Pope Francis: love for genuine sport and the link with San Lorenzo

It was a neighbourhood team the San Lorenzo, one of the many that played against each other on the streets in the so-called 'canike' matches at the beginning of the last century (where even a Jorge Bergoglio boy kicked a pelota de trapo, a rag ball in the 1940s). It was a habit that became increasingly dangerous with increasing urbanisation, so much so that one day one of Los Forzosos de Almagro - as the Boedo footballers of Buenos Aires called themselves - was run over by a tram during a match. It was then that a Salesian priest Don Lorenzo Massa decided to host the matches in the oratory of his parish on Calle México. In return, the boys agreed to attend mass every Sunday. In his honour and that of the neighbourhood, San Lorenzo was born on 1 April 1908, a club that league after league became one of the 'big five of Argentina' in terms of victories and prestige.

And it was precisely for the blue and red colours that the heart of Pope Francis, whose membership card number 88,235 he held, beat.

Perhaps not by chance, at the beginning of his pontificate San Lorenzo wrote the most beautiful pages of its football history. Indeed, in 2014, the Pope's team won the Libertadores Cup, the South American equivalent of the Champions League, for the first time, beating Nacional Asunción in the final, and a few months later in the Club World Cup they only surrendered to Real Madrid in the final.

Just after his election in 2013 Pope Francis had written a letter thanking San Lorenzo for the support he had received and had wanted to recall the origin of his sporting passion with these words: 'When I was 10 years old I followed the glorious '46 campaign. That goal by Pontoni!", recalling the goal scored by the striker, known as the Chancha, who had given San Lorenzo its third Argentine title.

But apart from the San Lorenzo, Pope Francis has never hidden his passion for sport. And in October 2016, after the Rio Games, at the opening of the World Conference on Sport at the Service of Humanity, in the Paul VI Hall, he had wanted to express it with this very contemporary reflection: 'The challenge will be to maintain the genuineness of sport, to protect it from manipulation and commercial exploitation. It would be sad, for sport and for humanity, if people were no longer able to trust in the truth of sporting results, or if cynicism and disenchantment were to take over from enthusiasm and joyful, disinterested participation. It is important to fight for the result, but playing well, with fairness, is even more so'.