- 2 April is International Children's Book Day
- Daniel Baldi, from Uruguay, was a professional player for 10 years and is now a popular author among Spanish-speaking children and teenagers
- FIFPRO spoke to him about the educational power of football and the advantages of having a career outside sport
“I don't think I write about football. I write about life and football is present in life at every moment.” Daniel Baldi, 43, a former Uruguayan footballer and writer, very popular with children and teenagers, wants to avoid confusion: his 30 literary works do not attempt to narrate football, they take it as a vehicle to talk to family about different issues that affect human beings.
“Football is beautiful, it has a lot of spectacular values that are useful for life. It is a very rich world, with many facets,” the author of the award-winning ‘Mi Mundial’ told FIFPRO on International Children's Book Day.
“Parents generally buy it with the intention of getting their child to start reading, believing that it is a football book. And then they realise that it wasn't really a football book, that they were a bit deceived. But they end up congratulating me because the child gets so enthusiastic that they start to generate a lot of other conversations that are great.
“Football ends up being the hook for talking about many other issues. It has so many layers that you can write stories about a bit of everything because there's the good, the bad, the rich, the poor, women, fame, money, sexuality, addictions, depressions, the fall... You can do whatever you want. I like to play with that.”
Beyond his talent as a writer, there is a distinguishing feature in Baldi that makes him unique in his ability to take advantage of the richness of football as a catalyst for stories that challenge his readers: he narrates from the rawness of his own experience as a professional player.
“I think I have the advantage of having lived through it myself. One day Sacheri [ Eduardo, a successful Argentine writer] said to me: ‘You know what it's like to look to the side and be spat at, shouted at, cheered on. To miss an important goal’. Of course, that happened to me. And if you know how to convey it, it's a unique experience. I access nuances that also help me to address the issues I want to address.”
Baldi’s 10 years as a first division footballer - he played in Uruguay but also in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Italy - have toughened him in the less glamorous and popular aspects of the profession. In his books he also talks about injuries, transfers or the world of agents and managers.
“I really enjoyed football, but I suffered a lot too. Terrible things happened to me. My agent stole money from me, thinking I wouldn't realise. He wouldn't answer the phone. I didn't know what to do. I went to another country and things were totally different to what I'd been told. I suffered injustices like mean managers who were always looking for loopholes so they didn't have to pay you or respect you.”
Even in the worst moments, literature was there to rescue him. Baldi's literary career, born into a football-loving family in Colonia del Sacramento, on the south-west coast of Uruguay on the Rio de la Plata, began at almost the same time as his football career: he wrote his first novel when he was still at junior level. “I wrote every day, but I kept it to myself,” he reveals.
Baldi made his debut at Plaza Colonia in 2001 and his first published work, ‘La Botella FC’, came in 2006, five years before his retirement as a professional. Writing while he played always had a “totally cathartic” effect. “It was therapeutic, I loved doing it. It was like a need. It did me a lot of good in moments of loneliness, of great sadness, so I turned to it a lot.”
With at least one book a year published since 2006, Baldi is an example of someone who has developed a career parallel to that of a footballer, a subject to which he is “very committed” not only as a writer but also from his position as manager of the Celeste Foundation, an organisation created by the players of the Uruguayan national team with the aim of promoting the values of sport in the education of children and adolescents through football.
“When I was a kid and I confessed that I wanted to be a footballer, my mum said something to me that stuck with me: the chances are that I'll never be able to make a living from football because that happens to very few people. It was a reality check. So, I never stuck with just football, I always looked for other interests for when football said to me ‘this is as far as you go’. I think that saved my life because when my retirement from football was approaching it became a really enjoyable stage of my life.
“Often children or teenagers feel pressured because at home they want them to be footballers. They have to be given the chance to realise that if they don't become footballers, it's OK. There's life for them to do something else, the important thing is that they are happy. What's more, football is so broad and requires so much help that nowadays, if you are a psychologist, systems engineer or teacher, football can welcome you. And to those who are lucky enough to be footballers, show them that at 30-something there is a whole life ahead of them.”
Where Baldi was unable to draw on his experience on the pitch was in the novel he is writing, in which the protagonist is a girl who overcomes all the added adversities she faces as a woman trying to become a professional footballer. But Baldi drew on contributions from women involved in women's football and even from FIFPRO, which advised him on issues such as salaries and maternity regulations.
“I was very careful in the writing and I asked for help. I was always interested in protecting footballers and, in the case of women footballers, these kinds of things are much more complex than those men have to deal with. Each disappointment the protagonist receives feeds her more inside to move forward. The dream of becoming a footballer makes her fight against everything.”
