YEAR ZERO
Messi, Matter and Football’s Emergent Revolution
QUE MIRAS, BOBO?
Que miras, bobo? (what are you looking at, Idiot?)
- Lionel Messi
December 9th, 2022. The Lusail Stadium in Qatar. The World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and Holland.
In the 73rd minute Lionel Messi calmly slots home from the penalty spot to give Argentina a 2–0 lead. Messi celebrates with his teammates in front of the Argentine fans but before the game restarts he has one more engagement to fulfil.
Messi walks towards the Dutch bench and stares down the coaches and technical team. The kid from the potreros of Rosario plants his feet firmly on the Middle-Eastern ground and cups his ears in defiance.
Sitting second-from-the-left in the neat little row of matching-suited coaches was the man in charge of the Dutch national team, the boss, Louis Van Gaal. After the game, Messi would explain away the provocative gesture by claiming it was merely a reaction to some flippant comments made by Van Gaal which, according to Messi, ‘disrespected the Argentine national team’.
But Messi’s account is a clever a misdirection for mass-media consumption. Messi’s choice to cup his ears at Van Gaal was symbolic of a far deeper grievance than just some pre-match gamesmanship.
But to understand the real roots of this conflict we must try to understand how a strange assemblage of objects, happenings and circumstances have interacted with each other across space and time to create a seemingly random network of curious connections and ruptures. By piecing together these lost fragments and clues we can begin to reveal an alternative account of football’s evolution which allows us to make sense of Messi’s gesture in a more meaningful and grounded way.
To bring about this fundamental shift in our understanding of football we must travel back in time and visit far off places. Indeed, the breadcrumb-trail begins in a time and place we can barely even imagine…
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless, twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
There is a world outside of our perceptions of it. There is an Exterior dimension. There was a time — a very long time — when the universe existed quite happily without even the tiniest trace of what would become ‘human consciousness’. Human consciousness itself was brought into being by a world from which it was wholly absent.
This Outside world is a world of matter. It is a world of non-human material. This exterior, material world is coldly indifferent to any of our preoccupations or plan, it has no interest in such petty concerns. Mountains, rivers, deserts, winds, volcanoes, forests and seas were colliding with each other long before any seed of humanness was ever present.
The world is not created by our perceptions of it. How could it be? If it was, how can we explain the aeons of time before our earliest stages of evolution had occurred? Are these lost epochs just a dream? A test from God?
Once we have accepted this most fundamental and obvious of premises: the existence of a world outside of human perception, we can proceed to the beginning.
NOT GREAT MEN
The past lives on in your front room
The poor still weak, the rich still rule
History lives in the books at home
The books at home
It’s not made by great men
- Gang Of Four
We have reached the point where football theory has become almost fully detached from its practice. And make no mistake, this is an issue of class. It is an issue of armchair academics and stuffy intellectuals coiffing flat-whites during the mid-morning ‘breakout sessions’ of their horrific conventions. Endless orgies of grey hued PowerPoint presentations, citations citations, references references, some guy said this in that year, another said that in this.
The irrelevance of this commodified discourse has reached unprecedented levels. The new-gurus of football’s neo-theory scramble for position on the free-market grid, yanking at each other’s hair, trampling over each other in a crazed Black-Friday lust for another online-course or book sale. Theories about theories, scatter charts of overly-inflated data sets, national curriculums, game models, positional profiles, career pathways, 17 Ways to Reach Elite Performance, complex systems, easy-to-implement periodization plans guaranteed to lead your team to success.
Some of these brainiacs even go as far as to suggest that football is a ‘closed logical system’ — as if all relations between the game and reality have been severed. This nihilistic vision of football as pure abstraction denies any intrusion from the Outside into the ‘objective constraints’ of football’s laws. It reduces human players to dots on a screen. Football is simpler that way, pixelated circles don’t have any families or upbringings, any passions or desires. Pixels don’t come from anywhere, they’re just lines of code.
Back in reality, fans and players on the ground are made of flesh and blood. They feel the game intuitively, always in relation with the material conditions of their place and time. Working people devote themselves to the game they love. But the connection with the on-pitch play is so often tenuous at best. We cling to examples of clubs and teams who’s playing style is reflective of the beliefs and values of the communities which support them. Why are clubs like Rayo Vallecano an exception and not the rule?
