The Chain Will Be Unbroken
Most of the time, a number is just a number. In soccer, it's anything but that.
Harry Houdini began his magic career as a sleight of hand artist, a traditional magician making cards disappear and appear again where they should not be. This is the most common type of magic around, still, to this day: magic that’s primary concern is the question “how.” It traffics in curiosity. The people watching know they’re being fooled, know the answers to how what’s unfolded before them are inches away from them, and yet the “how” question remains a mystery, smoke in their grasp.
Houdini, however, wasn’t great at cards. He was fine. A perfectly acceptable illusionist. But he wasn’t great at it, and it quickly lost his attention. He became obsessed with escapes, the acts which built his career as one of the most legendary magicians of all time. Handcuffs, straitjackets, live burials, ropes and cords and chains— people flocked to see what Houdini would get out of next. And the “how” question did remain, certainly. But his appeal had changed, as Houdini continued to up the ante and perform escapes that were more dangerous. The interest in the magic shifted. Suddenly the “how” was no longer the most important question, and even if it was, it was easy enough to figure out: Houdini found the pressure points and bends to pop open cuffs, sucked in as much breath as he could when being bound to give himself wiggle room, hid lock picks in his shoes and sleeves and palms. In this magic act, the “how” was, more or less, what most would expect it to be. Instead, people came for a different question: “will he or won’t he?” Does he make it out of this one? Will he live or does he die? The danger, the shock, the simple yes/no question. It made Houdini one of the most obvious and compelling magicians to ever live.
When Diego Maradona left us, he left us a magician in the school of Houdini: not necessarily to our surprise or curiosity, but to our shock, nonetheless. We knew it could happen, and could probably even work out how it would happen, given the way he lived. But the weight of the occurrence itself still drew our collective gasp, and then our grief, inexorably drawn to the man in his death as we had been in his life. The spectacle of Maradona was as joyful as it was cruel, at times. Spectators seemed to revel in his struggles with addiction, weight, and family drama as much as they did his forceful talent on the field. But it’s impossible to deny the man was incandescent, a beacon that we were all drawn to, throughout his entire life.
This is not a eulogy for Diego Maradona. For one, I don’t know nearly enough about him to properly eulogize him. The majority of his playing career occurred before I even existed, and he was never a player I personally idolized or tried to imitate. For another, many existing eulogies and thoughts on the man seem to be long-winded exercises in figuring out how to say “he was a flawed human being,” which is a journalistic bombshell on par with revealing the wetness of water or the bigness of Texas. We know. He made a slanty-eye gesture towards some South Korean fans at the 2018 World Cup in a self-described effort of racial bonding. He refused to acknowledge his son Diego for nearly twenty years. He is a man who made mistakes, although it seems to me no greater or more frequent mistakes than many other people. Much of the veiled Maradona-bashing is the whingeing of players and pundits still sore that the man got one over on them or their team, legally or otherwise.
Suffice it to say, Maradona was a phenomenal player, a magician in the great school of “will he or won’t he,” a man just as likely to throw a punch as he was to score on you in jaw-dropping fashion. And he was a human, much like other humans, with their faults and flights of fancy. Simple as that. Besides, if you want a eulogy, there are far better ones out there than I can write, like here and here. Do his faults cancel out his achievements? That’s entirely for you to decide for yourself, although I do not think a decision either way gives you the right to police other people’s grief.
This is not a eulogy for Maradona. It’s a talk about traditions, and shared histories. It’s a yarn, a chain. It’s about gods and men and the numbers that connected them. And it’s about a really, really terrible idea.
Retiring numbers feels like a very particularly American tradition to me, although I will freely admit I do not know much about the practice of retiring numbers in non-American sports. And yes, teams and leagues retiring numbers is special in its own way. I think about Mariano Rivera’s last appearance in baseball, one of the best pitchers of all time, with a MLB career stretching back to 1995, when he was given the number 42 by the Yankees. The number would be retired league-wide in 1997 in honor of Jackie Robinson, but active players with the number were allowed to keep wearing it, meaning Rivera was the last ever player in the league to wear the 42 when he stepped off the mound in 2013. In a way, it was a moment where the game stretched back half a century, where the past and present collided in a moment of chance and wonder. Like the dead were whispering to us.
The number 42, for various reasons, carries its fair share of weight. And there was power in watching it finally pass on.
Soccer is fundamentally different than most American sports. The USA, the land of excess, with its sports numbers stretching from a double zero all the way up to 99, has plenty of numbers to go around. What’s the harm in giving up a few for a legend or two along the way? Plenty more to choose from. By comparison, the squad numbers in normal use around the world of soccer rarely rise above 30, with a few exceptions here and there (academy players in Mexico making their way into the first team can be spotted with three-digit numbers, and then, of course, there’s also MLS). There’s not as many numbers to go around most places, and that’s just the least important reason that retiring number 10 is a bad idea.
The numbers you see on a soccer field, you most likely already know, strongly correlate to the positions being played by those numbers. The Goalkeeper is No. 1. The right back is No. 2. The striker is No. 9. The defensive midfielder is No. 6. So on. Those don’t always line up, and more frequently these days they do not, but the number alignments on the field still occur often enough for those numbers to be recognizable as those positions. When someone talks about “a classic Number 9,” they are never talking about a center back, even if there is a center back out there that has regrettably been allowed to wear the number nine. That’s all thanks to how players used to be assigned numbers: every player starting for a team was assigned a number in order, from one to eleven. The goalkeeper got 1, the right back got 2, the center back next to them got three; you get the drift. Everyone was numbered in order of where they played on the field, and since it took a while for soccer to implement the use of substitutes in a game, you didn’t have to worry about any other numbers. Eleven numbers for eleven players. That’s it.
