FERNANDO DINIZ vs THE MAN-MACHINE
Above the entrance to Plato’s academy there was a message inscribed in stone — ‘Let no one who is not a geometrician enter here’
‘Our football, with its creativity and joy, is an expression of our social formation, our rebellion at excessive internal and external order, against excesses of uniformity, of geometrization, standardisation, and the totalitarianisms that do for individual variety or personal spontaneity’
- Socrates
‘While European football is an Apollonian expression of the scientific method in which the human person is mechanized and subordinated to the whole, Brazilian football is a form of dance, in which the human person stands out and shines’
- Gilberto Freyre
INTRO PROLOGUE — Scrolling Text
The year is 2022. Global football is run by FIFA from their headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Propped up by corporate sponsorship, five European leagues dwarf all others in popularity and wealth with non-European nations left to fight over the scraps.
This centralisation of power is mirrored on the pitch, European positional systems dominate an ever-narrowing landscape of playing styles with players conditioned to adhere to the strict demands of the Western coaching elite. Regardless of culture or background, young footballers from all over the world are forced to conform to the rules of these systems or risk facing exclusion from the highest levels of competition.
These systems are self-serving, the maximisation of their own functionality and efficiency are prioritised over any romantic notions of human connection or creativity. Desire is harnessed as fuel for the system, human-beings are the batteries powering The Machine; Spirit is just another resource to be extracted.
At this point its easier to imagine the end of football than the end of Positional Systems Play. There is no alternative, it’s the slow cancellation of the future, the end of history punctuated by the rational occupation of space.
But in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil something is stirring. There are whispers of a brave new style that rejects the impositions of the conquering European systems, a style that seeks to resurrect what had been previously thought to have been lost, to summon once more a spirit of the past and revivify it with a breath from the now.
Fernando Diniz is Head Coach of Fluminense; Football’s future hangs in the balance…
MACHINIC ANALYSIS
The slow-hijacking of human consciousness by The Machine began long before football was ever conceived. The takeover was no smash-and-grab, more a gradual creep over millennia, an invisible intruder from the outside relentlessly inching its way into the human psyche measure by measure.
The Machine’s great strength is its difficulty to identify — its ability to remain hidden in plain sight.
The Machine is everywhere all at once…The Machine is abstraction…The Machine is definition…The Machine is quantity…The Machine is logic…The Machine is repetition…The Machine is standardisation…The Machine is that 20 grand fairy-tale wedding that’s gonna be oh so different from all the rest. The Machine is factory…The Machine is classroom…The Machine is measurement…The Machine is maps…The Machine is blueprint…The Machine is number…The Machine is procedure…The Machine is automation…The Machine is that dream job you kid yourself will make you happy when all it does is soften your bones and crushes your heart. The Machine is geometry…The Machine is calculation…The Machine is rationality…The Machine is accountancy…The Machine is Capital…The Machine is consumerism…The Machine is next-day-delivery…The Machine is debt…The Machine is checking your mobile banking app every 5 minutes until your tax deducted minimum wage finally drops in. The Machine is The Military Industrial Complex…The Machine is The Opioid Epidemic…The Machine is the Atomic Bomb…The Machine is The Suez Canal…The Machine is The Dutch East India Company…The Machine is Resource Extraction…The Machine is efficiency…The Machine is productivity…The Machine is surveillance…The Machine is being told how free you are while everything about you is being shaped to conform to the requirements of the system.
The Machine is not technology itself; this is not a protest ‘against technology’. The Machine in question is but one strain of technological usage — it is a distinct positionality within the field of technology, a particular flavour of technique. It is the prioritisation of standardisation, automation and repetition, a flattening out of human creativity through mechanized processes designed to benefit and serve some external non-human entity.
…NEWSREEL…TUNE IN FOR A COACHING MASTERCLASS!…
Josep ‘Pep’ Guardiola: The tactics are put on the field to help them (the players) to express their talent more often than not…I use the tactics to create some patterns so everyone can be more comfortable, they can have more time and express their talent as much as possible…with the ball if I can create some patterns like if 20 balls arrive in the box for our strikers to have more chances to score a goal this is tactics…I don’t believe tactics is you do whatever you want because after that it’s a little bit chaos and in the chaos you don’t know what exactly is going to happen.’
Thomas Tuchel: I think my job in particular is to create chances and to create a structure that we can create chances.
Cesc Fabregas on Antonio Conte: ‘It was like going to school. Conte will tell you exactly how he wants it from the goalkeeper until you score a goal, what you have to do, exactly everything.
