Interpretation of soccer
The following words are from this article I wrote in 2021 on a now defunct blog of mine. The article, whose title can be translated as “On bodies, technique and athleticism” was basically a rant, or at least it was born out of one, like all the stuff I write that’s more on a theoretical side. It was a wide-ranging piece, touching the issues of transgender participation and institutional racism in the policing of women’s bodies in sports. But in its second part, my ramblings on soccer took center stage, becoming more of a dissertation on what technique actually is and why soccer fans seem to hate the idea of players being athletes. This is an excerpt from that:
If I had to name a high-level footballer whose game seems to heavily rely on their physical abilities, I’d say […] Sergio Busquets. […] I say that he relies heavily on his body because his style of play, him being a washing machine keeping the ball clean and untouched by the opponents in key areas of the pitch and freeing up space with apparently routine passes wouldn’t be possible to players even ten centimeters smaller or with shorter legs.
I then made an example of a specific play he made during the Euro 2021 semi-final against Italy, a heavy pass from Marcos Llorente he managed to control even though it was bending away from him and towards his own goal. That play, I said — I wrote way too many words at the time, most of them useless, so I will spare you from those — would not have been possible had he not been that tall and with legs that long. Smaller midfielders we usually associate with a more “physical” approach, would not have been able to control the ball, or would have had to put themselves in difficult situations to get a grip on it.
As you can see, I’ve been pondering over this topic for a while now: How can we disentangle ourselves from the separation of physical and technical abilities in soccer and from the fully cerebral monster this dichotomy creates? I like to call this monster The Foot, a magical creature that dominates soccer, a brain in cleats that is the only chance for progress, the closest thing possible to a divinity in this sort of soccer positivism we ended up with. In that piece, I had synthetized my first attempt to dissolve such a dichotomy: technical abilities = physical abilities + mental abilities. That was to say, technique is contextual, it’s always a matter of execution and scope. You can have the coordination and feel required to hit a sixty-yard pass on a dime, but that’s a physical ability, and if you cannot see it in a game situation, which is the mental ability, you won’t make it.
It was a useful reasoning, because it helped me de-mystify The Foot: what made Maradona special and makes special Messi is not some kind of magic potion, it’s not a deal they made with the devil to insert free will into their left foot. It was and it is their body. Their physical similarities are not an accident, they are the magic itself. And so de-mystifying The Foot helped me de-mystify the soccer player. In that article, I discussed the common lie we’ve heard so many times over their prime years that “Ronaldo is the best athlete, Messi is the best player”, which is not only laughably wrong, but also somehow offensive to both.
Soccer is a sport — yes, yes, I know, it’s not like other sports, but so is every other sport — and who does sports is an athlete. If Messi is the best soccer player, he is the best athlete. Also, by that reasoning, so called “technical abilities” exist in all sports because all sports have rules that precisely define how a certain act should be executed — in the article I talked about weightlifting, and how not only it isn’t just a matter of how much you can lift, but is so specific in its rulebook that every competition is made of two rounds in which two totally different techniques are used.
But this didn’t solve all problems. Yes, the brain in cleats was defeated, but my reasoning did not address the way in which the cerebral still imposed its mark of dominance on the sport of soccer. It isn’t even something that involves just soccer, but expands to ball games in general. As said by Carlin Wing for Cabinet Magazine, ball games are by nature built on the aleatoric structures created by bounce, and the ability to impose your will and control over the bounce, being able to make it that little less aleatoric, that’s what technical ability is supposed to be about. It’s not necessarily weird as it’s very much in tune with the cultural climate we’ve been living under for more than a century, but we’re still very weird in how we talk about intelligence within certain sports. It’s frankly uncomfortable to hear as in many cases it can be a dog-whistle for racist tropes like the well documented pace and power discourse in soccer or how European basketball players have “a different brain for the game” compared to their American, and mostly African-American, counterparts.
But this separation of skill and intelligence, this divide between brain and body is, like most human things, an invention. For the ancient Greeks, the word tekhne ̄ was the act of creation and execution melted into one another, there was no before and after, just an ability to skillfully manipulate matter in order to produce artefacts. Before we invented the architect, there was the master builder. This professional builder was not merely someone who handled the design of the project, but also needed, after years of formal training, to be able to handle the material and shape it, who had to know it firsthand to understand its role within a construction. Master builders, as argued in a chapter title of Olga Popovic Larsen and Andy Tyas’ Conceptual Structural Design: Bridging the Gap Between Architects and Engineers, designed from precedent, as in deeply studied the masterpieces of the past to replicate and improve their solutions for their oeuvres.