This means that as time progressed and legends came and went, their exploits being told to the generations after them, “retiring” certain numbers never become a vogue practice for soccer clubs. It did and still does occur, from time to time, but it remains uncommon, even for American soccer clubs (there is, as far as I can see, only one club outside of the United States that has retired a number in honor of an American, and it’s AEL of Larissa, Greece, who retired the number 24 in honor of… Kobe Bryant).
Instead, a different tradition began in the game: those numbers worn by the greats were passed down, with all the history and weight of expectations carried in them. Goalkeepers describe that No. 1 with something approaching fanaticism. To say the No. 9 shirt at any given club is “coveted” is putting things lightly. And yes, more and more detractors emerge these days, and we see midfielders wearing No. 4 and strikers wearing No. 17 and the like, but plenty still relish the challenge and responsibility of taking on a famous number.
And no number is more famous than the number 10.
Maradona. Messi. Pele. Ronaldinho. Baggio. Hagi. Marta. Cruyff. Throughout soccer’s history, the best players in the world have frequently worn the No. 10. Like the other numbers, that began as simple positional designation. The 10 was one of the most advanced players on the field, traditionally playing a free role that allowed them to roam between the midfield and the forward line as an attacker. If the numbering order was reversed, and whoever decided how positions should be numbered started with the attackers instead of the goalkeepers, perhaps these attacking midfielders would have worn two or three, and the number nomenclature surrounding tactical talk would be completely different. But they got No. 10, and so the No. 10 became famous, as the person playing in the No. 10 position was frequently the best attacker on the team, and therefore, the most exciting.
Time being time and change being inevitable, those positional distinctions faded away in favor of simply assigning numbers, but the 10 remained as the greatest number one could possibly wear on the field. No longer bound to it, player after player chose to take it on themselves. Now, taking the No. 10 on any team is a statement, a declaration of self-belief, an announcement: I am the No. 10. I am the one you need to look out for.
Retiring the No. 10 in honor of Maradona is a notion spurred on by something noble, a wish to honor someone who was great. But erasing the 10 from the shirts of those living in the present robs the game of a quality that most other sports can only reach out and stretch for, and even then, just barely graze with their knuckles, like Mariano Rivera taking off that 42 for the last time: the ability to speak to the dead. Every player that puts on the 10 pays tribute to every great 10 that came before them, and at the same time, write their own story, and subtly change the way the next generation will see the 10.
When I was a kid, my 10 was Ronaldinho, a magician of curiosity and wonder. I spent hours trying to replicate the things he did on the field, feats of speed and balance and almost preternatural manipulation of the ball that I could only begin to figure out. He passed his 10 to Messi at Barcelona, who possesses many of the same jaw-dropping characteristics, but with his own take. Where Ronaldinho often seemed to do things on the field simply to delight in the things he could do, there’s an efficiency to Messi’s game that Ronaldinho could never hope to replicate. And why would he ever want to? It would make him less fun, less awe-inspiring, less fundamentally himself. And Messi has no need of being Ronaldinho, either, a king of excess whose delights often got the better of him, on and off the field. Career upon career, the story of the No. 10 continues to unfold, to shift, to wind its way around the field with skill and ease and a history that’s impossible to replicate.
Retiring the 10 might honor Maradona, sure. But in a way, it kills him a second time. Because ultimately, there’s no greater honor than seeing others inspired to take on your number because of the things you did with it. And when Messi scored that goal against Osasuna, it wasn’t simply writing another chapter in the story of the 10. It was speaking to the dead, and the dead speaking back. It was another link in the chain.
There’s a very old hymn called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” that at different times in it’s century-long life has been a blues song, a country anthem, and a worship chorus, among other things. It intrigues me because it’s been sung by so many vastly different people and in very different ways, but more and more, artists always seem to come back around to it.
I’m also intrigued by its typical use as a song of worship, because it’s a song of grief, about a mother being carried away in a hearse, and loved ones dying. The title of the song is an open question to God: “will the circle be unbroken / by and by Lord, by and by?” The original 1907 hymn takes it a step further, not affirming that a better home is certainly awaiting in heaven like Johnny Cash’s more popular version does, but again asking the question: “is a better home awaiting / in the sky, in the sky?”
I think those are a couple fair questions to ask of God, all things considered. I do understand why it’s sung as an act of worship, however. It’s ultimately a song of hopefulness, that the people who have left us will be seen again, and that the ones we’ll eventually leave behind will do likewise. That the song was sung before we were born and it will be sung after we are dead. That the circle really is unbroken, after all.
The song feels fitting here because of the circumstances under which I write these thoughts, and how I’ve attempted to reconcile those thoughts, in my typical ramshackle way: by talking about magicians and soccer players and numbers and a hymn, all in a bid to talk about life and death and the way that we’re connected with the people that came before us, and hopefully, those that follow us, too. And Diego Maradona always seemed to be just a little bit more than a man, if not quite a god, so what’s the harm in a little revival chorus?
I love soccer’s numbers. I love their history and their weight, the way they inform everything a player does, and at the same time, the way the player informs the way we talk about not just them, but the number itself. I love the conversation the numbers of today’s game have with those of the past, and the ghosts they conjure on the field whenever we see a Cruyff turn or a bicycle kick or a deity lending a hand to a player not quite tall enough to reach a ball with their head. And I would hate to see that tradition and conversation die out in international soccer in a misguided attempt to honor a player.
I don’t want to remember Maradona. I want to hear him speak. And when I see Lionel Messi dance past defenders, quick, incisive touches that bring them millimeters from swiping the ball away before he’s gone, vanished, escaped, like Harry Houdini from an inescapable box, I think I can hear Diego.
I think he’s laughing.
Dude, this was beautiful.