In Football, It’s Sometimes Better to Be Lucky Than Good

The unearthing this past week of a Red Sox jersey secretly buried by a Boston construction worker at the site of the new Yankee stadium was a humorous reminder of the lengths some will go to sway the tide of luck, good and bad, in professional sport. Curses within baseball have existed for years (Bambino and Billy Goat immediately come to mind), and whether or not they have any sort of impact on the final score at the end of the day, the fact is that many believe them to be true.

In football, such curses are no different, and in Argentina, where the game is ingrained into the national psyche, fans will do anything to insure their club comes out on top, and that includes jinxing their biggest rival. Just ask one particular Primera side about hexes, and you may start believing them yourself.

Racing Club de Avellaneda, one of the “Big 5″ in Argentinian football, is a massively supported club with a rich history filled with local and international titles, yet they endured a disastrous 35-year drought during the last half of the 20th Century where they failed to win the league, were relegated to the second division, and nearly went bankrupt after being almost 42 million dollars in debt. Could this horrific run of form been simply caused by bad luck, or were other forces involved?

Legend maintained that the club’s most hated rivals, Independiente, had actually buried 7 black cats within Racing’s stadium, El Cilindro. As the story went, Independiente fans (who just so happened to be called the red devils) snuck into the stadium during the night and buried the dead cats in 1967, the last year Racing won the title. Though the story remained an urban legend (player Fernando Quiroz admitted that it made it a bit frightened), by the late 1990’s, no other reason for such misery could be found. On February 14th, 1998, club President Daniel Lalín decided to take a drastic measure, organizing an “exorcism” and to remove the cats. Over one hundred thousand fans filled the Cilindro for a bizarre ceremony featuring former players dressed in all-white togas, with “priests” sprinkling holy water over the goalposts to raucous cheers. But despite every effort, not all the cats were found.

The club’s fortunes worsened on and off the pitch. Finally, coach Reinaldo Merlo had had enough. As described in David Goldblatt’s, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, “…Merlo ordered the digging up of a moat that had been concreted over. There lay the seventh black cat.” The result? In 2002 Racing won the local title, their first in 35 agonizing years. And if you think it was just coincidence, just consider that 5 years for each cat buried comes out to, yup, 35 years.

Racing may need to keep digging. This season La Academia have been an unmitigated disaster. They have only managed a meager 8 points from 11 matches, were forced to play one game behind closed doors after crowd trouble, and are dangerously close to the relegation zone. However there is one possible bright spot during these troubling times for Racing. It just so happens that Independiente are in the process of rebuilding their new stadium. If they can’t make their own luck, Racing may just try their own version of, reverse the curse.

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Category: South America, World Football