Alberto Lati was born in a home where football matters a lot. He played it badly, but that was his fortune. It was evident that he was not going to be a protagonist, but he could be a chronicler. Of course, without losing “an ounce of passion.”
At the age of 11, Lati spent hours copying a soccer encyclopedia that was printed prior to the celebration of Mexico 86, one volume for each World Cup played until then. Two volumes were missing, which he found in the Ciudad Universitaria newspaper library, and there he was going to transcribe them, letter by letter, and without realizing it he learned the history of the World Cup, its results and the names of the scorers. His mother jealously guards the notebook.
That 11-year-old boy, who early let go of the dream of becoming an athlete, was not at all frustrated. He wanted to be a commentator, and there he put all his effort. At 17 he entered Televisa as a merit, despite the frown of his father, a successful merchant, son of a Syrian immigrant, whose generation could not afford to pursue his passion.
Lati trained with a diploma in sports journalism at the Raúl del Campo school and graduated in Communication Sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana. In 1996, he had a great opportunity: Televisa sent him to the Atlanta Olympic Games. Since then he connects sport with social, political, cultural and historical issues, and thus gives meaning to the way he tells stories.
Four years later, he was sent to cover the European Championship in Holland and Belgium. An interview with Zinedine Zidane, who at the time spoke French and Italian, “let me know that if he did not learn other languages, he would not be able to compete with the best special envoys in the world.” Lati speaks English, French, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, German, Portuguese and Russian, and is part of the International Association of Hyperpolyglots.
In 2002, as a correspondent preparing for the World Cup in Japan and Korea, he suffered during the times of stark competition between Televisa and TV Azteca: “It was terrible. “They reviewed the ratings minute by minute in a lacerating way.”
From that moment on, Lati moved for years from one country to another: Greece, Germany, China, South Africa, Great Britain and Brazil, “in the wake of major sporting events, although sport was only the pretext to talk about other things that “They happened in places that celebrated sport.”
-You learned journalism, languages and soaked up other cultures at the same time…
-Yes, and in a very unstructured way, but there was no option. I went to my first Euro Cup not with fear, with panic. But my fear was of failure, of my career not taking off. In terms of other cultures, I am more comfortable in the difference, even if I don’t speak a lick of the language, as long as I feel like I have something to say.
A Kapuściński fan, Lati also had to understand sports other than soccer, which was what he had basically covered in Spain: the arrival of Mexican players, the rise of Javier el Vasco Aguirre and the Champions League. After a year he went to Athens to report during the Olympic Games, “and I threw a tantrum the size of the world, but today what I enjoy most are the Olympics: 35 world championships in the same city, in a period of two weeks. I usually say that in Rio 2016 I saw the Dream Team, Rafael Nadal, Simone Biles and Michael Phelps compete in a single day. If you could see those four over 60 years, you would say you are very lucky.”
-How can you not approach other sports when you can interview Schumacher or Federer?
-Exact. But football is still what I am most passionate about.
Lati ended her stage of life abroad at the same time as her work at Televisa. After 20 years, she was strained by a difference in the way of generating content: “Video on demand was growing a lot, audiences were moving away and I thought there had to be a change. “They didn’t agree.”
Contributor to Fox Sports, Claro Sports and guest commentator on Tercer Grado Deportivo, Lati published his first book in 2013, Latitudes: Crónica, Viaje y Ball. Five years later he delivered his first fiction novel, Here, Borya: “I gave that one a lot of thought. He had the obsession of writing a novel with an internal monologue, very intense and hazy. In the chronicle I am obliged to be clear, and in Borya I was able to do the opposite.”
They followed 100 Gods of Olympus: From children to superheroes and 20 balls of hope in times of crisis, among others. Number seven – about the childhood of the best Mexican athletes in history – will be ready this year.
Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Lati reviews the uphill road for female athletes and her colleagues, sports reporters:
“If you consider that around 2004 Joseph Blatter (former FIFA president) said that women had to wear tighter uniforms and smaller shorts for women’s soccer to have ratings, you can also understand why women were confined to the plane of the sports chronicle to be an ornament. In fact, in volleyball they did force the players to wear a type of clothing; If that was just 20 years ago, you can also understand how it has been difficult for women to demonstrate that they can narrate and tell the sport with the same capacity. What happens is that man has felt that sport is a preserve that belongs only to him, as if it were part of the male spirit to play sport, but also speak it, with a manly voice. Women have challenged them, but it has not been enough for them to be as good as a man, they have had to be better to earn their place and to get rid of the stigma.”
By the way, a female version of Geniuses of the ball is already planned. “I didn’t want to include women in that book; “The footballers deserve a book dedicated to them, to their stories.”
After carrying the Olympic torch at the invitation of the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, it is clear that Alberto Lati will continue telling stories, but it is not so easy, not even for him: “Now we have to capture the attention of young people, so dispersed ; You have to defeat that finger that is a tyrant, that gives you seconds to stay. It is quite a challenge to win over an audience this punishing.”