Part engineer part architect, the master builder learned its craft on the worksite, assisting an older master builder and getting in direct contact with the tactile part of the job. A volume written in 1887, The Inland Architect and News Record, said, about the job of the master builder, that he was recognized as such “because of his ability to comprehend those plans, and to skillfully weave together the crude materials which make up the strength, the harmony, the beauty, the stateliness of the edifice which grow in his hands from a made foundation to a magnificent habitation”. The emphasis on the terms weave and grow is mine, as they opened in my mind a portal to a completely different reference, written more than a century later. Those terms are some of the fundamental pillars on which The Perception of Environment by British anthropologist Tim Ingold is built. In particular, it is chapter eighteen, properly named On weaving a basket, which focuses on both these terms and how they directly contrast with the mechanistic view of nature in which we’re submerged. He writes (Ingold 2000: 342)
According to the standard view, the form pre-exists in the maker’s mind, and is simply impressed upon the material. Now I do not deny that the basket-maker may begin work with a pretty clear idea of the form she wishes to create. The actual, concrete form of the basket, however, does not issue from the idea. It rather comes into being through the gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material. This field is neither internal to the material nor internal to the practitioner (hence external to the material); rather, it cuts across the emergent interface between them. Effectively, the form of the basket emerges through a pattern of skilled movement, and it is the rhythmic repetition of that movement that gives rise to the regularity of form.
If the basket grows through the environment, shaped directly by the forces battling each other to give shape to it, Ingold argues, then we should invert the terms of the equation. It is not weaving that is a modality of making, but vice versa. (Ingold 2000: 346)
To emphasise making is to regard the object as the expression of an idea; to emphasise weaving is to regard it as the embodiment of a rhythmic movement. Therefore, to invert making and weaving is also to invert idea and movement, to see the movement as truly generative of the object rather than merely revelatory of an object that is already present, in an ideal, conceptual or virtual form, in advance of the process that discloses it.
So, it’s the movement, the feel, the tactile experience of the previously mentioned unique properties of bounce, this is what shapes the plays of the athletes we love so much. And it couldn’t really be otherwise. For Lionel Messi to be able to conceptualize, draw in his mind, and only then execute the crazy pass to Nahuel Molina in the World Cup quarter final against the Netherlands, he’d need to have some kind of degree or at least preparation in engineering. That pass is math, if you want to conceptualize it, and even there, it’s not guaranteed a guy with such a degree would manage to conceive it in such small time.
One of the most notable pieces of writing from David Foster Wallace came when he discussed how Tracy Austin broke his heart, that is to say: how an athlete who he had admired so much, a player whose brilliance filled the Infinite Jest writer with endless questions to be asked and curiosities to be fulfilled, could be so damn boring when writing a book about her life. David Foster Wallace was not alone in that conundrum. Great athletes enlighten us with unspeakable beauty, but that beauty is, well, unspeakable. Some of the finest writers, photographers and broadcasters of our ages have challenged themselves to provide instructions for their interpretation, but the athletes themselves are not equipped to do that because to them it was never a matter of reading a bunch of instructions.
Without disturbing further Tracy Austin, to whom I always felt DFW was a bit cruel towards, does it ever drive you crazy how Magic Johnson, one of the most fun, exciting, mind-boggling passers to ever grace an NBA court, routinely goes viral for tweets so empty, almost AI-generated that barely qualify as takes? Let’s not even talk about his brief time as a coach, when it was reported that he had tirades towards his players for not playing the passes he used to pull off, because to him those plays were easy — I heard this anecdote from an Italian NBA broadcaster during a game a few years ago of which I can’t remember the teams involved and, as such, can’t find the exact statement he made. If he is one of the most brilliant minds to have ever played the game, why can’t he not think of anything clever to say? Because it was never his mind in the first place pulling off the magic.