Football’s game theory has become a product. Incentivised by a propagandized mass-delusion of ‘self-improvement’, coaches gorge themselves on fatty heaps of industry junk-literature, stuffing their bookshelves full to bursting with bullshit books about bullshit ideas. It’s a feeding frenzy out there.
Sure, maybe these coaches have good intentions, but that doesn’t change anything. They swallow the pseud-lit whole and then attempt to implement these oh-so lofty theoretical ideas down onto the pitches where they stand — regurgitating clichés and buzzwords, mapping out ingenious tactical schemes as players look around at each other in bemusement.
We are in dire need of a great reset. The dominant paradigm privileges a particular method of cultural understanding. It’s what post-punk agitators, Gang Of Four refer to in their 1979 track ‘Not Great Men’. The ‘Great Man Theory’ Gang Of Four parody is the European enlightenment proposal that ‘ideas’ are spread through the creation of abstractions by clever people and then transmitted outwards into the general populous.
Like all great men, Louis Van Gaal has a method. He carries it around with him like a toolkit and wherever he lands, be it Amsterdam, Barcelona or Manchester, he implements this method with meticulous care and precision.
Van Gaal is not concerned with the local particularities or the material conditions of the environment — as long as the resources are sufficient to facilitate the animation of his grand plan, Van Gaal can impose his structural model onto the local ecology. If the material conditions (such as pesky players like Riquelme or Di Maria) happen to conflict with the Dutchman’s singular vision of Total Football Utopia then the solution is obvious: just get rid of them.
This Great Man method (an off-shoot of the wider philosophical school of ‘Idealism’) is almost completely dominant across a coaching landscape that seems to offer little or no alternative. The coach is the creator, he has the idea, he is the Godlike figure responsible for the strategic plan. For the idealist, their subjective theory is everything. It’s a blueprint, a grand schematic from which the team’s identity and style will be derived. The idealist deals in the creation of universal abstractions independent from the specific material conditions of the immediate environment.
We see this desire for universalism in the ‘Objective Football Theory’ of coach educator Raymond Verheijen and his lucrative World Football Academy. Following the work of his Dutch compatriot Jan Tamboer, Verheijen seeks to create a ‘universal football language’ — a footballing Esperanto designed to eradicate differences in localised terminology. The project of unification is rationalised under the guise of flattening out the landscape of communication — how can we ever expect to understand each other if the same words mean different things to different people?
Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ‘the limits of our language are the limits of our world’. Theorists like Verheijen openly work to limit, reduce and ultimately wipe-out any variance of footballing interpretations. They strive to unite the football world under the umbrella of a singular grand-theory, an all-encompassing logical system of terms and references — One theory to rule them all! The map becomes the territory.
It is exactly the prevalence of idealist projects such as these that has led us to the impasse we now find ourselves at. If we continue to privilege this universalising method of conceptualising how football develops then our linear trajectory will continue. We will end up collapsing all differences and variations into a singular rubric of homogeneity and standardisation.
We destroy football as cultural expression. The local is consumed by the global. Without a vibrant, bubbling multiplicity of footballing realities interacting with each other the game becomes stagnant, mineralised in its current state, fossilised and frozen in time.
The chasm that has opened between football’s current theory and its practice must be closed. And to do this a radical departure from idealistic thinking must be made. This shift requires a re-conceptualizing of football and a consideration of its emergence through a different analytical lens. Idealism must be sublated back into the material reality from where it is formed.
I am proposing that football can only be sufficiently understood by way of a particular analytical method: Dialectical Materialism. That is to say, we must always begin any analysis of football with an assessment of the material conditions of the local ecology.
If we want to understand how ‘tactics’ evolve, our investigations should not start with an appraisal of some ingenious mental construction. Rather, they must begin with our feet placed firmly on the ground. The player’s actions on the pitch are always-already informed by their unique ‘forms of life’. Who are they as people, where are they from, what values do they hold? How have various cultural milieus informed how players interact with football and orient themselves in the world writ large?
Football is not made by Great Men. It emerges through the relationships and interactions between people and their environments. It is a dialectic process. A recursive dialogue between the human and the non-human, between subjective perceptions and the exterior material world.
There can be no understanding of football without an historical socio-cultural understanding; a close consideration of the art, literature, politics, religion, demographics, geography and architecture of time and place.
