Kvaratskhelia and children’s football

Few players have fallen in love like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia in recent years. At the same time a footballer who “it seems to come from a district where no one lives‘, as Erwin Rohde said of Nietzsche, but also the product of a national school, Georgia’s, acrobatic and creative since Stalin’s time, in contrast to the cold scientificity of Soviet and Lobanovian football – not surprisingly, there were those who li he called “the Brazilians of the Caucasus”, the Georgians.

Kvara is an appearance in Italian and more generally European western football. The libertarian answer to tyranny from football schools to the homogenization of playing styles to the talent built in series. An ancient but modern player, reactionary and revolutionary, selfish (because he’s in love with the ball object like a kid who always wants it around) but utterly altruistic, ultra-competitive and yet who lives and feels football, and in its essence, like a game. Kvara is the revenge of the original, pure, uncontaminated football; the most beautiful game in the world.

His goal against Atalanta was another metaphor: «an archetypal goal – as Marco Ciriello writes this morning – which will score in eternity. He not only marks it once, but forever». Because Kvarachelia is «The last resource of children’s football” The “dribble the logic of efficiency, dribble the patterns, dribble the jersey change in between, dribble the gels and shower gels, dribble the looks at the camera, dribble the postmodern, dribble the useless chatter before and during games, dribble You get the numbers and even the money and dribble becomes epic.

An overhaul of the essence of soccer at two-touch soccer, restoring the epicureanism of a fabulous soccer that he does not care honestly everything».

And we pretended it, e.g carry out At high levels one had to become like them. Like everyone, like everyone else, stop pointing, point again, and get the man drunk. As confessed from his first coach Lado Kakashvili, in Repubblica, has always been Kvara “He had dribbling on his mind, it was a little obsession for him. And we never told him to stopnot to do it, we never locked it into a role». Think if he grew up in an advanced and European football school what we would have missed. With mythomaniac and insane trainers who would have told him to start over, don’t always risk the bet, don’t always take the risk.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the players who make us dream the most today are players who come from the periphery of the world. Just like the two Neapolitans Kvaratskhelia and Osimhen, who also grew up at the Strikers Academy in Lagos and only moved to Europe in 2017 at the age of 19. Wild footballers, authentic footballers, libertarian footballers. A breath of fresh air and a childlike, ancestral joy in today’s football. For unique and unrepeatable players, but paradoxically representatives of all of us.