What’s in a Goalkeeper?

This article will be different than standards in a couple of ways. Firstly, it will be truly multidisciplinary, flowing from references to managerial practices to popular culture references, to the actual personal reason that inspired it. Secondly, its purpose is in sharing a few anecdotes and possibly inspire a few reflections, however, at its bottom line, it should be considered as designed for recreational use, or in its case, reading pleasure. Thirdly, this article is dedicated to someone special, whose name will be revealed only in the Post Scriptum at its end. So, I hope that a bit of suspense remains in flowing from one paragraph to the other, for the benefit of the reading experience. The key topic, or the research question if this article was a scientific paper, pertains to the nature and the peculiarity of the goalkeeper, as a metaphor beyond soccer, and in order to explore such theme, we start from an autobiographic managerial situation.

At one of the several crossroads of my professional life in the Italian creative industry, a new Managing Director, confronted with the usual question on what would be the best way to leverage my multidisciplinary background, asked me: “Are you a tennis player or are you a football player?” What she meant was, of course, whether I am a soloist or a team player in terms of my professional style. The question was not posed neutrally, as the Machiavellian intent was to push me to either describe myself as a one-man-band or to push myself into collective discipline where no individual talent is truly nurtured. Only, she asked the question in a rather indirect fashion, metaphorically, based on her possible, sad illusion that mastering Neuro Linguistic Programming means mastering relationships. After due reflection, I answered: “Of course, I am a team player, so I choose football over tennis, also because during my 1970’s childhood tennis in Italy was still an upper class leisure pastime, whereas football was a popular, proletarian game we used to play in parks and city gardens”. However, I did not stop there but I added an “however” in my response: “However, I am a football player with a specific role, that is “goalkeeper”, therefore special rules apply to me and I have a separate training trajectory and career prospect than any generic member of a soccer team”. Because of this “however”, I went on to explain how a goalkeeper is the only one allowed to touch the ball with his or her hands, hence being a peculiar exception in a team of 11 player. I also elaborated how a goalkeeper has a different training routine, managed by goalkeepers, and is often the captain of the team, if his seniority allows. Notwithstanding these “organizational” circumstances, a goalkeeper is embedded in the team, but also alone when facing a penalty shoot out or when organizing the defense line to anticipate and avoid any risk for his team. In short, I departed from a sports metaphor that, I still believe, was adopted to trigger my individualist response based on my competences and preferences, into a philosopical essay about the benefits of an individual specialisation and the requirements to nurture those individuals skilled in an individual role within a team. That “However”, duly recorded in written agreements, was the key weapon whereby I anticipated and diluted any future efforts of my then-Managing Director to force me into a generic professional development path, based on the imperative of team work as a means of managerial standardisation. So, the goalkeeper as a metaphor became my extreme line of defence against an undesired development in my business life, and a valid argument to revert the balance of corporate power to my advantage, by simple rhetorics. Clearly, one of the exceptional cases when the goalkeeper scores a goal, or in this specific situation, a last minute equalizer. Perhaps the first finding of this article, then, could be that metaphors are the most powerful rhetoric tool, one that management should adopt, use or try to even abuse, at their own risk only. This especially when said staff has a university degree in Humanities, with a specialization in Modern Literature, and a history as a writer. However, there was truth in my answer about the goalkeeper’s role being special, and much more than my incautious then-Managing Director might have thought before posing her instrumental question.

I am not one of the 60.000.000 Italian National football team coaches. Look at an Italian bar with 25 italians enjoying or making espresso or cappuccino and you will see 25 self proclaimed world class experts in the art of catenaccio or any other strategy adopted by any coach in Serie A or Serie B or any international competition. Especially international competitions, when the 60.000.000 individuals that inherited their divided nation by the likes of Garibaldi, Mazzini or Verdi, historically became united as one in the name of Bearzot, Lippi or Mancini. As I really do not understand much of 4–3–3 or 5–3–2, what is left of soccer to me is the civic pride of being world champions when the “Azzurri” win the Cup; the bittersweet masochism of being the supporter of a mediocre Serie Team with a grand history and a dubious future, Torino Football Club 1906; and the popular culture anecdotes that popular press features about football players. Within such anecdotes, and in general in the collective memory of Italians that so much is geared to football, politics and pop music, a number of goalkeepers played a special role, from time to time. First and foremost, Dino Zoff. World Champion 1982 in Spain, team captain of that dream team, and then coach of the Deputy European Champion Italian team in 2004, in Rotterdam. Zoff stands like a giant in the personal history of any Italian Generation X 1980’s teenager. Born in the Northern East of Italy, famous for being silent if not somber, Zoff is remembered for the way he was continously shouting: “Antonio! Antonio!!!” to fellow team member, the fellow Juventus-player Antonio Cabrini, in order to organize his defense. While back then Cabrini was the “aidoru” of every teenage girl in the country, Zoff was the rock on which the 1982 miracle team was built. His photo when raising the World Cup after defeating West Germany with a sound 3–1, marked the passage from the dark 1970’s to the postmodern 1980’s, switching Italy in a “can do” mindset that made the next decade vibrant and vivid. A man of great integrity, Zoff resigned as National Team coach when Silvio Berlusconi, then Prime Minister, took the liberty to give his comments on how he coached the team and how he strategically approached the unlucky final game against France, in Summer 2004. While Zoff remains as an archetype of commitment, reliability, solidity within the history of Italian soccer, other goalkeepers have been flying to catch penalties but have expressed their exuberance also in lifestyle. From Ricky Albertosi, the 1970’s “moustache” who reigned over the defense of Milan A.C., whose career went down in a rather disorderly private life, to Stefano Tacconi, the 1990’s prototype of the Italian “macho”, or Gianluigi Buffon, whose love for female beauty brought him to a quite public divorce and second marriage with TV celebrity, Ilaria D’Amico. Being allowed special rules on the football pitch grants great opportunities to great goalkeepers but then, it is always the man who makes the difference in terms of career and of life.

