Football
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Real beauty is to be found in these examples, but not only in these. All over the field there are numerous displays of skill and athleticism that are attractive to watch. Football has true aesthetic value and that is a good enough reason to love it.
But is football itself art? If we are to take such a question at all seriously, we must answer in the negative. I say this mainly because I think art is a status bestowed upon certain forms of practice by a set of art institutions, and it is clear that they have not bestowed that status on football. If that does not convince you, it might be worth adding also that while the creation of aesthetic value is often a legitimate aim in producing art, it should never be in football. As will be argued in more detail in chapter 6, when you play football, you play for victory, not beauty. That need not, however, preclude the production of beauty in the endeavour to win.
3
Wholes
The team
Football is a distinctly team sport. It is teams that win and lose games and trophies. While this is perhaps a most obvious and striking truth about football, it is still frequently ignored. There are sometimes vital players on a team: individuals who make a big difference. Furthermore, in the most immediate sense, it is an individual player who scores a goal. It might be a fabulous goal. It might win the match, get all the headlines and be shown countless times in replay. It is not the team – all 11 players – that puts the ball in the net. It is one individual with a moment of outstanding brilliance: a Pelé, a Maradona, a Zidane, a Cristiano Ronaldo, a Kylian Mbappé.
There are cases where we think one individual made all the difference to a team. Would Argentina have won the 1986 World Cup without Maradona? Probably not. And wouldn’t Portugal be a distinctly average side without Cristiano Ronaldo? In cases like this, it seems that one of the players is so much better than all the others that they can elevate the rest of the team with them to glory. The possibility is not hard to grasp. We have noted that football is low scoring. Many games are won with just one goal. In the modern passing game, most of the match is a to-and-fro of possessions, making steady progress in midfield. Chances are few. Even a good team might have only six shots on goal in a game. In those few crucial moments, having a really good player in the key position can make an enormous difference in outcome. Only a very few can remain composed during one of those goal-scoring opportunities. In some instances, it takes a special player to see the possibility of an opportunity: for instance, with a chip over a crowd of defenders. And only a few have the skill to execute certain shots that require precision or power. In short, with such a dearth of chances to score, the individual genius could have a decisive impact on the outcome of a game. Many matches are roughly equal in terms of number of passes completed by each side and percentage of possession. But a brilliant player can turn a game that is otherwise level into a victory with just one moment of creativity.
Nevertheless, I want to defend the counterpoint. This chapter is a defence of the team and also an explanation of why the team is the most important unit to consider in football, rather than the individual player. I will also offer an explanation of why teams can be greater, or worse, than the sum of the talents of the individual team members.
Let us consider the examples again. In 1986, Diego Maradona was undoubtedly the stand-out player of the Argentinian World Cup winning team. He scored great goals against England and Belgium as a result of his individual skill and dribbling. It seems quite credible that Argentina would not have won that World Cup without him. But the rest of the team was also good. They conceded only three goals in the competition on their way to the final. Maradona, with his free role, made relatively little direct contribution to the defence. Nor was he the scorer of the winning goal in the final. Maradona’s pass played in Burruchaga in the 85th minute, the latter still having a lot to do to beat the West German goalkeeper, and he did so perfectly under immense pressure (the Germans had just pulled it back from 0–2 down to 2–2). We don’t have to deny that Maradona was the best player, and that he delivered when it mattered, but he was only able to do so because he was surrounded by an efficient and well-drilled team. Clearly, had he been on his own he could not have won any game – indeed, no one is even entitled to play an official game of football without a minimum of seven players on the field. Those who were his teammates had to be world-class players. Maradona couldn’t defend every attack his team faced, make every tackle that was needed, play in goal, win every individual battle. Argentina faced good opponents throughout the competition, and without a good team they couldn’t have come out on top. Now one might say that, even if the rest of his team were pretty good, there was no doubt that Maradona was an outstanding individual. This can be granted, but we also have to note that the Argentine coach Carlos Bilardo allowed him to stand out by organizing a team around him. The rest had to provide a disciplined stability so that Maradona could go where he wanted and do what he wanted. Clearly, Maradona should have played a vital role in that team. He was the best at playing the sort of pass that put a striker through on goal and was also best at dribbling through a defence, but he needed support to do these things. A ball winner had to first get the ball that Maradona could dribble, and a crucial pass is only made so if someone else can use it advantageously, as Burruchaga did in the Final.
