The Hands That Wove Another Man's Name

In Aldama, Chiapas, fourteen women still hold red and blue threads in their hands. They weave huipil, rebozo, gabán — the ancestral garments of the Tsotsil people. Those fabrics travelled to international fashion runways, draping the name of a designer from their own people, Alberto López Gómez. Then one day, his house in San Cristóbal de Las Casas was sealed by the Attorney General's Office of Chiapas. On the paperwork there is only one line: 572,800 pesos — money the fourteen women say they never received, accumulated over years and repeated broken promises. One of them told the press: "Lo que queremos es que ya nos pague" — what we want is simply for him to pay us.

I read that news one morning, beside a worn notebook. What made me stop was not a lawsuit half a world away. It was its familiar face. The way a man with a name stands on the shoulders of people without names, then, over the years, forgets he once stood on them. In football, I have met that face many times. It makes no noise, it reaches no front page. It simply stands at the edge of the light.

It is said that the orders between the designer and the artisans of Chiapas were placed by word of mouth: no contracts, no invoices, no clauses. A spoken economy — where trust replaces paper, and when trust breaks, the worker has only her voice. Since March, those fourteen women have risen to denounce him publicly, then filed a formal complaint, until the authorities finally seized the property. The sequence sounds familiar: from a private whisper, to a public voice, to legal action. I have seen countless young footballers walk that same road — when they were not paid, when their contracts held not a single line to protect them.

At fifty-four, I have reported from eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups, and many editions of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Enough to understand that the stadium floodlights illuminate only half the story. The other half lies in the darkness of the tunnel, in the dressing rooms no camera enters, in the mornings when children run drills on dirt pitches before the sun rises. And the people who built the name of this sport mostly never appear in any table of honours.

A youth football academy — anywhere, Vietnam included — runs in the same way. An eleven-year-old boy leaves home, lives in a dormitory, eats in the communal canteen, trains twice a day. The people who teach him to play — the young coach, the cook, the one who wraps his knee — are workers too. They weave a footballer, thread by thread, over many years. When that boy grows up, wears the first-team shirt, and gets his name on a banner, where have those workers gone? Most remain where they were, on unchanged wages, or have been replaced by a new cohort. No one seals their house. No one puts them on a front page. They simply disappear from the story.

In the arithmetic of modern football, value is measured by transfer fees, by sponsorship deals, by shirts sold. Clubs pay hundreds of millions of euros for a player who has not yet played fifty top-flight matches — a naked gamble dressed in the pretty word "potential". But at the other end of that value chain, the man who taught the boy to plant his foot, the woman who repainted the touchline, the one who washed the kit every night — they appear in no figure. They are like the fourteen women of Aldama: weaving another man's name, then waiting. And their waiting has no deadline, because no contract ever set a date for payment.

I think of clubs that sell shares to their own supporters, turning the love of the terraces into an investment. Everything can become a line in a financial report, even loyalty. The pressure of those numbers often falls on sporting decisions: sell a player to balance the books, keep another for the image, trim the youth budget to flatter the quarter. The worker at the start of the value chain never sits in that meeting. Her voice has no place in a spreadsheet.

In 2026, I was at a match between Becamex Bình Dương and HAGL in the V.League. A nineteen-year-old player, Nguyễn Xuân Tùng, number sixteen, came on from the bench and scored the only goal in the ninety-third minute. After the match, in the press room, he stammered: "I only heard my heart beating, and then the ball found my foot by itself." I have never forgotten that line. I did not write about tactics in my piece. I wrote about a boy who grew up amid an industrial zone, where his parents were factory workers, and a goal that was like a promise to a small rented room. He called me afterward: "Uncle, I read it and saw myself in it." From that day, I gave up opening my articles with a scoreline.

But if I look back at that goal through the eyes of a worker, I see something else. I see his first teacher on a village pitch, the one who bent down to correct the footwork of a five-year-old. I see the older brother who fed him in the dormitory. I see the gatekeeper on duty at eleven at night, when the boy sneaked out to train alone. A goal has one name on the electronic board. But there are dozens of other names written nowhere at all. The ball rolls on the grass, but in truth it rolls across human fates.

I understood this late. For years I wrote about moments — the ninetieth-minute goal, the penalty missed in the eighty-eighth, the bowed head in the tunnel. I called it seeking the human voice inside the voice of the ball. Then I understood that the voice of the ball is only the surface. The true human voice lies behind it: where people weave, where they mend, where they wait. People score with their feet, but I write with my scars — and most of those scars do not belong to the one who scored.

There is a lazy way to read the story in Chiapas. People see the house sealed and assume everything is settled, that justice has arrived. But a seizure is not a verdict. It is a temporary measure — and it exists precisely because every earlier attempt at negotiation failed. The fourteen women still say they are willing to talk, but also say the matter should continue through legal channels. A double path: one hand extended, one hand holding the law. In my narrow view, that is the posture of people who have learned that kindness cannot replace clarity.

In sport, we misread such signs too. A young player is promoted to the first team, his photo appears in the papers, and fans think he has "made it". Few ask what contract he signed, how much an eighteen-year-old earns, what he will live on when he retires at thirty-four. The career of an esports professional is even shorter than a footballer's, yet the youth system and post-retirement support there are almost non-existent — while the glow is sold off very quickly. We celebrate the one on the summit, and forget that the summit was built by other hands.

Perhaps that is why I take little joy in praising winners. My eye settles instead on the empty substitute's bench, on the corner of the pitch where the groundskeeper stands in silence when the referee blows the whistle. The stadium is empty, yet the applause still lingers somewhere in memory — and in that memory, I want to dig up the names of those who were never called.

One more thing I want to say plainly: we often praise beauty without asking where it came from. A hand-woven cloth, a flash of improvisation, a backheel — people marvel and move on. But behind every beauty there is a chain of people who gave something up to let it take shape. The fashion industry learned this late, once the debates about cultural appropriation and unpaid Indigenous labour grew loud. Football has not learned it yet. Or it has, and chooses to forget.

At fifty-four, I understand that the stadium floodlights illuminate a whole life. They shine on the goal, and on the hands that wove the goal. The fourteen women of Chiapas did not write their names on the runway. But every cloth they wove is a signature. And I think that somewhere in Vietnamese football, too, there are such invisible signatures — on the grass, on the bench, in the darkness of the tunnel. The question I carry is not who scored, but who gave them the legs to score — and whether we remember to give thanks.