There is a further way in which we can get behind the cliché. The examination of wholes, space, chance and victory will also leave us in a better position to understand the aesthetics of football. In particular, a case will be made for an initially counterintuitive conclusion, namely that it is not in pursuit of aesthetic value that it is produced in football: it is in pursuit of victory. Hence, one cannot produce beauty in football if it is one’s primary aim to do so. We will also see that a precondition of the aesthetics of football is the role of empty space, of chance events, and of wholes being more than sums of parts.
Excitement
Just as we considered whether it was possible to take too much of an intellectual attitude towards football, might it also be implausible to suggest that football fans sit and take a detached aesthetic attitude to the game? Isn’t there something more obvious about watching football, which is the sheer excitement it can generate? Perhaps it is more the exciting game than the beautiful game. This really should not be denied.
In chapter 1, I offered an explanation for one way in which football is exciting: the infrequency and method of goal scoring makes such moments supremely thrilling. Consider the perfect instance. The ball has to cross the goal line, between the posts and under the crossbar: a relatively small area but not an exceptionally small one, a good size to be seen by spectators and covered by a keeper. It enters the goal, bulging the back of the net. The goal netting was a marvellous invention not simply because it removed some cases of doubt as to whether a goal had been scored but also because of how it made a goal look. The goal nets have been redesigned in recent decades. The rear used to slope from the bar diagonally down to the grass some distance behind the posts, with the effect of killing the ball, making it stationary, after it had been shot in. The move to more box-like nets with vertical backs means that even a slow shot along the ground can jump up spectacularly into the roof of the net. This is not just a practical device: it is designed in such a way as to magnify the splendour of that already crucial moment. Couple that now with a shot from distance, sometimes looping over the keeper, or drilled from outside the penalty area and still rising as it crosses the line, perhaps crashing in off the post or crossbar: the net bulges out, the keeper is prostrate, is there any more exciting moment in a sporting context?
Of course, it is not just the goals that generate excitement, even if they do so to the greatest extent. It is also exciting when a goal is nearly scored, when a swift attacking move threatens a goal, when a penalty is saved, when an opponent is sent off, when a team plays in a fluid, swashbuckling way. Even in the few seconds before the first ball is kicked, the excitement builds as we anticipate the thrills and spills to come.
Yet, can we say that this experience is solely one of excitement? Is the aesthetic experience really separable from the exciting one in these cases? When the ball bulges the net after a long-range shot, might not the intense reaction be because it is such a beautiful and rare moment? It is the greatest and most awe-inspiring sight: one that looks amazing. Watching in a stadium, with a large group of likeminded fans, the experience is intensified. It is a collective experience: a sublime one.
Is excitement, then, an aesthetic category in its own right? If it is, there is no conflict between beauty and excitement, so one would not exclude the other. What else might it be? Is excitement an emotion? It seems not. Certainly it could accompany an emotion, so one could be quietly happy or excitedly happy. The emotion is the happiness. The excitement is something that is caused by the emotion: an effect it has on the happy person, or an expression of their happiness. Similarly in the case of anger, you could be quietly angry or you could allow it to affect your behaviour, manifesting in violent outbursts. Perhaps, then, excitement is a passion, something that happens to us, rather than an emotion, which is an action. It might seem strange to talk of emotions as actions, but one way to see this is to understand that there is a rational structure to emotions, as Ronald de Sousa says in The Rationality of Emotion. To be happy that something is the case, you have to be able to see that it is the case and think that if it were not the case, you would wish that it was the case. Similarly, to hope that F, where F is some relevant situation, you must believe that F is not the case but wish that it were. If you could not recognize these things, and understand them this way, you would not be able to experience those emotions. You cannot fear that G if you are incapable of believing that G, for instance. Emotions require thought, and some conceptual understanding, on the part of the holder. Passions are more like feelings that arise uncontrollably without rational explanation. You can certainly be happy to see your team win, which is to have the emotion, but the passion would be the feeling that can accompany that happiness, that makes you jump with joy or scream spontaneously.
There are arts for which excitement is an aim, and this suggests that the passion is aesthetically evaluable. One could praise or criticize a film, a book, a TV drama, a play because it either is, or fails to be, exciting. This shows us that beauty is only one among many aesthetic categories that are at work and available for appreciation, in football or in anything else. A novel, for instance, is rarely described as beautiful. It can be described as gripping, credible, touching, insightful, and so on, but anyone who calls it beautiful is likely to be talking rather casually. Similarly, when we talk of something in football – a goal, a move, a game – as beautiful, it is likely that a better and more detailed analysis of the aesthetics is possible.
