What is soccer for? For the same as tenderness. Arrigo Sacchi once said that football is the most important thing among the things that matter least. And in football, what is important? The goals? Overcome or be defeated? To become, at least every four years, part of a whole? This Brief history of the merit is not an apology of the loser or a logical representation of our miseries. Nor a study of national proclivity to failure. We are not damage analysts. This already merit is a band of resistance to the technology of statistical and economic reasoning of the game. History is not written by those who win or those who lose. It is rewritten by those who renounce time. If every World Cup is a staging of the epic available to everyone, it is clear that the supernatural and the unexpected play a fundamental role in the construction of that lyric heroicity that at some point stopped wondering who won to begin to question what it means to win . Maybe that's why Manuel Negrete (and his epic goal in the World Cup in Mexico 86) is still there, suspended without measure, oblivious to the gravity and the opinions of the victors or the defeated, like an astronaut floating in the infinite cosmos of memory.