SOCCER, THE MOST PROLETARIAN of world sports, is also the most literary. This may sound ridiculous—and it is: a literary sport?—but as is natural for the most lived-for and died-for game in history, soccer has us spoiled for choice in the roster of its plaudits. Galeano, Pasolini, Knausgaard, Villoro, Vargas Llosa, and Amis fils have all written about the sport. And why shouldn’t it be so? It’s the world’s metalanguage. Almost anywhere, three things will curry favor in the face of cultural and linguistic barriers: American currency, a proffered pack of cigarettes, or a soccer ball. Only the latter two will gain you true sympathy—and only the last, especially if used with style and skill, will make you a whole new group of friends on the spot. There’s no transaction, but a symbolic exchange does take place: as the ball passes from foot to foot, its punted syllables say, with a kind of cumulative and dissolving warmth—let there be commerce between us.

My point is that soccer’s ubiquity at every level of global society—from a lonely patch of dirt to Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium—bonds it to the stuff of life as well as the sinews of history. This, at the very least, is rich fodder for literature, as The Murmuration (2024; originally published as La parvá in 2015)—the latest novel from Chilean author Carlos Labbé, recently translated by Will Vanderhyden—proves exuberantly.

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The premise of the novel is simple. A treasured soccer commentator in semiretirement is approached on a train crossing the cordillera by a woman, referred to simply as “the director,” who serves in the shadowy heights of the government sports ministry. The year is 1962, they are both Chilean, and, it so happens, Chile is hosting the World Cup. The director attempts to convince the sportscaster to return to the radios and televisions of the Andean nation, shaping the collective narrative of an all-important event through his commentary. He is wary at first but quickly accedes to fate—or, in the face of an offer he could never refuse, its intramundane equivalent, power. The director knows, as the commentator himself puts it, that he has a shamanic gift: he can transform “the mere act of speech [into] part of the surrounding choreography.” But to what end will the state put this unique ability? And where will this potent combination of the spectatorial and the vatic be aimed? Something, we hope, like the collective good.

We do not have to wait long for the answer. It is a conspiratorial no. The point, explains the serene director, is to whip the masses into a “proud, fervent” frenzy and then stick the knife in and twist:

With your narration, the Chilean team will bring the idea that there exists something like Chile to the imminence that our trans-Andean siblings achieved nearly a decade ago, to that state the Prussians attained with their idea of Germany. And when those fans have finally glimpsed the brink, the edge, instead of showing them how to keep climbing, you’ll push them over it, so they fall. We need to lose just when we’re about to win, so the certainty that our fulfillment was within reach and we let it go remains as if imprinted on our people.

The part left unsaid is that the masses would thus remain politically indolent (and impotent) for a decade, avoiding the workerist fanfare of “Brazil, Mexico, or China.” If you know your history, you’ll realize that Salvador Allende was deposed and murdered a little over a decade later—on September 11, 1973—by people even more cynical than the good director. The resonance of this historic rise and fall, from democratic socialism to fascist dictatorship, is both shrewd and well judged, especially if you recall Augusto Pinochet’s later use of the Estadio Nacional de Chile as a site of detention and torture in the dark years of the desaparecidos.

The rest of the slim novel is primarily occupied by a looping commentary on the Brazil–Chile semifinal match. Labbé finds in this operatic face-off—ending 4–2 in the canarinhos’ favor—all the metonymy that historical allegory needs. The Estadio Nacional hums with the massed ferocity of 80,000 spectators, all tense in the livery of their country, attempting to render up and will the figures below by voice and sight. To those in the nosebleed seats, the 22 men are dots that hop and skip like a flea circus. To the hotshots in the director’s suite, where the commentator also sits and watches and murmurs, the players are the object of suspended though nonetheless avid speculation. To all involved, the beautiful game calls upon the energies of both love and war. An event is happening, and not just the one on the surface of the text.

To call such an event religious would be trite. It’s a cliché, in particular, to say that soccer is a religion in South America. And while Labbé sometimes strikes a note of religious ecstasy, his sights have a much more secular, even postmodern, set to them. It is as if Thomas Bernhard elaborated on a Baudrillardian treatment: Chile vs. Brazil Did Not Take Place. Thus, as commentator becomes narrator and word becomes flesh, the world collapses into the patterns of language, with an emphasis on the televisual sense. A flick of the ball becomes the flick of a cigarette; a glancing shot becomes 80,000 groans.

At times, I was reminded of the tennis scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). In the film, the crowd metronomically swivels with each volley, lapping back and forth like bathtub wavelets; all of a sudden, you see the face in the crowd that isn’t moving, and you realize you are being watched—and there is a sense of simmering paranoia beneath Estadio Nacional’s hysterics. At other times, I thought, well, if Christopher Isherwood hadn’t already snagged it, I Am a Camera would have nicely suited the book as a title. But The Murmuration is indeed perfect for both its intuition of mass susurrus and its intimation of starlings in flight. The world-hum is presided over by a man at a microphone, poised like a prosthetic god. He speaks in your voice, Sudamericano:

[W]e’ll fire a driven ball from outside the box, fuck; with all our power, my soul, this small chest, these arms, this breath, and all our hoarse shrieks, motherfucking conchetumadre, we’ll pull Jorge Toro’s foot back and drive it forward, striking the ball; the ball will rise, bound for an upper corner when their keeper, desgraciado Gilmar, will leap up out of nowhere and block our shot and our cheers.