Let us also consider Cristiano Ronaldo, who between 2016 and 2018 emerged as probably the best player in the world. At Real Madrid, Ronaldo played for an all-star team that had no notable weakness, leading to a string of Champions League victories. But Ronaldo comes from a nation that has not historically been one of the world’s most powerful in footballing terms. Only when they had Eusébio on the side, in the 1960s, were Portugal previously a force. With Ronaldo, however, they have become so again, culminating with their first major honour when they were crowned European Champions in 2016. This case might pose more of a challenge to the primacy of the team, since Ronaldo is so outstanding a player. He often seems so much better than any other player in the competition, let alone his teammates, that it is hard not to think of Portugal as a one-man team. Of course, though, this cannot be the case. All the same reasons given above in relation to Maradona apply here. And there is an additional consideration, which is that Portugal-minus-Ronaldo was put to the test and came through it. In the 2016 European Championship Final against France, Ronaldo was injured early in the game, with the score at 0–0. He finally came off in the 25th minute and the team had to play the rest of the game without him, even into 30 minutes of extra time. Nevertheless, Portugal won with a breath-taking long-range goal from Eder. Portugal proved that they were a good all-round team as their defence kept a clean sheet against the competition’s hosts. Most importantly of all, the team suffered no adverse reaction to the surprise of Ronaldo’s injury and withdrawal. Perhaps they welcomed the opportunity to prove themselves with a positive response. This was in quite a marked contrast to Brazil when they hosted the 2014 World Cup. Having lost one of their best players through injury, Neymar Jr, they came out for their Semi-Final against Germany clutching his shirt, holding it up during the National Anthem, almost as if they were in mourning. They proceeded to suffer the most catastrophic and humiliating defeat in their history, 1–7, as their defence in particular completely fell apart. David Luiz, who held Neymar’s shirt during the anthem, had an especially bad game at centre back. It was not that Neymar Jr’s presence would have made Brazil clearly a better side than Germany; it was more that Brazil’s response to his injury was to lose focus and their nerve and they crumbled at the first setback. It was the team of 11 players on the field that night that lost the game, not the absent injured player. The same 11, in other circumstances, could have been winners; but they lost as a team.
The system and the jigsaw puzzle
This debate, between individual and team strengths, is one that presses upon all successful coaches at one time or another. Any student of the game realizes that coaches need a system – a formation and manner of playing – for
these are the matters that tend to produce success. Additionally, it is better if everyone in the squad knows the system and understands how it should operate and how they can contribute to it. If one player is unavailable, through injury or suspension, then someone else can slot into that place within the team. Ideally, a coach finds a system that is successful and it shouldn’t matter too much which players are available if everyone in the squad knows what the roles are and how to fill each of them. The coach can, thus, devise the system first and then decide which roles need to be filled. The midfield needs a ball winner, for example, a holder and a distributor. The defence needs a good tackler as well as someone who can win headers from crosses. The attack needs pace but also an aerial threat, and at least one forward should be good at holding the ball up so the others can join the attack. A system also allows fluidity in these roles and movements between the positions. Hence, a 4–4–2 formation can rapidly switch to 4–3–3 when in possession, if one of the midfielders advances, and a 3–5–2 with wing-backs allows players on the left and right who go up and down the whole length of the pitch with both defensive and attacking duties.
Brian Clough was said to be an expert at putting together teams to fit his model. Because his resources were limited, he could not afford to buy star players. When he took over at Nottingham Forest, for example, they were playing in England’s second level. He saw the team as a jigsaw puzzle, however. The pieces had to fit together in a certain way, first of all, but he then had to find a player to be each of the pieces. It happened, for example, that there was a piece that was exactly John Robertson-shaped. Robertson was an undistinguished left winger, who was far from a first-team regular and was on the transfer list at the time of Clough’s arrival. But Clough had a framework in which there was a need for a player exactly like Robertson. And it worked. The jigsaw puzzle fitted together perfectly, and with a team of players who, like Robertson, had not previously been considered stars, they won promotion to the top division, then won the top division, then won the European Cup (now the Champions League) twice in a row. It was a triumph of the system over individuals.
There are, however, obvious risks with football that is all about the system. Clough did well at Nottingham Forest but only because he managed to find a player for each role. What if you can’t get a player with the requisite ability to fill a key role? Or what if you have some very talented players who don’t fit into the system? Jonathan Wilson considers this dilemma in Inverting the Pyramid, his masterful history of football tactics in relation to the very system-driven approach of the Soviet coaches: ‘This was the debate raised by Mikhail Yakushin’s preference for the collective over the individualism of a Stanley Matthews taken to its logical extreme. No matter how talented the individual, if they did not function as part of the collective, they had no place within it’ (p. 186).
The failures of successive England teams could be attributed to what we might call a system failure. For a period, they had a host of talented midfielders, including Gerrard, Beckham, Scholes and Lampard. But it seemed that they couldn’t play together in the same team. If they are clearly the best players at the coach’s disposal, there will be a temptation, accompanied by outside pressure, to play them all together. This can lead to attempts to change the system and formation or play players outside their regular position. As England showed, however, this was not a good idea and failed to produce success. The absurdity is obvious. Suppose the best 11 players available are all left-side midfield distributors. That makes a terrible team. You need balance. All the necessary roles have to be covered.
