ATWhen the Women’s World Cup kicks off on July 20 in New Zealand and Australia, and a few weeks before the European Women’s Flag Football Championships in Ireland, the development of women’s sport plays a central role in the evolution of representations.
Sport, like cinema, literature and art in general, through the images it creates, opens up many possibilities on the multiple ways of being in the world, on game, cognitive and relational intelligences between individuals. “Football is a stupid game for smart people”often reminds the vice-captain of the Italian team, Elena Linari, proof that this sport, far from the clichés conveyed, requires great intelligence.
Sport is fundamental in the construction of future generations, in the representation of all the ways of being in a society, and it is precisely by being aware of this and in order to promote inclusion that amateur teams have developed such as the Lupi, in Rome, or the Dégommeuses, in France.
One could say to oneself, in a period when access to resources is under great tension, when shortages of all kinds are multiplying, and when production and achievement through work are almost the only elements valued in an individual, that there would be no room for the superfluous, and therefore doubt the usefulness of all that is entertainment. However, it is in this particular context that culture and sport are fundamental to maintaining the links between individuals.
A soft power weapon
And sport has a political role here, not in a necessarily partisan sense, but in the etymological, primary sense of the word: the link between citizens and the organization of the city. It allows us to reconnect with our bodies, with everything that makes human beings not robots at the service of the production of consumer goods, but that they can also create other spaces, of pleasure, of being together, for the public, for play, for the collective, for oneself.
It is perhaps paradoxical to point out this need in a period when certain sports have never generated so many profits, such as men’s football. But isn’t this, as pleasant as it may be, a reflection of the gap that is widening between the ultra-rich and the rest of the population? Has it not above all become a weapon of soft power, at the same time as a magnifying mirror of the elitism of today’s societies? Those who succeed perceive in a year what they do not need to accumulate for their entire life, and those who fail find it difficult to survive.
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