They’re just small boys, in the youngest age group, so they are shunted off to a distant corner of the field with others their age and immediately unleashed in pursuit of a soccer ball. In fact, even before they begin learning the basics, these little boys must necessarily go chasing madly after a soccer ball, the way we did on the fields of our youth, so that they can pass through the old healthy process of natural selection. It’s just that, since there are no longer any fields for them to play in, if we want to get even a little piece of a field for them, we are obliged to enroll them in a soccer school. And they hit the ground running, they try their best, they sweat and they run and they tumble in the dirt, under the bored gaze of an instructor who can’t say anything yet, can’t teach them anything yet, and who, in fact, does nothing. I begin to see that there’s not much to watch. Nothing but a cloud of dust in the distance, a swarm of frenzied flies, all moving in unison behind the soccer ball. This is still barely the dawn of soccer.

But it is pretty interesting to watch the boys in the more advanced courses, because they have been selected, equipped, and trained. The instructors make them do training exercises for half an hour with the ball or with cones, okay, now sprint! now shoot! come on! hustle! before they get to play a match. So after awhile I find myself losing track of the chaotic swarm, in the distance, where my son is busily trotting to and fro. Instead, I start to watch other people’s sons, especially because they are training and playing in a section of the field that is much closer to the bleachers where all of us parents sit watching. Some of the kids are just on the other side of the netting, right there in front of us, and I can watch them closely.

There is one thing you can’t help but notice: they all have shirts marked with the number 10, with the name Totti emblazoned on the back. All of them, I notice, except for two. There is a little blond boy, with long straight hair and a lovely face, who hunches over whenever he sprints. His parents, lulled by the articles that ran during the summer in the Corriere dello Sport, made the horrible mistake of buying him a shirt with the number 7 and the name of Bartelt. There is also a massively built young boy, as solidly planted and burly as a fire hydrant. From here, he almost seems to have a receding hairline, and inevitably he is wearing a shirt bearing the number 4 and the name Di Biagio. So, on the glorious Testaccio soccer field, on a luminous afternoon in the magnificent October weather found only in Rome, here is the scene that presents itself to our eyes: one hundred little Tottis, one little Di Biagio, one little Bartelt, plus my son and his friend – clearly a pair of interlopers, in the distance, scrambling back and forth in their nondescript shirts.

Then there are the parents, or the care-givers: they offer a fairly interesting show of their own. There is no mistaking the babysitters, cell phones glued to the sides of their heads, oblivious to everyone and everything. There are clusters of mothers chatting away, likewise largely indifferent to the play, though they at least have succeeded in laying their hands on the elusive soccer accessories – how on earth they managed is beyond me – and they happily show off their spoils. Then there are the solitary fathers, like me, who sit in silence, wrapped in heavy jackets. And there are whole families, one might say, with faces straight out of the pages of Pasolini, wearing sweatshirts and sweatpants, smoking MS cigarettes, faces you might encounter in a prison yard, with stingy smiles and sandpapery voices, clutching desperately at the natural talents of their boy, in the old, familiar hope that he is going to lift them out of poverty.

Directly in front of me, there are four boys at play, always the same quartet: four little Tottis, each totally unlike the other three, playing in teams of two. Each time I see them play, it’s a duel that lasts till the end of training, with goalposts made of cones. In theory, they are all pretty talented, but one of them, a chubby boy, basically plays alone, and never passes the ball to anyone else. He plays attack, defense, and goalkeeper all at the same time, and the other boys almost never get to touch the ball. It is nerve-wracking. There are two standard plays that are re-peated before my eyes ad infinitum. In standard play number 1 (attack), the chubby Totti gets the ball, and begins to move forward, dribbling, toward the defending Tottis, taking on first one, then the other, then both together. In the meanwhile his Totti teammate, completely open and unmarked, calls for the ball, but the chubby Totti orders him to take his place in the goal. After that, it doesn’t much matter what happens: he may score a goal or lose the ball, wandering off into the intricacies of a final, pointless, yet exhilarating dribble, but it makes no real difference. In standard play number 2 (defense), the chubby Totti orders his teammate to mark the attacking Totti without the ball, then he moves up to mark the one with the ball. When his man, quite correctly, passes the ball to his own teammate to try a one-two play, he promptly abandons his man and runs to the goal, so that he can show off by decisively blocking the ball when one of the two attacking players appears alone before him – or, on those rare occasions when he lets in a goal, so he can accuse his teammate of failing to defend aggressively enough. That is how he plays, basically alone, and the instructor smiles at his antics. The other three Tottis are increasingly frustrated, and don’t know what to do about it.

This chubby little Totti who does everything on his own, however, bears a little study: with his thighs that rub together, the lard that overflows at the bottom of his T-shirt, his full-fledged pork loins, it is very clear that he has no real future as a soccer player, despite all the gifts that he works so hard to display. In fact, he is one of those graceful, coordinated fatties, like John Candy, the ones that grow up to be good dancers, and when he has a ball underfoot he is a steady spectacle of dribbling and hip feints that remind you of Gascoigne. But he is genuinely fat, a dead loss in athletic terms. The profound irritation that he provokes when he is on the field is slightly undercut by one’s sense of pity at the thought of the dead end to which his hormones have ineluctably destined him. So I feel a certain empathy for the instructor, who ignores the complaints of the three other Tottis and never demands that he adopt a somewhat less autistic mode of behavior. The instructor must be thinking that these little explosions of style are the chubby Totti’s last opportunities to take a degree of pleasure from playing soccer, and so he chooses not to ruin these moments by urging him to be a team player, to show some generosity and self-sacrifice and all the other qualities that a soccer school ought to instill in its pupils. Because soccer, even more than being a team sport, is a sport, and a fat boy like him can never hope to play that sport on a serious basis. As soon as full-field games begin, he will be relegated to fifty square feet of turf where he can only watch helplessly as teammates and opponents flash by him at three times his speed. And when that time comes there will be no need at all to explain to his father why the chubby Totti was not selected for the C-level Beginners’ Championship of the coming year. He himself will understand, sooner or later, and he will channel his skills into Subbuteo table soccer or his Play Station, and his passion directly into extreme soccer fan clubs like Curva Sud. Still, it is truly irritating, and I find myself rooting for the two Tottis playing against him, or hoping that his Totti teammate might just once manage to extricate the ball from chubby Totti’s feet and score a goal, or even (most unlikely of all) that the instructor would lose his age-old Roman sense of pity and yell at him, in a harsh, no-nonsense voice, to pass that fucking ball to another player, God damn it to hell.

Then, suddenly, I notice something. Whenever he is playing goalie, while his Totti teammate runs feverishly around the field, all alone, to ward off the two attacking Tottis who charge at him repeatedly, the chubby Totti narrows the goal, delivering sharp little kicks to one of the cones that serve as goalposts. The more the three other players take advantage of his absence to actually move the ball around, the more he narrows the goalposts, until there is an opening more or less as wide as him. That is why, even if an attacking Totti does manage to attempt a shot, he almost always manages to block it. Then, when he puts the ball back into play (which amounts, in his case, to passing it to himself, as if from goalie to defender), he just gives a sly little kick to the cone to re-widen the goalposts, and then runs off as if nothing had happened.