Fútbol In Costa Rica - Part II: Knocking The Giant Off The Mountaintop

By: Paul-Denys Calixte

Soccer City FC is honored to present our summer series -- Fútbol In Costa Rica. Harvard student, Paul-Denys Calixte, graciously agreed to offer up some cultural insight regarding how the game impacts the people, from the individual to the nation as a whole. In 2009, he is studying abroad at the Universidad de Costa Rica. His series will run throughout the summer. He can be reached via email at pcalixte[@]fas.harvard.edu

I should be straightforward with the goal of this entry beforehand: although it is intended to be a recap of encounters I experienced revolving around last Wednesday’s match between Costa Rica and the US, the game itself will receive short mention since you could have (and probably did) watch it live. Instead, with the benefit of staying in the country to witness the national reaction to yet another comprehensive victory at home over the US, I will share what I found on how the people themselves approached, contemplated and reacted to the only World Cup qualifier that took place that day.

Whether or not Costa Ricans see the US National Team and clubs as rivals is a question that will be addressed later on in the series (July 4th edition!), but in the two months leading up to the game, everyone who I met eagerly discussed possible outcomes. For instance, most of my classmates had confidence that Costa Rica would win – as one described it, the Estadio Saprissa serves as the "Tico bunker" in which the national team is expected to gain points no matter who they play – but they just as readily pointed out the gulf in footballing experience between the players of the respective national teams. Avid followers of the European game, they lamented the fact that some US players, such as Michael Bradley and Clint Dempsey, managed to gain key roles on teams in the more prominent leagues, while their better players who chose to go abroad ended up in places like Switzerland and Norway. I remember specifically a point that one classmate made in my course on the Theory of International Relations: "What a shame that your goalkeeper plays in England and ours can’t even get a starting job over here!"

None of that deterred their belief, though – in fact, in my soccer class one teammate was willing to bet me that Costa Rica would beat the US here and in DC during this qualifying series. And the man who runs a fruit market near the university’s sports complex also had confidence in a local victory, although he pointed out that "we always beat you guys here and you always beat us when we go over there, so it’s even." But the day before the match, pragmatism seemed to set in for some – while I ate lunch at the San Pedro Mall, I overheard the rare moment of a man openly admitting to his friend that he anticipated Costa Rica losing the match; and when I went to class that day, a female classmate asked me, "¿nos van a ganar?" Just like the optimistic majority, though, they felt that the match would be close, a reflection of the fact that at the time, only one point kept the United States above Costa Rica at the top of the qualifying table.

However, no equivalent of this cautious approach to the game could be found in the national media. In the days leading up to it, newspapers sported bold (literally and figuratively) headlines reminding Tico and gringo alike how much psychological pressure the stadium put on the US National Team and its effect on the outcome of past matches. To be more specific, they made no reference to the condition of the pitch – since Deportivo Saprissa and "la Sele" play all of their home matches on the same turf, and since the visiting team had a chance to practice on similar terrain in Miami before flying in, no one considered it a crucial factor. Rather, the sheer passion and vibrancy of Costa Rica’s fans, led by the same "Ultra Morada" that normally occupies the South end of the stadium for both club (Saprissa) and country, was expected to intimidate the US into submission – certainly the location of the visiting dressing room, below this very section, played into this tactic. The two competing national TV networks, Repretel and Teletica, followed the same trend; they both showed the goals from the last time the US played here with every mention of the upcoming game, and in the Sports section of Repretel’s nightly news, they even included a serious report on phantoms that haunted the visiting dressing room that would disrupt American preparations.

Given such hysteria from the press and public interest in the game, one expected that it would be a sell-out. And it was…only none of the people with whom I had talked about it thought to buy tickets until a week and a half beforehand, by which time all the ones available from legitimate vendors (including the Banco Nacional, one of the biggest banks in the country) had all be sold. Because everyone who knows me here finds out very quickly about my interest in the game, at this time (the week-and-half before the qualifier), I received a lot of questions about where to get tickets; I did not find it surprising that fellow American exchange students at la UCR (the University of Costa Rica) waited so long to look for them, but even locals asked me if I knew whether places like the Mall in Tibás (where the stadium is physically located) or specialticket.com still had some available. To explain this, I should draw a distinction: not all Costa Ricans are hardcore fans that must attend every match that they can, but on the other hand, they treat every national team game like a Super Bowl, to the point that even those who have no interest in the sport whatsoever still carries an opinion on how la Sele is doing.

