MEXICO CITY - Many people watching a soccer game may see a bunch of players trying to kick a ball into a net for 90 minutes.

Juan Villoro, one of Mexico's most decorated and esteemed writers, sees something else: a metaphor for society.

"And Mexico now," he said, "it's a combination of the nation that has been promised a lot, but the promises have not been fully fulfilled and there is a feeling like maybe they never will be. It is a very Mexican team in that regard."

It is a team that may miss the World Cup for the first time in 24 years, a crushing possibility in a country that treats soccer like a religion.

Something about the national squad's struggle - their last chance to make it to Brazil in 2014 is a two-game playoff with New Zealand later this month - seems to fit the general sense of fatalism often manifested in Mexico.

"Every World Cup team reflects its country's social model," said Mr. Villoro. "When Spain won last time, it was about middle-class aspiration, a nation making it. France's victorious team before that," in 1998, "reflected the multinational ideal it aspires to be."

Mr. Villoro's newspaper columns, television appearances and literary writings, including a book called "God Is Round," have made him, at 57, a a pre-eminent figure in the church of soccer here.

"Soccer has much less to do with sporting triumphs than with the desire to form an emotional community," he said. "For that reason, I wrote in 'God Is Round' that if there were a World Cup of spectators, Mexico could get to the final. We celebrate the game, but above all we celebrate ourselves."

Mr. Villoro's output includes journalism, essays, short stories, children's literature, novels and even a few rock songs, dissecting and mulling contemporary and historical Mexico, often with a darkly reflective eye.

In one of his better-known works, "The Witness," the protagonist returns to Mexico after its 2000 elections heralded a return to democracy to find a country slipping into social disintegration and disorder.

But he has also been a lifelong soccer fanatic, having even played briefly and unspectacularly for his college team.

None other than Carlos Fuentes, a god in Mexican letters whom Mr. Villoro admires and is sometimes compared to, once told an interviewer, "If you want to talk about soccer, go talk to Juan Villoro."

Mr. Villoro attributes his reflective tone and passion for the sport to youthful outings to games with his father, Luis Villoro, a well-known philosopher here. His parents divorced while he was young, "so this is how we got to spend time together, going to soccer matches."

He came to see analogies to life in the game: the steady drone of striving, frustration and missed opportunities before, finally, maybe, success - a goal. The soccer field itself, he has written, is an allegory of space and time.

Asked to explain what has been ailing Mexican soccer, he dove deeply into the "corrupt" buying and selling of club players to mint stars instead of solid teams, the exhausting schedule driven by television's demands, the instability of coaching.

The result, he said, is a national team in which the players hardly know one another, let alone how to play well together. It is, he said, something of a metaphor for contemporary Mexico, rich in promise, yes, but still far from its ideal.

"It's an illusion of a team."

But he is still supporting it.

The New York Times

(China Daily 11/03/2013 page12)