As long as it is played by humans, football will never be a closed system. It is lunacy to suggest as much. There are infinite external currents flowing into, through and out of any ‘objective’ model of the game. And like with a river flowing through the countryside, these currents shape and form the structure of the land.
No one told Zinedine Zidane how to control a football. No genius coach formulated a plan to achieve this. The emergent relationship between young ‘Yazid’ and the ball (between the human and the non-human) was formed by their shared movements through time on the rough pink stone of a make-shift pitch deep within the urban jungle of La Castellane.
TOTAL REPLICATION
All systems should be familiarised, one with the other, in such a way that their combined impact and interaction can be appreciated as a single complex system
- Aldo van Eyck
Van Gaal has a good vision of football, but it is not mine. He wants to gel winning teams, but he has a militaristic way of working with his tactics. I want individuals to think for themselves.
- Johan Cruyff
The problem with delusions of objectivity is that you end up believing you’ve constructed some total solution. But there is no total solution to football. You cannot solve football through a logical process of mental acrobatics in the same way you click together the coloured blocks of a Rubik’s Cube. The desire to view certain footballing conceptualisations (models) as panaceas is endemic in what Mark O’Sullivan has called a ‘copy/paste’ mentality which pervades so much of football’s developmental thinking.
There is perhaps no more lauded footballing model than the Dutch creation of ‘Total Football’. At this point it is reasonable to propose that Total Football has influenced the global game more than any other interpretation of football. It has become a grand cathedral of concepts, principles and utopian visions of ‘how the game should be played’. Johan Cruyff’s name has become sacred, synonymous with a kind of unspoiled footballing purity.
There is no denying that the Total style Cruyff and coach Rinus Michels helped bring forth is a masterpiece. It is a formulation of staggering pragmatic function and elegance of form. It was a revolutionary method that seemed to dissolve the tension between individual and collective, collapsing One into Many.
But the mistake so many have made is to believe that this majestic footballing ‘idea’ was primarily a mental construction — an abstracted theory with Cruyff and Michels as its Great Men creators. And it is this misguided, idealistic belief that legitimises the replication process which has been underway ever since. If the idea worked for Holland then why not for Australia? Or for Nepal?
We can find the answer to this question — and the fundamental error of Idealism — by applying the analytical tool of Dialectical Materialism. If we are to justify a rejection of an Idealistic, Universalist, Great Man conceptualisation of football we must first demonstrate how the material conditions of the local environment directly influenced the milieu from which the playing style emerged. Why Holland? Why the 1960s? In his book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, David Winner wrestles with precisely such issues as he delves into the cultural ecology in which Cruyff, Michels and their ground-breaking Ajax team were embedded.
Throughout the book, Winner weaves together narratives of how and why ‘Dutch space is different.’ Calvinist religiosity is fused with the geographical flatness of the landscape. Pragmatic spatial utilisations and rural dyke-building are meshed with the aesthetic geometric divisions of tulip fields and Piet Mondrian. The collective imaginary of the Dutch people is brought into dialogue with the material conditions of the environment.
‘Before Dutch Total Football there was Dutch Total Architecture’ explains Winner. In his chapter on ‘Totality’, Winner uncovers a strange correlation between an avant-garde Dutch architectural movement and the emergence of Total Football.
Team X (Team 10) was formed by a splinter group of radicals proposing an alternative to the dogmatic modernist movement of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM).
Through the theoretical writings of their in-house Forum magazine and practical examples of their work across Amsterdam, the members of Team X sought to establish a new-school of structuralist architecture.
The idea was to create the ‘Total City’. A radically flattened out urban topology where every locale was representative of an overriding conceptual theme. Whether through the merry-go-round placement in children’s playparks or the traffic flows through great boulevards, architects like Aldo van Eyck sought to maintain the coherence of the ‘city system’ as a whole. Situational nuances and variations were harmonised in service to an overarching score.
Perhaps the most iconic building produced by the movement is Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage. Completed in 1960 — nine years before Cruyff would appear in the first of four European Cup Finals with Ajax (winning three of them) — the orphanage is regarded by many as the crowning achievement of Team X’s attempts to actualise the concept of ‘Total Architecture’.