Aesthetic categories
Let us, then, consider some of the aesthetics of football and try to produce an initial list of the sorts of things that are appealing to us. We can start with some obvious ones. Speed, power, balance and dexterity are all assets in football, not so much because they are aesthetic properties themselves but because they are productive of something that we do enjoy aesthetically. This is the human form when it exhibits a number of athletic excellences. The body can be fully extended, for example, such as when a player leaps for a header, or a goalkeeper stretches to make a save. Speed helps to win games, but it is also pleasing to watch if there is a graceful, fluid and efficient running style which also gains a game advantage. Strength is an underpinning asset in football, allowing explosive runs, jumps for headers and an ability to retain the ball and repel attempts to be pushed off it. Football is a contact sport, of course, and there are times when it can provide experiences similar to competitive wrestling. When we gaze upon the human athletic form in football, strong, sleek, toned, fast, we can become lost in our experience of the object of perception, forgetting our sense of self. The athletic forms that we see are almost superhuman; indeed, the way we look upon the athletic body has much in common with the way we look at superheroes in comic books, drawn to appear dynamic, elongated and powerful.
Another aesthetic category might hold a key as to why we find this appealing. The category is skill, and the suggestion is that it is pleasurable to watch skills being displayed. It is probably even more pleasurable to be the one exercising the skill, but we can set that aside. To see a footballer capable of receiving a pass from 70 metres and controlling the ball instantly, or playing such a pass accurately, or juggling the ball to escape an opponent, or placing a free kick from distance into the top corner of the goal, can be productive of the same aesthetic experience that concerns us. I cannot be sure why it brings us pleasure to see another exercise their skill, but it evidently does. We like to see people juggle with their hands as well as with their feet, we like to see people who can balance on tightropes, we like to see people lift great weights, play musical instruments, and so on. To explain why this is so will likely take us into realms of metaphysical speculation. We are embodied, rational beings, interested in the extent of human capabilities. Seeing what another person can achieve tells us also what we are capable of, as fellow humans, even if we decide we do not want to develop our abilities to the same extent. I might not be inclined to have the same dedication an elite footballer has, who spen
ds so much time training and perfecting skills. I get to admire what I don’t have, but I know what is possible for a fellow human, and, by extension, for me, when I see it.
A higher-level aesthetic category is what we can call simply drama. Football is dramatic, which can of course explain why it is exciting. Drama is an accepted aesthetic quality, of plays and other stories. What might be challenged is whether the action in football qualifies as genuine drama. There are disanalogies. Drama is scripted, of course: the invention of a writer who has a message or moral that they wish to impart. Football follows no script. As we will see in chapter 5, the excitement of football indeed rests on there being no script and the result being genuinely contested. Further, football players are not actors. They can suffer victories and defeats, concussions and broken legs. It is not the characters that the footballers are playing that win or lose; it is the players themselves. When Brutus kills Caesar on the stage, in contrast, no one really dies.
The case can be made for the drama in football being genuine, however, even if it differs from that found at the theatre. Drama can occur in regular life too. A stormy relationship can be dramatic, as can a journey to catch a flight, or a late rescue from financial ruin. Recent politics has also thrown up its share of drama in recent years. Events can be described as dramatic when they involve unexpected twists that are of significance, changes of fortune, just deserts or cruel bad luck. The stage does not have a monopoly on these sorts of events, though it does contrive to depict them. Clearly in football too we get late goals, underdogs beating supposedly better opponents, undeserved defeats, occasional comebacks from two goals down, players scoring against former clubs, incident-packed local derbies, near misses, last-minute relegations and promotions, victories after years of unrewarded endeavour, unexpected managerial sackings, seasons turning from bad to good, triumph in adversity, hubris followed by a loss. The drama is real enough, there for us to follow and enjoy as it unfolds, over the course of a season or within 90 minutes.
Regardless of whether that argument is accepted, the alleged disanalogy between football and stage drama can be challenged anyway. Football does follow a kind of script. We know how games will start and end, with the conventional ceremony of a referee’s whistle. We know when a game will begin and roughly how long it will last: which is also similar to a play, since its exact end time depends on how long the actors take to deliver the lines and required actions. We know that what happens in the game will more or less abide by the laws of the game, and we know that each team will try to win within those laws. There is a lot that is left unspecified by this minimal script for a game of football, but every script leaves certain things open. This is why any play or film needs a producer and a director, whose jobs it is to interpret the script, in conjunction with the cast. More than that, however, players can be assigned roles by the coach, just as each actor has a role to play. A player might be given the job of ball-winning midfielder, right wing-back, libero or ‘false nine’, and it will be that player’s job to interpret the role. In the next game, that player could be assigned a different role. There is even an oppositional role to be played. Consider Cristiano Ronaldo and Sergio Ramos, teammates for a number of years, but adopting oppositional roles when Portugal faced Spain in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The actor who plays Caesar need not resent the actor who plays Brutus for his act of murder. Similarly, Ronaldo need not resent Ramos for the foul he suffers, where it is inflicted on him in his role as opponent.