From shouting to fellow team mates to flying to catch a penalty shoot out, the question arises: what’s in a goalkeeper’s job? What makes a real difference for a goalkeeper to be “the” success factor for his or her team? And why are goalkeepers fundamentally different than the rest of the players? I turned with this question to a dear friend of mine, Michael Woodall, former IT entrepreneur in The Netherlands turned into master of “slow life” of all things that truly matter in life, from fine food to vintage cars. Michael coached to outstanding success a local amateur youth team in Hilversum, The Netherlands, where kids start to play for fun and passion. This is the true leisure time of one’s life, bar the WhatsApp chat of parents, who seemingly always find a way to turn pleasure into drama. Michael had an overwhelmingly simple task: bring this team of early teenagers to win. His approach was simple to understand, even for a football illiterate as I am: keep the centre fluid, keep the attack sharp and fast, and leverage the goalkeeper as “the” pillar of the game. Specifically, he trained his young goalkeeper to oversee the game, both in visual terms by directing defense players where he saw threats or opportunities, as well as in dynamic terms, by kicking the ball from his corner to the forward half of the pitch with power and precision. A goalkeeper, therefore, according to the winning recipe by Mr. Woodall, needs to train his or her body, in order to jump indeed like Albertosi or Tacconi did in their decades, but is also required to train his kicking and shooting technique, in order to reach the most advanced players and move the game forward. Most importantly, a goalkeeper needs to train his or her mind to the fine arts of leadership. A goalkeeper must oversee the game, yet remaining within the confined space of his or her rectangle and he or she needs to transmit to the defense the sense of solidity, confidence and tranquility that will psychologically enable the team to remain calm in action. In short, a goalkeeper needs to be elastic with his or her muscles but most of all, persuasive and strategic with his or her mind. And I guess this is the best lesson we can learn from goalkeepers.

In the 1970’s, when I was myself a kid, I dreamt for a short while of being a goalkeeper. It was not conventional, as the players who scored most goals were the most popular, from Paolino Pulici, who earned Torino F.C. “our” last Serie A “scudetto” in 1977, to Roberto Bettega, leader of “our” archi-rival Juventus, the team where Dino Zoff expressed his talent for years. The reason why I came to this temporary ambition was due to the fact that, for Italian standards, I was taller than average, and that led to the question whether I should play basket or be a goalkeeper at soccer, in my leisure time. When I moved to The Netherlands, perhaps the “tallest” nation in the world, my design team used to actually tease me, because my “official” passport registered 177 cm were actually pretty average in their country, and the size was even contended as incorrect by a young and talented designer, who claimed to be taller than I am, being 177 cm. In any case, my humanistic skills prevailed on any sports ambition I might have quite secretly had. In the end, I received a book about the art of goalkeeping, I read it all avidly, and I went on to study literature and then to be a writer. So, in a way, the goalkeeper thing worked for my own “career planning” at least twice, once as a manager in a creative industry negotiation, as introduced above, and before as a young kid who fell in love with books and with writing by reading the goalkeeper’s manual that was supposed to enable him to play in the Serie A, one day. For being a soccer illiterate Italian who stopped playing in his early teenage, I feel grateful to all goalkeepers who taught me so much in life.

(Post Scriptum: This article is dedicated with love to Roman, who turned 17 this week, and who will be the Dutch Oranje goalkeeper to raise the World Cup in 2030, and the Torino FC goalkeeper to earn “our” 8th and 9th Serie Scudetto, sometimes in the late 2020's).