Greek architect and author, Alexander Tzonis describes the affordance of localised emergence in van Eyck’s thinking — ‘In juxtaposition to the top-down idea of the conception of a plan which little by little breaks it down hierarchically until it is implemented in every spot in the city, van Eyck proposes exactly the opposite idea, the idea of bottom-up.’ ‘Van Eyck was interested in a non-hierarchical development of cities and in the Amsterdam Orphanage he created a building with many in-between conditions to break down the hierarchy of spaces.’
Like van Eyck’s buildings, Cruyff’s football was situationist. It didn’t matter which player performed which function as long as the coherence of the overall system was maintained. There was no hierarchy of position. Authority is de-centralised to localised nodes of emergence affording the fluidity and rotations which Total Football teams are rightly famous for. But — and this is crucial — both architectural and footballing systems were grounded in an order faithful to the classical geometric tradition. Its no coincidence that David Miller of The Times described Cruyff as ‘Pythagoras in boots’.
‘The Orphanage is both house and city, compact and polycentric, single and diverse, clear and complex, static and dynamic, contemporary and traditional; rooted as much in the classical as in the modern tradition. The classical tradition resides in the regular geometrical order that lies at the base of the plan. The modern one manifests itself in the dynamic centrifugal space which traverses the classical order’.
Dutch Totality is decentralisation within the coding of an established order. As the spaces and Tetris-like forms of van Eyck’s orphanage cascade outwards there is a certain predictability and coherence to each next iteration of the structure. It can’t help but look a little…digital. A completely random, unnameable and chaotic shape will not suddenly appear.
In a 1962 article in Forum, van Eyck speaks of an architectural scheme which, ‘attempts to integrate the smaller and larger urban components by means of a single configurative discipline’. Just like in Total Football, The DNA coding of the overriding concept pulses through every connection between nodes. The system is always maintaining a certain consistency of identity. Its structures are formed by a repetitive, multiplicative process where each node is always-already pregnant with the blueprint of the next.
In this sense we must understand that Dutch Totality is designed to collapse distinctions and universalise space. Instead of amplifying the difference between situations it seeks to approach each moment with a perspective in-keeping with the overall identity of the system.
Like van Eyck’s Total Architecture, Total Football is an example of Dutch cultural expression. Forms of structure that manifest themselves in relation to the lineage of localised environmental forces. Total Football was an eruption from the smoothed-out flatlands of Holland’s collective spatial psyche. The system’s fluidity and emergence always-already anchored to the rigid axioms of the classical Geometric tradition.
So why do we feel so compelled to extract this artefact from its Northern European context and export it to every corner of the globe? Should the mountainous regions of Bolivia be a suitable canvas for such a design? The Neo-Andean architecture of Freddy Mamani shows us an interpretation of form and structure derived from a different time and place — intimations of sun-worship, an alternative collective imaginary, a cosmology and mythos far removed from the rationalised European grid.
Great Man coaches like Louis Van Gaal have simplified the cultural expression of Total Football and re-packaged it for global distribution. His Positional game is an impoverished replica of the original. The Positionism of Van Gaal (and of many other exponents of footballing idealism) is Total Football abstracted away from its roots entangled deep in the fertile soil of Dutch tulip-fields.
Finally free from contextual complications, Van Gaal’s ‘game model’ is standardised and ready for top-down roll-out and implementation. Nuance and individualism is lost. A Big-Mac in Manilla tastes the same as a Big-Mac in Mexico City. In the hands of Van Gaal, Total Football is reduced to fast-food. Next stop Barcelona.
THAT’S POTRERO!
I asked a player: are you not ashamed that your father sees you as if you no longer play as you did in the neighbourhood?
- Cesar Luis Menotti
‘Here we have to [pass] the ball, we’re going to play with two touches and don’t dribble so much’. These were the words Lionel Messi remembers hearing from a trainer at Barcelona’s La Masia youth academy shortly after he arrived from Argentina. Of course, Messi would go on to become the greatest ever Barcelona player, but the difference in footballing interpretations between the young Messi and his coach is the perfect example of how materialist emergence is supressed by idealistic diktat.
Messi didn’t learn to play the way he does on the flat carpets of the modern artificial surfaces so sought after by football development institutions all over the world. Like generations of Argentinian kids before him, Messi cut his teeth on the rough and loose ground of the potrero. The grainy video footage of young Leo slaloming his way past hapless opponents shows his ability perform a gambeta (an Argentinian term for a deceptive move or dribble) on dusty pitches most European academies would be ashamed of.