Perhaps, then, Carlos Bilardo found a good compromise in 1986. It looked as if he had 10 players playing a rigid system and one, Maradona, who was allowed to do what he wanted. If that interpretation is correct, it was a system that could support and bring the best out of one exceptional talent. And in practice, other compromises have to be found. It is extremely rare, for instance, that a coach builds a team from scratch. When a new coach comes in, the club owners might make some money available for transfers, but this will usually equate only to a couple of new signings. This coach then has to find a system that the available players can play, with a chance of it being successful. So it is possible to tweak one’s system in order to fit the players and work to their strengths. A coach could have a strong view about the best system, but if it’s one that the players are incapable of operating, then the ideal might have to be sacrificed to more pragmatic considerations.
Emergence
How can we explain the proper functioning of a team in a way that makes sense of an excellent team being made out of previously undistinguished or average players? Answering this question will also help us to understand how teams relate to the individuals who make them up. This relationship is best understood, I suggest, in terms of the philosophical notions of emergence and holism.
Emergence is a controversial issue in philosophy. Not only is there disagreement on whether there are emergent phenomena, there is also disagreement over what exactly is meant by emergence. This is very problematic since those who believe in emergence and those who don’t might have different things in mind. In recent years, however, some progress has been made and we are in a position to offer an account of emergence that seems applicable to football teams.
An emergent phenomenon is one that belongs to a whole and is different from all the properties of the parts of that whole and from the properties that come merely from the addition or aggregation of the parts. Here are some examples. Life emerges from lifeless parts, consciousness emerges from non-conscious parts, free will emerges from nonfree parts. Let us take the first example. Each animal is a living thing but it has parts that are not living things. A tibia bone, for instance, is not alive, nor are the many carbon molecules that a body contains. It is the animal – the whole creature – that is the living thing, not its parts, which could not function except as part of the living thing. Being alive is thus a property possessed specifically by the whole. We can say that life is emergent in this sense. It is only found at a certain level of nature: not at the molecular level, for instance.
One might wonder how a property, such as being alive, emerges from parts that are not alive. This question is one for biologists to answer. Some cases of emergence seem very mysterious, however. We have conscious minds and know that their basis is in a network of very many neurons and other components of the brain and other body parts. But those components have no mind: a neuron cannot think. How, then, can many non-thinking parts be added together to make something that does think?
When the explanation is given, we can see how emergence has application to football teams. Emergence occurs, according to this explanation, not just when the parts are lumped together. If there is no mind in one neuron, it doesn’t seem that there is any in a billion of them either. But for emergence, we need the parts to be interconnected in such a way that they causally interact with and change each other, which is what we believe neurons do. Clearly, living organisms also have parts that are constantly interacting with and changing each other. There’s an even simpler example. Water has a power to put out fire but neither of its components has this power. Both hydrogen and oxygen would fuel a fire. So how can this whole have an ability that none of its parts has? Again, the answer is that the hydrogen and oxygen atoms change each other when they enter into a chemical bonding, completing each other’s outer shells of electrons.
Now let us apply this analysis to a football team. It’s clear that the parts or components are the individual players and the whole is the team. It is just as clear that the parts are interacting. One player’s play on the pitch is affected all the time by what their teammates are doing. A player has to cohere with the rest, moving up and down the pitch with them, filling in when a teammate goes out of position, holding an exact line at the back to catch an opponent offside, attacking the near post if another striker attacks the back one, and so on. Offside traps are a good example of this coherence and unity in operati
on. The defenders must stay in a line: a property they can possess only as a unit. When it goes wrong, such as when England conceded against Panama in 2018, one player gets out of line, deeper than the rest, out on the wing, and the unit is defenceless against an on-rushing striker through the centre. The team captain has a crucial role to play in improving the performances of the other players. They might gee the team up, inspiring them for one last effort at the end, encouraging play with a little more energy, and it is acknowledged that they have organizational duties on the pitch too. But a captain, though important, is still nothing without a team to lead.
There are significant cases where players change each other, for it seems perfectly possible that playing with a team, and being affected by teammates, can make an individual player better, or worse. Let us be positive and focus on the case where an effective team can make an individual player excel too. Very often players are praised for good passes or good crosses. But, of course, they are only good if a teammate gets on the end of them. The second player has to anticipate the pass or cross and be in the right position to meet it. The ‘best’ cross in the world is no good if there’s no teammate there to receive it. We can apply this lesson to a whole team, each player having some kind of interaction with every other one, the team developing a complex web of mutual understandings. In this respect, they are operating as a unit. Only together can they create fine football. Alone, all a player can do is dribble or juggle. If I may add a personal note, my own experience is that playing in a high-quality game has always made me play better, sometimes performing skills I never knew I had, and in one case had never even practised. I am sure many others who have played football have had similar experiences, since I don’t believe I am unique.