What exactly is “beautiful” football?
It’s about flow
“Winning alone is not enough anymore. Today fans demand that you play attractive football”.
Andriy Shevchenko, former ace striker and now coach of his native Ukraine, succinctly summarized the current expectations of football. Once anticipated from super-elite clubs only, the demand for aesthetically pleasing football is now expanding to teams across the spectrum.
So what is attractive or “beautiful” football? Does beauty exist only in the eye of the beholder? Or can it be defined? TotalFootball wades through some abstract concepts to provide a tangible answer.
Elements of beautiful football
To understand beautiful football, it’s important to define the operative term — beauty. What is beauty? The dictionary defines it as:
a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight
This is a good definition to start from, as it contains the basics. We will focus on shape/form, as these are important in football. No doubt, colour is a large part of the appeal of a team. The Oranje or the…