‘Potrero’ is a word referring to the public space where people gather together to play football. Like with the stories of Zidane in La Castellane, or the cage players of London, footballers develop their technique in relation to the material conditions of their playing environment. Each potrero is different. Some are concrete, some are mud, some are smooth, some are rough. Some have walls on all four sides, some on only three. Some are open, some are on a slope, some have trees growing in the middle of them.
But these physical aspects of the potrero’s characteristics do not only form the footballing grammar of the individual player. What is far less understood is how these material conditions can afford the emergence of a collective grammar, a localised lexicon of cues and signals.
If enough time is spent by the same players playing together on the same potrero then a unique collective style can be formed. It is a shared understanding of play authentic to the particular relationship between human group and non-human setting.
Imagine you play with the same group of players on the same pot-holed concrete rectangle day after day, year after year. Over time, the group will develop a collective understanding of each other’s strengths, habits and tendencies in constant dialogue with the constraints of the environment. How does each player like to receive a pass? On which side? At what speed and height?
Subtle movements, facial expressions and vocal calls attain bespoke meanings only discernible to the in-group; If he rolls the ball to the left, it means he wants me to move to the right. Remember Wittgenstein — ‘the limits of our language are the limits of our world’.
Unlike the abstracted systems of theorists who wish to eradicate colloquialism from football’s vocabulary, the players of the potrero are the active agents involved in the bottom-up generation of localised dialects of play. The emergent styles are grounded in relation to the physical geography of the pitch — if the surface is uneven then the pass can be lifted, an aerial style is developed.
But it is not just the physical aspects of the potrero that are in dialectic with the emergent playing style — intangible cultural phenomena are also very much in play. What are the values and beliefs of the potrero’s locale? Of the neighbourhood or Barrio? Of the city? Of the nation?
The players and spectators will select for behaviours through their reactions to particular football actions. Does the crowd of a concrete cage game in Kinshasa respond in exactly the same manner as the supporters of a dust-pitch derby in Jakarta? Perhaps certain locales favour physicality over deception. Some cheer speed and storm while others applaud stillness and calm.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic recalls this dialogue with the spectators during his formative years in Sweden — “When we played football in Rosengard, it was all about putting the ball between people’s legs, doing different things…after every trick people were like ‘oohhh’ ‘eeeyy’. It was all about who had the best trick, the craziest move. I loved it.”
Young Zlatan’s stylistic tendencies emerged from the dialectic between his situational interpretations of the game and the material conditions of the environment. And these material conditions not only include physical characteristics. Also present are the more intangible culturally embedded values, preferences and beliefs of the people inhabiting the immediate ecology.
In this sense, playing style is literally forged in the heat of the interactions between players and environment. This is how genuine, authentic, culturally expressive forms of football can emerge up from the furnace of a locale’s material milieu.
In Argentina there is the legend of El Pibe, the mythical street kid who uses cunning and deception to outwit adversaries of superior size and strength. To Argentines, players like Maradona and Messi are perceived in relation to this archetype — they are seen as manifestations of El Pibe, characters from the collective imaginary made real.
Here in Scotland we ask — ‘where are our Messi’s?’. But it’s the wrong question. We can’t have a Messi. Because Messi is Argentinian. Like Maradona, Messi emerged from the potrero’s of Rosario in dialectic with the local ecology’s dusty ground and cultural archetypes. But a country like Scotland can have its own incarnations of footballing wonder — we too have a landscape, history and culture. Not all flowers can bloom in the chill frost of Scotland’s spring, but that doesn’t mean those that do must smell any less sweet.
It is the dialectic between players and place that gave rise to what is known in Argentina as La Nuestra. Literally meaning ‘our way’, La Nuestra is the name given to a style of play that blossomed in the early days of the Argentinian professional league.
La Nuestra was characterised by ‘skill and trickery’ and relied on the emergent dynamics between players and their environments rather than any overtly tactical plan imposed by the coach. In its most potent manifestations, La Nuestra is wild and vibrant — a interpretive celebration of what it is to be Argentinan. Of what it is to be human.
When the kids of the potrero reported for their official club games, imagine their confusion when the coach launched into his litany of pre-match instructions. ‘4–3–3 boys, you play here, you play there. Mid-block here, build-up there’. In this situation the coach serves only to complicate matters unnecessarily. The players know what to do, they’ve done it many times before. They already have their way of playing. The players already have La Nuestra.