Let us consider one more type of aesthetic in football, which we can describe as broadly geometrical. The geometry of the game seems initially quite simple. As prescribed by the laws, football is to be played on a perfectly rectangular flat pitch, with rectangular goals. It all looks ordered, with precise right angles. But once we introduce two teams and a ball we find that a number of other spaces come into play. There are passes and shots that move in curves and arcs, as do players’ runs when they seek to avoid being caught offside. Much is about angles: the angle of the run, the pass or the shot. The defenders and the goalkeepers have a job of narrowing down the angle for the shot, thereby making the goal small. Players weave their way through the opposition, working neat triangles, sometimes launching long balls through the air. We watch super slow-motion replays to fully appreciate this movement within space, seeing the spin on the ball, for instance, that allows it to curl inside the far post. An exemplar was Benjamin Pavard’s goal for France in 2018 against Argentina. Is there anything in this sport more wonderful to dwell upon, to contemplate, to be absorbed in?
These are aesthetic categories. But have I said enough about aesthetic value itself? What is it? What is its nature? What makes a category an aesthetic category? The attentive reader may have noted that I have been making certain assumptions along the way that reveal my views on these questions. I think it is right to reject both a purely objective and a purely subjective view of aesthetics. I have no complete theory of beauty to offer but nor do I think that one is required in order to understand the aesthetics of football. What has been implicit in my argument, however, is the idea that aesthetic value resides in a relation between the perceiver and that which is perceived. There are certain features or properties of things that tend to give us – and from which we tend to take – pleasurable experiences. An aesthetic experience is a mutual manifestation between perceiver and object. But I see little hope for a further analysis of why it is that particular features of things are pleasing to us in this way. As with Hume’s account, it seems undeniable that humans have shared tendencies to appreciate the same kinds of things. Use of the word ‘tendencies’ is meant to suggest that this appreciation need not be universal, however. Some people have unusual tastes. But there can be a degree of consensus over the sorts of things that tend to please us. Even if I don’t personally like the Mona Lisa, for example, I can still recognize that most people do. And there seem to be good empirical grounds to suppose that football has a number of features that a lot of people find pleasing to see. There might be some deeper analysis of what tends to please us. A formalist, for example, might say that the particular things that we like to see in football please us because they exhibit some underlying abstract form. But I would then give the same account of why certain abstract forms are aesthetically valuable: simply that they would be the ones towards which we have an appreciative tendency.
Examples
Having considered in general some aesthetic categories for football, let us now consider concrete instances. I pick two special cases where the aesthetics we have described apply.
First, there is the chip shot. Most shots in football are hit hard, with pace. Accuracy counts, of course, since the shot must be on target. But accuracy without a firm shot is pretty pointless since the goalkeeper will easily get to a ball that is travelling slowly. The chip is the exception. It involves finesse, some say artistry. The chip shot is less often deployed since it is effective only under certain conditions – when the goalkeeper is in an advance position – and it requires a high degree of control and exact placing. Consequently, it could easily go wrong, with a risk of embarrassment for the striker. When executed correctly, the shot involves the relatively slow arcing of the ball over the keeper: slow because it needs to drop down under the bar. The changing trajectory of the shot is something to marvel at, but we also appreciate the shot as a display of skill. The skill comes from mind and body in unison. The striker out-thinks the goalkeeper who has advanced to narrow the angles. The striker must first spot the opportunity, pick the right spot, and then get the exact contact needed. Many such attempts are over-hit and there is aesthetically a world of difference between a chip that goes over the bar and one that falls just under. This shows that aesthetic appreciation does not reside in disinterestedness, as some think. In football, it is because a shot is successful, in scoring or winning the game, that it is enjoyed aesthetically. A variant on the chip is the shot from distance, such as Carli Lloyd’s goal from the halfway line in the 2015 W
orld Cup Final. This could only succeed through accurate placement since no shot could retain enough pace from that far. Lloyd saw the opposing goalkeeper off her line and hit the ball over the top. The beauty of such a goal is enhanced by the length of the arc of the ball and the excitement of seeing such a rare event.
The second example is perhaps even more spectacular: the bicycle kick. Here, athleticism and agility are to the fore. It is first of all an ingenious invention (again, its inventor is a matter of dispute), not least because it is also very hard for the keeper to defend against. Because most shots are hard, if the keeper were to wait to see where the ball was going, it would be too late to react if it was not already within reach. So a keeper learns to read the body shape of the striker and from that anticipate the likely destination of the shot. As with the header, though, it is virtually impossible to anticipate where the bicycle kick will go since the body shape of the attacker remains the same, starting with their back to the goal, regardless of the eventual destination of the shot. The direction of the ball is determined by how early or late it is hit: that is, whether the ball is struck straight on or on one side. If it is on target and away from the keeper, then, like the header, it is probably a goal. Its effectiveness is part of its beauty, of course, but if we look just to its beauty, then we should consider the partially circular motion of the feet, ending with one foot as high as it is possible to get it. As an example, look at how high Wayne Rooney rose for his goal against Manchester City in February 2011, with his body entirely off the ground, seemingly suspended in mid-air. Such a shot makes for a stunning photo, but it is still vital to witness the motion too for a full appreciation, and it is even better in a slow-motion replay.
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