The evidence of the past

The Estadio Azteca, now Estadio Banorte, is preparing to host games for the upcoming World Cup. Usually, when a stadium gets this old, the owners tear it down. They clear the ground and build a new, modern facility. But that did not happen here. They decided to renovate. They kept the original concrete structure and built the updates within and around it. This choice made me pause. People call the stadium a cathedral because it is the exact place where Pelé and Maradona made history. Tearing down a cathedral feels wrong, but why do we go through the trouble of keeping old structures when starting fresh is often much easier?

It made me think of my mother. She keeps clothes in her wardrobe that she no longer wears. Some of those shirts and coats have not seen the sun in decades. When I ask her why she keeps them, she cannot give me a practical answer. The clothes just sit there taking up space. It is the exact same behaviour we see with the stadium, just on a much smaller scale.

The first guess people usually make is nostalgia. We assume my mother looks at an old coat and remembers a happier time. We assume fans want to keep the stadium because they miss the matches they saw when they were young. But nostalgia is an active wish to live in the past. If my mother truly felt nostalgic, she would put the coat on and wear it. If fans truly wanted to live in the past, they would demand the stadium stay exactly as it was, complete with the uncomfortable seats and the bad plumbing. Nobody truly wants to go backwards.

If it is not nostalgia, maybe it is a fear of waste. We tell ourselves we are being practical, hoping we might need an old coat or old concrete again. My mother might notice the fabric is still perfectly good and tell herself that throwing it away would be irresponsible. The architects might look at the stadium and argue that the original concrete is still incredibly strong. Yet a shirt sitting in the dark for twenty years has absolutely no practical use. Working around a massive, ageing concrete structure is often far more expensive and difficult than starting with an empty lot.

We might also blame the idea of financial investment. We hate feeling like we wasted money. We look at an expensive dress or a massive stadium and think about the initial cost. We convince ourselves that keeping the object preserves its value. But an unworn dress hanging in a wardrobe has no financial value. It is just taking up physical space. The same is true for the stadium. The old concrete does not generate money. The new luxury suites and the updated food stands are what bring in the revenue.

We could also look at loyalty. We sometimes feel a strange obligation to the places and objects that sheltered us. Fans treat the stadium like a holy site because of what Pelé and Maradona did there. My mother might feel that throwing away a reliable old winter coat is a kind of betrayal. But loyalty is an emotion meant for living things. You can be loyal to a football team or to your family, but you cannot be loyal to cotton or cement. The stadium does not know who played inside it.

Could the answer be guilt? Sometimes we keep things because throwing them away feels like a betrayal of another person. My mother might keep a coat because someone she loves gave it to her. Throwing it away feels like rejecting the person who bought it. The architects might feel guilty demolishing a cathedral of football that previous generations worked so hard to build. But guilt only explains a small fraction of the clutter. We also hoard things we bought for ourselves that have no emotional connection to anyone else.

Perhaps it is the fear of empty space. An empty wardrobe is intimidating. A vacant plot of land where a massive stadium used to stand forces us to make a decision. It demands a blank slate and a new plan. Old objects fill the void perfectly. They save us from having to decide what comes next. Keeping the old concrete or the old coats is a simple way to delay the future.

There is also the illusion of control. The world changes very fast, and we have very little power over it. People leave, cities change, and time passes regardless of what we do. By keeping heavy, immovable objects, we trick ourselves into feeling grounded. A wardrobe full of familiar clothes or a stadium made of thick concrete gives us a false sense of stability. We cannot control time, but we can control whether or not we throw a coat in the bin.

But when all these layers are peeled back, I think the real force driving this behaviour is a fundamental need for proof. We use physical things as evidence that our lives actually happened. Memories are incredibly fragile. They fade, they change, and sometimes they disappear entirely. You cannot touch a memory, but a heavy winter coat is solid. A massive concrete pillar is solid. If my mother throws away a coat she wore during a difficult winter twenty years ago, she feels like she is throwing away the physical evidence that she survived that season of her life.

The stadium works the exact same way. We call it a cathedral because we need a physical place to anchor the legends of Pelé and Maradona. We want the comfort of a modern building, but we are deeply afraid to destroy the original walls. We keep the old concrete to prove that the history made there was real. My mother keeps her old clothes because they show her the shape of the person she used to be. We hold onto the physical remains of the past because we are terrified of forgetting that we lived at all.