When a player like Juan Roman Riquelme performs a trademark move of beguiling ball control and contextual awareness those who understand the origins of such special powers cannot help but shout — ‘That’s Potrero!’.
THE ETERNAL RETURN
‘Our footballers are what they are. We cannot play like Guardiola’s Barcelona.’
- Cesar Luis Menotti
The history of Argentinian football can be broadly read as a tug-of-war between the desire for authentic footballing expression through La Nuestra and an opposing ideology favouring a move towards a more conservative and restrained mode of play. The devastating 6–1 defeat suffered by The Angles With Dirty Faces at the hands of Czechoslovakia in the 1958 World Cup was a pivotal moment in the battle for Argentina’s footballing identity. For many, the heavy loss served to confirm that Argentina must move away from the whimsy and romance of La Nuestra if they were to compete with the faster, more powerful football of the rising European powers.
And this inferiority complex still haunts Argentina and many of its non-European contemporaries to this day. It’s as if La Nuestra and its various localised proxies (such as the Jogo Funcional of Brazil) are seen by many of their own people as naïve and folksy — quaint indigenous artefacts of little value when put up against the technologically advanced superpowers of the European elite. It’s what Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues described as Vira-Lata — a creeping ‘mongrel complex’ that holds back the South American will from ever truly confronting the cultural assumptions of its colonial ancestry.
Such accusations of cultural-betrayal were levelled at Tite for his deployment of a Dutch-School Positional system with Brazil at the Qatar World Cup. Even more recently, Javier Mascherano’s choice to recreate the Positionism of his Barcelona education with the Argentina u-20 team was met with fierce criticism.
Some even went so far as to compare Mascherano with La Malinche, the Aztec women who was taken as a wife by the invading Spanish military commander, Hernan Cortes. Over time, La Malinche has — rightly or wrongly — become symbolic of a kind of cultural treachery. Her tragic figure is now synonymous with Latin America’s complicity in its own civilizational fall at the hands of European conquistadors.
Prior to the World Cup in Qatar, Argentina had gone thirty-six games without defeat. They were newly crowned Copa America champions and the talk was of a more fluid playing style which was finally maximising the otherworldly powers of Lionel Messi on the international stage.
The revivified Argentinian players seemed to arrange themselves in chaotic, non- linear distributions. There was a malleability to their structures, a kind of shape-shifting plasticity that defied geometric logic and oozed with disorder and unpredictability. Collective coherence was decentralised from the coach’s plan to the player’s intuitions. While Tite was utilising a distinctly European order to ‘harness the carnival’ of the Brazilian players, the talk in Argentina was of the return of La Nuestra.
And it wasn’t just speculation. Argentina’s onfield playing style was flexible and Relationist. In contrast to the Positionist impositions of Tite, Head coach Lionel Scaloni and his assistant, Pablo ‘el payaso’ (the clown) Aimar fostered a style that used close connections and approximations (particularly around Messi) as its primary attacking function.
The style mirrored the noises coming from the national football association’s technical mandate. Newly appointed Director — and 1978 World Cup Winning manager — Cesar Luis Menotti was explicit in his proposal that ‘As the new Director of the Argentinian National Teams, my commitment stems from loyalty to a leadership and to an objective: to recover the essence and genetics of Argentine football’.
This was an attempt to reconnect theory with practice — to ground the Argentinian national team’s identity in the communities and potreros from which La Nuestra had originally emerged.
But during Argentina’s opening game against unfancied Saudi Arabia, all of those old Latin American insecurities seemed to come flooding back. Scaloni moved away from the La Nuestra style and deployed his team in a more evenly spaced and symmetrical manner. There was a zonal attacking structure — a 4–2–4 distribution with larger distances between the positional slots. Argentina could have (and probably should have) still won the game. They lost 2–1.
Why — having finally arrived on the biggest global stage — had Scaloni abandoned the approach that had proved so effective whilst also capturing the imaginations of the Argentinian people? We’ll probably never know the answer. Argentina and the football world was in shock. It was a horrific defeat for a tournament favourite to suffer. Messi’s post-match comments were telling. ‘Its up to us to fix what we did wrong and get back to the basics of who we are’.