Labbé’s style, with its rapid shifts in perspective, is an exhilarating attempt to grasp a social totality. We may find it a gripping, though at times onerous, revision of the 1962 World Cup (as Benjamin Woodard argues in his review of the novel). Or, in what I expect will be a representative response, an “incredibly detailed dual narrative of a play by play […] and some other narrative that you couldn’t get into cos you were so bored by the football” (from a Goodreads review by a certain Harry Angus). We may even be able to sympathize with all of these positions, but I suspect those who will cotton on quickest will be the “intellectual football-lovers,” that beleaguered group Martin Amis rightly dubbed “despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike.”

But this would be a misreading. For one, we consider “intellectual” too narrowly. Many sport fans are intellectuals—listen to the callers on any talkback sports show. For two, this experiment in style turns the mass spectacle, in all its dilation and contraction, into a means of speaking in the collective first person: a difficult but necessary maneuver these days for political militants, littérateurs, and lovers alike. Difficult, but no less dear.

The above block quote, I will admit, is not exactly muscular prose. I’ll also admit I’ve never understood what is meant by muscular prose. But athletic, limber, lithe, even lissome prose—that I get. Labbé’s dashes sometimes, or leisurely skips, or runs a brilliant streak; it keeps on the balls of its feet. How else to describe all The Murmuration’s “searching” passes, those headers that serve as “rebuttal,” the musical “snorts, chirps, and pants” that attend the players’ movements, and all those plangent “long balls which […] weave together in the air without mockery”? In his incredibly detailed play-by-play, Labbé (abetted by Vanderhyden’s fluent translation) develops a new rhythm, harvesting the energies of its own premise. In the singular and the collective, he gives voice to capital-H History—another very serious game.

Or, to paraphrase Annie Dillard, the language doesn’t penetrate things so much as it bears them away with it.

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Let’s get back to my “literary sport” thesis. The language of soccer makes itself available to the colloquial—for example, “rouletta,” “rabona,” “elástica,” street names for street tricks—and articulates itself in the beatific: for example, Garrincha, Brazilian star of the 1962 World Cup, was popularly christened “Alegria do Povo” (People’s Joy) and “Anjo de Pernas Tortas” (Bent-Legged Angel). What other quotidian language so often reaches between heaven and earth? It’s enough to make you believe that vox populi really is vox Dei … And this is to say nothing of the sport itself.

Standing at the crossroads of word and deed is, as The Murmuration understands, the commentator/narrator. It is a brilliant subject of novelistic focus. For my money, the only other pastime that brings its talking heads into such close contact with the muse is horse racing (Gerald Murnane has put in honest work here: see, e.g., his 2015 meditation Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf). For soccer, inspiration lies in the extraordinary variation of movement; for horse racing, it’s the inordinate restriction. Horse races, like electoral politics, have their built-in climax; soccer, like political upheaval and insurrection, has its doldrums and its moments of grace, its hours when nothing happens and minutes when decades elapse. This pendulum of exaltation and despair provides endless fodder for the strophe-makers and rhapsodes of the game. Consider the erotic epiphany that commentators experience after a goal: from Latin America’s single moaned vowel to Ray Hudson’s shouts of “magisterial” and Messi-inspired flights of fancy (“Excuse me for being excited, people, but we’ve just witnessed a goal that would wake up a catatonic!”). Then consider, while you’re at it, the songs and chants weekly ginned up by curvas and ultras the world over—not unanimously works of genius, sure, but evidence of the demotic hard at work, and even an intellect that can favorably be called general.

The novel never tires in its implicit reminder that the present is fired in the kiln of the past. In that spirit, I have to mention my own lifelong affair with soccer. The sport granted me many visceral insights as I grew up, as both a player and a fan. Watching various leagues playing on various continents on bootleg websites, for example, is how I learned global geography. How else would I know where Derbyshire is but for the fact that Derby FC was in the English Premier League for the 2007–08 season, or that Vigo is a Galician fishing town but for Barcelona’s 3–1 thrashing of Celta Vigo in 2012?

Beyond geography, soccer is how I learned, in the parochial confines of an Appalachian childhood, about the ways of the world, and especially the realities of class. It was a long way between the jury-rigged carport field behind the high school (whose proprietor, Juan, would occasionally get busted for hosting illegal cockfights) and the enormous, expensive complexes in the hour-away cities, where the well-coached and mostly white teams would practice. I still have my knockoff taqueria-sponsored Arsenal jersey with my name misspelled on the back. And I still remember learning the financial meaning of the word “delinquent” after I moved into the pay-to-play top regional teams. The energies of love, yes—and the awareness of class war.

Meaning emerges from within—but oftentimes takes shape from outside—the text. The bated breath of the roulette wheel has little to do with colors and numbers. The little leather sphere is not the real object of the screaming stadium. Must we, as Fredric Jameson said, always allegorize? With soccer, we respond with a vigorous yes. The Murmuration’s great achievement is to show that what is popular is worthy of the literary, and that the popular doesn’t require concessions to the culture industry—that is, to power. What is most literary may also be most proletarian. We can slot Labbé’s feat—nothing less than the collective novel—between the useful and the magisterial. Homo sapiens, as we know, is not always so sapient, and Homo sacer is undecided between the sacred and the cursed. But Homo soccer, as Labbé shows, will always be expansive, global, and political, speaking in many tongues, many voices.