Children of Girueta and the Wastelands of Football for All - Andrei Mihail

Football can be more than a sport. Obviously, playing football can help improve the health of city dwellers. Accessible pitches, modernized facilities, or well-trained coaches can harness the sport’s popularity to get people to play it. But there is a further effect of football to consider. The beautiful game can strongly contribute to repairing the social health of the cities we live in. The football pitch has a unique ability to bring together people from different social backgrounds. Unfortunately, in twenty-first-century Bucharest, the chances that people from diverse backgrounds interact on the neighborhood football pitches are almost null. The rental prices or the costs of football training for children are prohibitive for a significant number of people, with this leading to a very high level of homogeneity of the sport. As my research on Bucharest’s neighborhood stadiums shows, things have went downhill at great speed after 1989. In this regard, the city has a lot to learn from its recent past. A number of the small-sized workers’ stadiums built in Bucharest’s areas of blocks during communism used to work as informal neighborhood centers where residents would gather not only to play football but also to spend their leisure time together, relax, and socialize. Girueta is possibly the most vivid example of this. Unfortunately, the former stadium located in Bucharest’s neighborhood of Berceni, where you could once see people sunbathing in the stands or kids playing in the shade of the tall poplar trees surrounding it, is gone. On the now vacant lot, a supermarket is said to soon take its place. Read by actor Daniel Popa, with an illustration by Ferenczy Andráshttps://theanthro.art/children-of-girueta-and-the-wastelands-of-football-for-all/