Argentina dusted themselves down and regrouped. But it was as if they were fighting a battle with themselves to believe that La Nuestra could work on the biggest stage of all. As if dogged by a scepticism of his own nature, Scaloni once again began with a wide formation (this time a 3–4–3) in the must-win game against Mexico on matchday two.
But it was the more spontaneous, player-led moments of close connections and interactions around Messi that would prove decisive. Towards the end of the first half it was as though Messi decided enough was enough. He started to drift deeper in to the six-position, abandoning the collective coherence of the structure in favour of some more organic vision of functional emergence.
Messi took the locus of control from Scaloni and imparted it on himself and his teammates. The fire of human creativity is stolen from the Gods. During Argentina’s final group-stage match against Poland there were even more frequent examples of emergent, localised structures with Messi as a primary reference point. We were witnessing the breaking through of La Nuestra on the global stage.
And so, as if by some strange trick of non-human logic, we find ourselves back where we started.
The Lusail Stadium on the night of December 9th, 2022. On one side there was a workmanlike Dutch outfit led by the Great Man architect himself, Louis Van Gaal. And on the other, an Argentina team attempting to win the World Cup with a childlike potrero style. It was the perfect match to encapsulate the philosophical rupture that defines modern football — Total Idealism vs Emergent Materialism.
But there were also more personal scores to be settled. In the days before the game Argentina’s mercurial winger, Angel Di Maria’s recollections of his time under Van Gaal at Manchester United resurfaced. ‘Van Gaal was the worst coach of my career’ Di Maria said, ‘I would score, assist, and the next day he would show me my misplaced passes. He displaced me from one day to the other, he didn’t like players being more then him’.
Di Maria wasn’t the only great Argentinian player to have clashed with Van Gaal and what Cruyff called his ‘militaristic’ methods of system imposition. Two decades earlier, playmaker Juan Roman Riquelme found himself playing under Van Gaal following a high-profile move from Boca Juniors to Barcelona.
Riquelme’s playing style was pure potrero, all feeling and intuition. He effortlessly rolled the ball with his studs before finding ways to tirar paredes (literally translated as to ‘throw down walls’ — ‘give and go’ or ‘one-two’ are roughly equivalent terms in English) with a teammate. Riquelme was as graceful and elegant a player as Argentina had ever produced. But, like Di Maria, he did not fit within the strict geometric logic of Van Gaal’s positional system.
Riquelme was publicly criticised by Van Gaal and forced to play in a system he was wholly unsuited to. Despite Van Gaal’s sacking, Riquelme’s Barcelona career never recovered and he was loaned out to Manuel Pellegrini’s Villarreal.
If there were any doubts about Riquelme’s ability to play at the highest level in Europe they were quickly dispelled. His performances for Villarreal earned him a nomination for the 2005 World Player of The Year as well as helping the provincial club to a remarkable run to the semi-finals of the Champions League in 2006.
In the 73rd minute Lionel Messi calmly slots home form the penalty spot to give Argentina a 2–0 lead. Messi celebrates with his teammates in front of the Argentine fans but before the game restarts he has one more engagement to fulfil. Messi walks towards the Dutch bench and stares down the coaches and technical team. The kid from the potreros of Rosario plants his feet firmly on the Middle-Eastern ground and cups his ears in defiance.
The cupping of the ears was Riquelme’s trademark goal celebration. Messi’s gesture is an homage to Riquelme’s struggle and is charged with centuries of cultural and personal baggage. The image of Messi mocking Van Gaal is a primal scream from the depths of football’s soul. It is symbolic of a rising materialism within football, a bottom-up, emergent school of play which rejects the top-down, universal impositions of Great Man instructors and their followers.
Football emerges from the material conditions of the environment, from potreros, through the players and people of a specific place and time. Football is not created by the abstract theories of godlike coaches.
Argentina won the World Cup with La Nuestra, by playing their way. The performances against Croatia and France were free from the constraints of European Positionism, The victory was football being returned to the people, football as authentic cultural expression.
The time is now for the rest of the world to follow this example and look inwards to the materiality of their own locales to solve their footballing problems. Every team can find their own version of La Nuestra, a way that is an authentic representation of their own ever-changing circumstance.
The age of copy/paste imported solutions is ending. Universalism is out and Localism is in. Multiplicity and diversity explode outwards sparked by the internal contradictions of the singular. The clock has been reset; its Year Zero and the dawn of football’s materialist new beginning.