There has never been a preconceived idea of the big play. What exists is the environment, which isn’t just made up of the things around us, it’s not something external to us, but of which we are a part of and of which every move we make contributes to shaping. And every big play is shaped by the environment and possible only in that specific context. One of the most notable plays in Italian soccer history is Francesco Totti’s Panenka against the Netherlands at Euro 2000. In the years after it, Totti and his teammates revealed that before going to take the penalty, Roma’s captain muttered the words “mo’ je faccio er cucchiaio” — literally “now I’ll make him the spoon”, where “the spoon” is how the Panenka is known in Italy due to the shape of the ball’s trajectory. This is quite a challenging anecdote because Totti himself used the word “make” to define what he was going to do, a word which would probably turn Ingold immediately into a Lazio sympathizer.
By all accounts, this sound like something that was preconceived in his mind, a play that always existed somewhere in his brain and that he just made tangible out of thin air, basically a confutation of everything written so far. But no one has ever said that humans don’t think, as that would be falling in the completely opposite trap. We’re not fully cerebral, but we’re not even fully not cerebral. Francesco Totti had very much an idea, but whatever he visualized in his mind was not exactly what turned out to be the result. I’d go even further to argue that the environment not only shaped the play — everyone can agree that an almost infinite number of variables including but not limited to the shoe’s material, the ball’s material, the fans behind the goal, the referee’s whistle, influenced the execution of that strike — but it shaped the thought: it is directly responsible for the idea Totti shared with his teammates before taking the penalty. He might not have gone for a Panenka in a slightly different situation. The buzz, the moment in the game, the significance of a semi-final, the faces of his teammates, his physical condition and how tired he was up until that point, all of this played a part in addition to his confrontational personality. In the end, what role the environment plays on where the ball ends up is something we already consider, for example, when we make a distinction between players who excels in big games, like Totti, and those who don’t.
I won’t pretend like this essay is ever going to end with a definitive opinion on the matter. This doesn’t feel like a source of energy that is going to be exhausted in little time. This essay is about starting a conversation, about proposing a template for improving — I say presumptuously, a more balanced approach would have me write “changing” — the way we talk and discuss soccer. And to do so, I need to start from a new framework, at the very least from a couple of new words that could be introduced to better explain some of the stuff we see on the field and take the cerebral out of the driving seat. In the end, what I do here is write about soccer, and so, also to held myself accountable for my future soccer writings, I want to put forwards some proposals.
The two key terms to start with, in this discussion, are dwelling and weaving. At its core, soccer is a sport divided in two phases: the one where you have the ball and the one where you don’t. A player needs to excel in both to get a shot at the highest levels of the game, there’s no way around and no position for which one of the two phases it’s less important — even for a goalkeeper, positioning is not a less valuable skill than reflexes. When we reduce this sport to its most elemental parts, everything we evaluate players on, every skill and ability, is either an off-the-ball skill, which is a dwelling skill or an on-the-ball one, from here on defines as a weaving skill.
It is necessary to start from the dwelling perspective because it is the most prominent part of soccer, a sport in which players spend around 97% of their game time, on average, away from the ball. Everything a player can do with the ball at their feet is rendered completely useless if they can’t even get on the ball in game situations. Ingold argues that (Ingold 2000: 186)
the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings. Building, then, cannot be understood as a simple process of transcription, of a pre-existing design of the final product onto a raw material substrate.
Dwelling, then, is a fundamental skill, one without which it’s impossible to build. Ingold echoes Martin Heidegger who, starting from a deep analysis on the etymology of the verb to dwell, came to the conclusion that “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build”. These statements encapsulate perfectly what is the true value of any off-ball action in soccer. It is through the dwelling on the field that the structures of play arise, and it is only if we are capable of dwelling on the field that a goal can be created through the use of the ball.
Talking about on-the-ball actions, it is through weaving, or as we’ve already seen Tim Ingold define it (Ingold 2000: 342), “the gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material” that the form emerges. Talking about weaving as a “pattern of skilled movement” by which, through the “rhythmic repetition of that movement” things are shaped and forms are created offers a really nice parallel with the beauty of soccer and other ball sports. If we imagine a soccer game as a field of forces all fighting against each other and all pushing into different directions, the elite player on the ball is the one that can allow the sphere to travel through the path of least resistance, whether with a pass or a dribble. If force, as the Futurist painters argued, is a line following a certain direction, thus transforming force from a static to a dynamic entity, the goal of the player is to have the ball meet as little vectors pushing in the opposite direction.