POSITIONISM
The term ‘Positional Play’ appeared some time ago now. It was billed as an English translation of the Spanish ‘Juego de Posicion’. This mysterious method was apparently the secret magic behind Pep Guardiola’s generational Barcelona side of 2008–2011, a mind-bending system of rules and sprawling logic charts directing the on-field actions of the players — no more than 2 in a vertical line, a maximum of 3 horizontally, when he goes there he goes here, when the ball is here you are there.
The pitch is re-interpreted as an elaborate grid, a schematic floorplan compartmentalised into a dizzying array of rectangular corridors and offices. The partitions are designed to keep the players apart. The distances and spacing between the players are paramount in Positional Play, don’t get too close, the occupation of space must be rational, don’t you understand? I SAID RATIONAL DAMMIT! rational according to the blueprint! it’s all right here in the plan, can’t you see? just stick to the plan and nothing will go wrong. Now stop all this chatting and get back to your desks.
Positional Play is a Machinic mode of football where the system governs with an iron fist. Like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt who had exclusive access to the divine will of the Gods, the coaches of Positionism appeal to the authority of the system when justifying their approach. The system demands that you pass here, not there — the probabilities are higher, chance creation is more efficient. You must stand still and wait here, alone without the ball, to occupy these defenders. Its not my choice boys, it’s just fact, it’s what the logic of the system demands.
And just like those God-Kings of old, the Positionist implements patterns of standardisation and repetition to ensure protocols are met and structures are maintained, the automatisms and pre-ascribed patterns dutifully animated by the humble workers. The triangles constructed on the pitch may not be made of desert stone, but these meticulously calculated straight-lined geometric shapes of human flesh and blood are monuments to their leader’s desires for immortality none the less.
ORIGINS OF GINGA
It is by way of a well-documented historical process that football arrived in Brazil from Europe. The colonising Europeans had already been extracting resources from Brazil’s fertile ground for centuries and by the early summer of 1894, when Englishman Charles Miller returned from his education in Southampton armed with a football and knowledge of the rules of Association Football, their systematic rape of the continent was well underway.
In the time since their ‘discovery’ of this foreign land, the Old World’s rabid lust to consume exotic produce such as sugar and coffee had fuelled The Machine to step-up and maximise production. Terrible fleets of slave-ships were trafficked across The Atlantic from Africa and, along with platoons of indigenous captives, their human cargo was set to backbreaking work in the endless fields of vast sweltering plantations — humanity is secondary to the unquestionable authority of The Machine.
Brazilian academic Luis Uehara identifies ‘ginga’ (pronounced jinga) as originating from capoeira, a practice anthropologist Greg Downey describes as ‘an acrobatic, danced game done to distinctive vocal and instrumental music. Derived from African challenge dances and shaped by slavery, urban gangs, and official repression throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries in Brazil…a form of Brazilian martial art that relies on swaying as the key movement to outmanoeuvre the opposition’
In his 2006 book, The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt cites Brazilian social commentator and writer, Gilberto Freyre as the source of ginga placed in a footballing context — ‘…Our passes…our tricks…that something which is related to dance, to capoeira, mark the Brazilian style of football, which rounds and sweetens the game the British invented, the game which they and other Europeans play in such an acute and angular way’.
The mythic Brazilian style embodied by the great players and teams of the 50’s, 60s, 70s and 80’s incorporated the idea of ginga, it was a play coloured by constant movement with fluid, spontaneous and disguised flows in both individual actions and interactions between teammates — an ingenious rhythmic slave-dance reappropriated for sporting confrontation. It was in stark contrast to the ‘acute and angular’ play of the Europeans — an intoxicating antidote to the static confines of early Positionism.
The perpetual novelty of these ever-shifting inter-player perspectives brought about by ginga afforded a creativity and artistry that for decades was able to confuse and short-circuit the predictably Machinic systems and structures of so many Northern opponents.
But The Machine does not stop.
…NEWSREEL…TELE SANTANA’S BRAZIL LOSE TO ITALY IN 1982 WORLD CUP!…
‘…it was the day that a certain naivety in football died: it was the day after which it was no longer possible to simply pick the best players and allow them to get on with it: it was the day the system won’.
— Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid
FERNANDO DINIZ VS THE MAN MACHINE
‘In my conception of living life, I prefer life to be more art than science, what is artistic marks forever, it moves people’
‘My greatest teachers gave me a lot of freedom and this is different to what the players are used to…I try to promote an environment where we can create things collectively, everyone gives their opinion so they feel like they’re a part of it, it’s very alive, very organic’
— Fernando Diniz
‘He’s a man who lifts you up when you make a mistake…He makes you feel at ease and raises you up despite the boos and curses of the crowd. He’s always there for you…Diniz is without doubt one of the best coaches I’ve ever worked with’
— Antony
There are an infinite number of ways to view and understand the world. But when one worldview achieves such dominance that all others fade into the background we approach what is known as a point of singularity. All alternatives have been cancelled.
We now live on the cusp of such an event. The Machinic enframing of the world threatens to envelop everyone and everything in its path. But not yet, out in the margins the soft winds of revolution are beginning to swirl, there is hushed talk of a man who is said to possess an inner strength, some rare ability to withstand the encroachment of The Machine. The man’s name is Fernando Diniz.
One of nine brothers, Diniz grew up to enjoy a successful playing career as a midfielder for top tier Brazilian clubs such as Palmeiras, Corinthians, Fluminense and Flamengo. After retiring at 34, Diniz moved into coaching taking charge of various lower league clubs but it wasn’t until he arrived at Audax SP that his team’s unique playing style began to be noticed by a wider audience.
In 2016 (during his second stint at Audax) he took the unfashionable club to the final of the Campeonato Paulista where they lost to Santos. But Diniz’s unorthodox approach had the pundits reaching for comparisons to the ‘Tiki-Taka’ possession play of Guardiola’s Barcelona — a comparison which persists to this day where we find Diniz in charge of a Fluminense side playing some of the most thrilling football Brazil has seen since Tele Santana’s great 1982 team and the last days of ginga.
But it is in this very conflation that the true distinction between Diniz’s method and highly sophisticated Positionism of Guardiola shows itself. ‘His team is absolutely positional’ says Diniz of Guardiola’s style, ‘it’s a game where players keep their positions in the lanes of the field they occupy and the game reaches them…my team is totally different, we change positions a lot…we try to apply a dynamic game, it’s a different collective participation’.
In contrast, when asked about the importance of his Manchester City player’s movement, Guardiola made it abundantly clear that the reporter’s perception was mistaken. ‘Move the ball’ Guardiola enthused, ‘it looks like the movement is the players but the movement is the ball…everyone has to be in their position, when you move much its not good…the ball comes where we are, we don’t go to pick up the ball. It’s completely different.’
The systemic machinations of Positionism dictate where the players must be. They must be in their slots. They can switch and rotate but only ever between these pre-allocated situational locations. If the ball is here, you are here. The human players do not interpret space, rather they learn where to locate themselves within an already defined generalised conceptualisation of space. The Machine has done the thinking for you — the players are cogs in The Man-Machine.
Diniz’s system is different. It is still a system but it is not of The Machine. It is a system of greater elegance and complexity than Positionism as it is designed to prioritise localised moments of inter-player creativity by allowing them freedom to interpret space as they experience it in the moment. It rejects the perceived stability of ‘rational’ space occupation and seeks to maximise instances where players can gather close together in small areas to weave unpredictable patterns and create new collaborative connections. Proximity and movement over Position and space.
To The Machinic eye the rational structure of Diniz’s team appears far-from-equilibrium — the team is unbalanced! Its unstable you fool! But imagine a swaying capoeirista leaning back so far on one foot with body twisted that any untrained participant would immediately lose balance and collapse in a heap on the ground — now imagine this is the moment where novelty emerges and the critical advantage is created.
PROXIMITY PLAY
‘Our history is not about space, but about players’
- Gabriel Dudziak, Brazilian Football Commentator
By rejecting the Machinic definition of space as a barren flatland waiting passively to be populated we can begin to view the green of the football field as a place of coming-together for the players to collaborate and create new patterns and worlds; we can escape the prison grids of Positionism. There is an alternative way to the straight-lined geometry of Europe’s Positional neurosis.
Despite its ever-accelerating expansion, The Machine still cannot account for human communication on the subtlest of levels, the reading of each other’s eyes, the intuitive knowing of one another’s deepest conceits. This is why apparently chaotic Proximity Play remains off-limits to Positionism — The Machine cannot compute the potentials of such interactions and arrangements as it has not yet processed and replicated the most complex aspects of human experience.
The hour is growing late if Positionism is to be overcome and a new paradigm entered into. And it is through the methods of coaches like Diniz that we can see a chink in the armour of The Machine. For the game to evolve down a more artistic, dynamic and human timeline the locus of creative responsibility must be returned to the interpretive power of the players rather than remain locked in the possession of high-priest coaches of Positionist systems doctrine.
No football system is ever TOTAL.
