Before there were balloons made of rubber, there were bladders. You tied up one of the exits of the sac of elastic membrane extracted from the butchered pig, you poked a straw in the other, and you blew. The inflated globe was light and buoyant. If clad with leather, it became a ball to kick. Whether passed between hands or feet, it drew players together, a magnet for their eyes and energies. And we welcome what draws us together. Or do we curse it? Why do people team up around an emptiness, so much spent breath? All too easily it maddens them. Authorities have forever linked soccer with the misrule of the mob: What bounces is at best frivolous, at worst dangerous. Two boys tussling over a bladder in a three-foot-high canvas painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in the late 1760s snarl up in a whirlpool of pain, each twisting the other’s right ear.…