Of course, both these terms are very generic, but that’s because they describe something very generic. Both dwelling and weaving are not skills in and of themselves, but are a collection of a myriad smaller skills, and any player might excel in some of them, very rarely most of them, but almost never in all of them. The complexity lies in the ways those two sets of skills are used on the field, and on the almost infinite ways they can be interpreted. In his classic Interpretation of cultures, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz brought up Gilbert Ryle’s example of a person blinking their eye. Is that a wink or a twitch? Is it parodying someone winking, or is it just a rehearsal of a caricature of a wink? The mere act of an eye blinking is not diriment on what its auteur wanted to tell us. The thin description of the blinking eye needs to be substituted by a more in depth thick description not just of the act itself, but of how it relates to the environment it is a part of.
Geertz argued, echoing Max Weber, that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”. Soccer, or any sport, for that matter, is not considerably different. There are no two equal passes even if they happened to travel the same distance on the same strip of the pitch from and to the foot of the two same players. Within these new boundaries, which reduce the game of soccer to basically an endless string of weaving and dwelling actions — if one wanted to be more specific, the act of disrupting both the weaving and dwelling could be imagined as a third categorization — every play that is produced also needs to be, quoting Geertz, perceived and interpreted. Soccer is a context within which people move, an ever-changing and never-the-same context which needs to be described thickly. Let’s take dribbling, for example, which is an act of weaving, and could be defined within these boundaries.
It is not uncommon to read of players that are either technical dribblers or physical dribblers. That is, dribblers who knot complex patterns worthy of a sailor to create a moment of separation to move the ball forward or dribblers who prefer more straight lines, confident in the fact that their pace will be enough to create that separation. But technical abilities are physical abilities. And, more importantly, within a “technical” dribbler there’s always a part of a “physical” dribbler, and vice versa. One never dribbles with only one of those two skills, at the very least because what makes the defender move is the threat of another option, which allows the dribbler to create separation using the other, completely opposite, threat. In this sense, I’d argue that the definitions of agile dribbler and quick dribbler are a better fit. Quickness and agility are two bordering skills, and they need a bit of the other to fully shine, but they’re separate enough that it’s noticeable when one is needed more than the other to complete a task.
I think that too much of our soccer discourse happens in a vacuum. Players and coaches are judged a relatively low number of performances and without taking their fit within a certain environment into account. Whenever there is a new signing, or a new callup to a national team, too much time is spent focusing from where this player is coming from, the level of the league or the team they’re playing in, ignoring the context around why it is so, the fact that they might be a late bloomer, or went looking for a smaller team in order to maximize their first team opportunities, or that they might be recovering from a big injury, or more simply the fact that he wasn’t scouted enough or that those who scouted him were bad at their job.
The discourse around technical abilities shows just how much this sport takes things for granted, and refuses to elaborate an interpretation of what, deep down, we are actually talking about. If we only stopped for a minute and asked ourselves what even is a technical ability, we wouldn’t think about it in the same way. A technical ability is a physical ability — hence why, for example, kicking a ball against a wall is such a useful way of developing technique, it is no different from going for a run to develop endurance — and it is only useful as long as it makes sense within the context of the game — which could explain why some wonderkids don’t pan out as expected, and, in the opposite direction, why players who look “technically” poor would immediately turn Messi-like the moment they were pitted against even high-level amateurs. It’s so simple, and I think that if spelled this way very few people would disagree with it, and yet it is never reflected in the way we talk about such skills.
Through a change of framework, I think we can not simply move towards a better comprehension of a player’s skillset, but we can also improve how we explain and present their abilities to a public, whether we are mainstream pundits calling the game and providing analysis as stuff happens, or amateur bloggers who want to provide coverage for prospects who haven’t yet broken out in the professional games, or even scouts counseling teams on which players to sign next. This is a job of storytelling, with the key distinction that it is not allowed to make up stuff like a novelist might. It’s about using the creative resources of language to clear out the fog around a player’s silhouette. How? Well, it’s a developing strategy, it’s a process of trial and error, of forging at every single attempt a slightly more precise solution. But there is a place to start. That’s more than what I had when I started writing this.
