VANISHING POINT
Why Pep Guardiola is Football’s First Post-Modern Coach
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars — Borges, 1946
My face is the front of shop
My face is the real shop front
My shop is the face I front
I’m real when I shop my face — SOPHIE, 2018
In 2022 football has no face. It is face-less, bereft of identity, meaning, roots. Football now is a disembodied pastiche of its former self; barely comprehendible — like looking into a mirror and finding only a mirage reflected back. Football now is defined by absence. Where previously there was substance and permanence there is now vagary and transience. The game has passed through the glory of its classical and modernist periods and now finds itself bogged down in the barren marshlands of perpetual nostalgia. Football’s physical and tactical acceleration has led only to stasis, to a point of no return, ever faster speeds converge on paralysis. When the Millennium Falcon goes into Hyper-Speed the stars appear to elongate until, just for a moment, the craft is held in suspended animation, its movement through space no longer discernible.
The global media machinery strains every second of its non-stop 24/7 rolling coverage to convince us that football is still exciting, still worth watching, still worth paying for. The most banal of events are hyped up to levels of decisive importance — players cover their mouths to avoid the spotlight of punditry interrogation, the human face hidden from the camera eye’s view.
So, in this strange no-time of football’s being, how can the capital-fuelled simulation of what the game has become be brought to light? How can the narrative warfare waged by corporate self-interest be subverted? The featureless mannequin football has dissolved to must be not denied nor vilified (for this is the role played by Capital). No, rather its expressionless façade must be emphasised and demonstrated. To save football from permanent dislocation, dislocation itself must be embraced.
‘Most of us don’t watch football for technical quality or tactical intrigue’ Irish Times journalist Ken Early laments, ‘We’re watching because we want to feel something’. Early is responding to Manchester City’s recent 1–0 Premier League win against Chelsea. Despite City coach Josep ‘Pep’ Guardiola’s beaming assessment of his team’s latest dominant performance, Early brings the focus back to the people, ‘As for what the rest of us are supposed to feel? That is not Guardiola’s concern’.
Early also identifies the City player’s risk averse decision making as a source of frustration for the everyday fan who just wants to feel something when they go to the game on a Saturday at 12.30pm. Early continues, ‘Players today are told to avoid shooting from distance by coaches who have studied the stats and know precisely how low the chances of scoring from out there really are. Teams now aim to work the ball into a better position before pulling the trigger. The result is that the long-range screamer — arguably the most thrilling sight in football — is being optimised out of the game. Football evolves, while the fans pine for what’s been lost.’
This dire state of onfield affairs is only exacerbated by City’s vast financial clout provided by their Petro-state benefactors as, according to Early, ‘City are also the best-resourced team, so they have the best technical players, playing the most careful, disciplined, risk-averse football’.
The thrill-a-minute end-to-end blood-and-thunder football Early and so many others pine for is indeed conspicuously absent from Guardiola’s footballing blueprint. The often aloof but always sartorially intriguing Catalonian has led Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now Manchester City to a splurge of domestic and European titles over the last thirteen years and his teams’ radical ball possession style has received gushing plaudits for its redefining of how-the-game-can-be-played.
But it is only now, as we enter the fourteenth season of top-flight PepBall, that we can begin to adequately interpret Guardiola’s project and situate it within the wider context of football’s great disappearance, the once beautiful game’s classical identity now vanished into a vast depthless milieu; Events that were previously marked by a distinct time and space are now assembled together, dislocated from their authentic locales to co-exist discordantly, Pollock-like on a singular homogenous plane.
The City players no longer adhere to some archaic principle of fixed-ness, no more are their positions consistently identifiable; they have become blurred, players pop-up here and there, their locations never set. Perpetual rotation negates the need for specialisation, the particular becomes general. Even the truest of all England’s traditional positions, the-number-nine, is proved to be false.
And off the pitch too we see ever-increasing manifestations of this strange new dislocated reality. Temporality is ruptured as Euro 2020 time-hops forward into 2021, it lands not in one host country but spattered across the continent. And with its endlessly flat horizon-line and faceless nowhere-ness, what place more apt than the great vista of disappearance itself: The Desert, for this year’s World Cup to be staged?
All of this leaves so many of us feeling numb. As Early alludes to there is an oddness to watching City play, as if you are being hypnotized by some curious magic of the system. Master technicians only affordable to the controllers of vast wells of Capital beguiling you with unfathomable patterns performed in accordance to algorithmically constructed heuristics, no mistakes allowed, all imperfections eradicated. In some sense Guardiola’s City are the most potent of sedatives, footballing SOMA for the armchair tactistocrats.
But at this point resistance seems futile. Perhaps the most vital aspect of Guardiola’s football is that through its dominance it reveals to us the true nature of the reality football has lost itself in. By unashamedly harnessing the power of Capital to animate his meticulously codified game-theoretical system, Guardiola inadvertently presents to us the Gods we too have so blindly chosen to worship; It is us who have elevated these forces to positions of apparently unassailable supremacy.
At this point the passion and emotion craved by fans no longer exists, they have been exorcised, displaced, banished to another realm, our reality is no longer one inhabited by such base aspects as feeling and sensation; Football has now almost fully departed; Exited from the sprawling wasteland French philosopher Jean Baudrillard prophetically diagnosed as The Desert of the Real.
CITYZENS OF NOWHERE
‘The past is everywhere at the same time’ wrote the great theorist of post-modernity, Fredric Jameson, authenticity is replaced by ‘the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museums of a new global culture.’ We see this flattening of time in Guardiola’s homages to 1930’s tactical pioneer, Herbert Chapman and in his devotion to the 70s principles of Cruyffian play; there is a deep nostalgia to Total Football presencing itself once again fifty years after its inception, performance becomes pastiche.
City’s giant stadium, named in deference to the national airline of their Abu Dhabi owners, is, like so many other current stadia, resemblant of a Jetson-age shopping mall, a daring vision of a brave new world from the book-cover-art of mid-century sci-fi pulp. Like all fans, City’s were absent during The Pandemic, but many would argue their absence was present before. The Etihad is so often conspicuous by its abundance of empty seats; Guardiola even pleaded for more fans to come ‘Are you not entertained?’, apparently not. Rivals mock the Cityzens by rebranding the stadium The Emptyhad; and even when its full the spectators turn their backs.
And yet, to award Guardiola anything other than a starring role in the narrative of football’s snaking timelines seems at best hopelessly dismissive and at worst wilfully blind. His football is capable of levels of control previously thought impossible — only one shot conceded in 180 minutes against a Chelsea! And not just any Chelsea, a Chelsea Early accurately describes as ‘a Petro-dollar fuelled superclub that last season won the Champions League.’
The reality is no other coach has even come close to capturing the spirit of this strange football time and the abstract world-system it is embedded in. Guardiola’s football is itself a system of control, the players comprise a complex network capable of dismantling and re-assembling itself in relation to the problems being posed; each number is a node, communicating collectively through a hidden syntax of movements and gestures; a swarm conscience playing its own version of 5D football chess.
Guardiola’s City have no spine (this used to be an insult), they are invertebrate; the team’s limbs dislocated from their sockets, this is a football that has moved beyond traditional notions of structure, it is post-structural. But with this phase shift comes an unshakeable feeling of alienation, as though something so dear to us has been misplaced and lost; Guardiola’s football shows us this absence, it demonstrates to us that which is not there and asks us if we have enough human-ness left to justify the necessity of the disappeared.
