Community Legal Advice Centre.
Street football promoters understand the sport as an educational process.
"We want to mould social actors who are good footballers, but above all who want to influence society. What we say is, ‘competition is great, so long as you look at it as an exchange with others.’ We don’t play against others, but with others. This is a way of shattering old paradigms and building a new culture," Leguiza said.
Street football can be applied in a variety of ways. In Latin America it is used to work on issues like poverty and exclusion, while in Europe it is used, for instance, as a tool to boost the integration of immigrants.
The Kickfair project, begun in 2001 in Germany, seeks to integrate immigrant communities into society through football.
"Using football, we want participants to play as teams, with a fraternal spirit, developing their individuals capabilities, and remembering above all values such as respect, friendship and cooperation," Steffi Biester, coordinator of the project, told IPS.
The German team has only three players, but its fate is already sealed: by participating, they have already won. |
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News from Around the Americas | November 2007 
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