I should note that on the day of the match, in the suburb of Sabanilla where I live and at the university, nothing outside the normal splattering of national-team jerseys gave the slightest indication that a game was about to take place. And before I took the bus to go to San José, only my classmates playfully razzed me over wearing US Soccer attire. But once I got to the center of the capital, from which I would take a bus with a friend to Tibás, I quickly caught wind of the excitement building up – on the walk to the bus-stop, I passed by several street vendors listening to pregame banter on their radios, and on a TV screen in McDonalds I could see reporters outside the stadium talking to the more colorful among fans of both sides. Of course, to get there I could always have taken a taxi, which at most would have cost around $6, but I decided to take the bus in all but seven or eight other people were clad in red. In spite of that, I did not receive so much as a hostile look for opening supporting the away team, nor did anyone of the hundreds of Costa Ricans outside the stadium harass my friend and an I as we walked towards the East end where we bought tickets.

The security at the Estadio Saprissa deserves special mention: due to the sanction imposed on the stadium after a coin-throwing incident in a CONCACAF Champions Cup match against Atlante last year, a long list of items are not permitted, including umbrellas, coins, and batteries. However, my friend and I had attended both of Costa Rica’s games against Honduras and El Salvador beforehand, and both times we remembered seeing people taking pictures with cameras, so we thought that perhaps they made an exception. That did not end up being the case; but as soon as a female security guard found the camera in my friend’s purse, she told both of us aside and she explained to us that if we put the camera near a "sensitive" part of the body where they would not check, we could bring it in.

Once we entered, we found the first people holding a US flag and sat next to them…at this point, one could bring forth a legitimate concern: if my goal is to share with you about the local fútbol scene, why would I spare a moment to talk about US fans? Because the first two that we saw, believe it or not, were Costa Rican through and through, born and raised here. As one of them explained to me, when he was growing up he constantly heard the insults that his parents reserved for players on the US National Team and he ended up "adopting" them as a reaction. The other 99.991% of Costa Ricans in the stadium, of course, came to support their own national team, but they also never got more hostile with the away fans than whistling down any "USA, USA!" chant we could muster. This included maintaining a respectful silence for the US national anthem – after having drowned out the Honduran one in the first game of the Hexagonal, the PA announcer made a point of asking fans not to repeat such antics in their next home qualifier against El Salvador, and since then they have obliged.

What impressed me most about them, though, had to be their organization – as soon as the South end started up any one of four or five chants to support the team, it quickly reverberated throughout the entire stadium, creating the cauldron of sound that not only completely canceled out the few Americans in attendance as a factor, but imposed their will on the game, harassing every US player that touched the ball to the point of draining each one of confidence, while cheering for every good pass or dribble between their team that left the Americans grabbing for air and roaring in celebration for each goal. After the third one, they chanted, "¡Venga, que venga México!", almost arrogantly looking forward to what they hoped would be a greater challenge then that which the feeble US team presented that day.

Until today I have had to hear it from everyone about the demolition that occurred. In my soccer class, my teammates made a point of asking me how the US underachieved so badly; my classmates in the university itself offered me their condolences on Thursday; the man who runs the roast-chicken restaurant near my apartment greeted me with three raised fingers on one hand and one on the other; and on the front page of La Nación the next day was written in characters as large as one of my paragraphs, "Sele lidera 3-1", while in the sports section it praised the "best game of the Kenton era." It is true that now the team has to focus attention on its away game to Trinidad and Tobago this Saturday, but for the past two days the country has maintained a euphoric state after having crushed what many felt was the better team.

Why is the national team so popular? On one hand, the obvious answer does apply here, that in a country where football is number-one and where the team has a legitimate chance of making it to the biggest tournament in sports, la Sele will not want for support. But in the Costa Rican case, beyond the surface of interest in winning games is an outlet in which everyone feels free to express pride in the country. One cannot really perceive this aspect of Costa Rican culture except through extended exposure, but at a national level there is a widespread sense of malaise. On a cultural level, they have experienced great changes in the last 20 years as a result of increases in immigration and tourism – as a teacher in my Spanish class mentioned, in the 80s the average Costa Rican would have had no idea what a pupusa is, whereas now in the center of San José there are many more US, Nicaraguan or Salvadoran restaurants than ones serving local food. And in politics, there exists a crisis of governability, with only one of the two traditional parties still in existence (the Partido de Liberación Nacional, founders of La Nación and the party of the current president Óscar Arias), almost constant deadlock in the Legislature, a complete lack of control with gun- and drug-related violence that festers amongst the poverty and stagnation in the "forgotten" province of Limón on the Caribbean coast, and the youth either leaving the big parties for lack of a sense of "representation" or resigning themselves to apathy. So the national team provides all Costa Ricans a chance to live out the "Pura Vida" mantra with which they greet each other, to lay aside their complaints about their present and concerns of the future, and just be proud to be a Tico.

Soccer City FC Summer Series: Fútbol In Costa Rica

Part I - Fútbol In Costa Rica - Part I: Who Am I And What Do I See