“When Haiti plays Brazil, Haitians will feel equal. Football gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. That is profound.” — Dimitri Elias Léger
Yesterday, Simon Kuper defined the World Cup as a religious feast for all of humanity. Today, Dimitry Elias Léger asks whether God is watching. His new novel, Death of the Soccer God, is a fictional reimagining of the most famous goal in American World Cup history — scored in 1950 by a non-American. Joe Gaëtjens was a half-German, half-Haitian teenager sent to New York to study, not to play football. He picked up the game in Central Park, somehow (as a non-American) made it onto the US team at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and scored the goal that famously beat England one–nil in Belo Horizonte. England was so heavily favoured that the football-mad BBC didn’t even send a reporter.
Léger — a Haitian-born writer and (for his sins) an Arsenal fan — spent three weeks in Brazil researching the novel, two of them in Belo Horizonte. The philosophical question at the core of the book asks if God loves Haiti. Does God, Léger wonders, have a particular affection for the poorest people on earth?
And now, for the first time in decades, Haiti have qualified for the World Cup. In the United States of all places. They’re in the toughest group — with Morocco and, yes, Brazil. For ninety minutes, Haiti will be the Seleção’s equal. The democratic spectacle of football, Léger says, gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. God might even be watching.
