20 Feb When a team does not play well together, then collective action collapses into its atomized, individual parts and thewhole thing falls apart. (SIMON CRITCHLEY)
WHAT DO WE THINK about when we think about football? Football is about so many things, so many complex, contradictory and conflicting things: memory, history, place, social class, gender in all its troubled variations (especially masculinity, but increasingly femininity too), family identity, tribal identity, national identity, the nature of groups, both groups of players and groups of fans, and the often violent but sometimes pacific and quietly admiring relation between our own group and other groups.
Football is a tactical game, obviously. It requires discipline and relentless training to maintain the fitness of the players, but – more importantly – to attain and retain the shape of the team. A team is a grid, a dynamic figuration, a matrix of moving nodes, endlessly shifting, but all the while trying to keep its shape, to retain its form. A team is a mobile shifting form pitted against another form, that of the opposing team. The purpose of the shape of the team – regardless of possession, regardless of whether you play offensively or defensively – is to occupy and control space. The way a football team tries to control space has obvious analogies with the policing of space or the militarization of space, whether in terms of attack or retreat, occupation or siege. A football team should be organized like a small army: a compact, unified, mobile and skilled force, with a clear chain of command. As many have said before, football is the continuation of war by other means, but the means of football are clearly bellicose: it is about victory (and sometimes heroic defeat).
As Bill Shankly – my boyhood hero and legendary Liverpool Football Club manager from 1959 to 1974 – said, football is about basic things: control the ball and pass, control and pass, all the time. When controlling and passing is combined with movement and speed, where, after each pass, there are two or three options open to the player with the ball, then eventually the team with the ball will score. And whoever scores the most goals wins. It’s as simple as that. But as the late, great Johan Cruyff, said, ‘Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.’
Unlike sports like golf and tennis, or even baseball, cricket and basketball, football is not individualistic. Although there is no doubt that it has a celebrity-driven star-system where players demand and exert ever-increasing amounts of financial autonomy, football is not just about the individual players, no matter how gifted they might be. It is about the team. Football is essentially collaborative. It is about the movement between players who play together and play with and for each other and who make up the mobile spatial web of a team. Now, a team can be made up of truly gifted individual players, like Barcelona, or of less gifted individuals who function together as a fused group, an effective unit of self-organization where each player knows exactly the role they play in the overall formation of the team. I think of teams like Leicester City in the English Premier League in the 2015–16 season (who really gave football back to the fans), or a team like Costa Rica in the 2014 World Cup or Iceland in the 2016 European Championship. With teams like this, the whole is clearly greater than the sum of the parts.
It is no accident that when Jean-Paul Sartre was trying to think about the nature of organization, he turned to football. The free action or activity – what Sartre call ‘praxis’ – of the individual player is subordinated to the team, both integrated into it and transcending it, where the collective action of the group permits the refinement of individual action through immersion into the organizational structure of the team. What is taking place in an organized team is a never ceasing dialectic between the associative, collective activity of the group and the supportive, flourishing individual actions of the players whose being is only given through the team. What continually compels Sartre’s attention is how an organization shapes the relation between individual and collective action, in the constantly shifting, dynamic form of a football team. The individual motions of each player are predetermined by their function – being a good goalkeeper, being a decent central defender, holding midfielder or whatever – but these individual functions find elevation and transcendence in the collaborative, creative practice of a team that plays well together. When a team does not play well together, then collective action collapses into its atomized, individual parts and thewhole thing falls apart, players blame each other and the fans turn on individual players. This is bad form, in all senses.
Of course, such socialist sentiments seem ridiculous – indeed, positively laughable – especially when we think of the autocracy and sump of corruption that is FIFA, football’s governing body based in the bourgeois comfort of Zurich. But such sentimentality also seems risible because of the massive and ever-increasing influence of money in football, where players are encouraged – or, in many cases, compelled – by their greedy agents to act like mercenaries, clubs are the playthings of the super-rich and powerful, and where the devotion of fans is greedily monetized and loyalty is taken for granted at every conceivable moment. And here is perhaps the most basic and profound contradiction of football: its form is association, socialism, the sociability and collective action of players and fans, and yet its material substrate is money.
And yet I still insist that football is not just that. It is much more. To quote Cruyff again, ‘Why couldn’t you beat a richer club. I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.’ Perhaps what brings us together, as spectators and lovers of the game, is the simultaneous truth and untruth of Cruyff’s sentiment.
Such a critique must not shy away from the intrinsic connections between football and violence, football and war, football and colonialism, football and racism, and football and forms of retrograde and atavistic nationalism (as evidenced in the ugly clashes between English and Russian fans in France during the 2016 European Championships, but examples are sadly legion).
But, on the other hand, football also requires a poetics, more focused on form, that can attempt to evoke its often powerful and deeply moving beauty. As the Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa (an inspiration to some, like Spurs coach Mauricio Pochettino, and a mad genius to others) says, the essence of football is a gesture at the service of beauty.5 For there is beauty here: the beauty of the players, the effusive green of the grass intersected with crisp, geometrical white lines; the beauty of the ever-shifting shapes, interconnecting, interlocking movements, dynamic grids and nodal formations on the pitch; and the beauty of the banners and flags waved by the fans and the sound, force and rhythm of their songs. And there is grace, an unforced and at times unwilled movement and elegance. I think, obviously, of a player like Zinedine Zidane, especially as he appears in the wonderful 2006 movie by Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, but also of the extraordinary poise and movement of players like Roberto Baggio, Paolo Maldini, Thierry Henry, Andrea Pirlo or Andrés Iniesta. But I also think of the simple grace with which an entire team can move, say, for example, during the first half of Germany’s 7-1 Destruktion of Brazil in the 2014 World Cup. What was most impressive about the latter was the simplicity of the German play: control and pass, control and pass, move into space, receive the ball, shoot, score.
Simon Critchley
What We Think About When We Think About Soccer
