River vs Monterrey: because there were players from the Mexican team wearing a shirt with three digits

There is something more worrying than the goalkeeper’s false start River and Monterrey’s goal on the cold Dallas night: the three stickers on the shirts of some players of the Mexican team. Who would think of such a question? The kids now want to play at 205, when do they dream of becoming footballers? We insist, who invented it?

When on March 6, 2002, at a Racing – Central, a boy wearing the number 40 jersey showed up while warming up to enter, he attracted so much attention that it was talked about all week. Emiliano Papa had a disproportionate back. Football has ended up getting used, as it did with black referees, to double figures beyond those that consecutively follow 10 until the last substitute.

But what happened in Mexico is unusual and its explanation has to do with a certain laziness. Apparently it was the administrative solution to allow clubs to do less paperwork. The Mexican Football Federation registers youth players with a number and to avoid using one as Sub 17 or Sub 20 and another when they reach the first team – two different ways – the clubs have chosen to use only one for both competitions.

Logically, since those from one to twenty years and over are used by professionals, the players of the youth sector are registered with three-digit numbers and therefore the range of the terrifying 200 on the shoulders of the players.

It will be enough for some charismatic Mexican player from the basic forces – scorer, good goalkeeper or dribbler – to seduce the younger players, earn a place in the Primera and decide not to change his number so that the kid wants to stamp the “246” of new idol.

Football is quite full of numbers with the 4-4-2; 4-3-3 or 5-2-3 that are repeated in football discourses to give the fan the possibility of claiming a faster “266”, a “278” that does not last or a “160” with greater consistency. How can the coach ask his defender not to miss the 284 mark if when he finishes saying it and the player spots it, the 284 will probably be in front of goal?

Footballers once stopped wearing black boots and no one thought that two generations later some, even those of the national team, would finish the matches without sweating. No one could have predicted that 20 years after Papa appeared with the 40, the latest fashion trend in Mexico was the triple-digit one.