What I mainly have in mind, though, are those fans who are content to describe themselves as longsuffering, who think there is something heroic in a love that endures despite a lack of success. They can regard themselves as genuine fans, as opposed to the ‘glory hunters’. It can be dismissed as easy to support a team like Manchester United, Chelsea or Real Madrid since that is almost always about winning. Those supporters don’t know what true love for a team is, however, since they have never really had their resolve tested. There are clubs that are a lot less successful than Sheffield United, but even we talk about all the losing cup semi-finals we have experienced in recent years, along with eight attempts at promotion through the play-offs, all of which failed. There is indeed something noble in defeat. Anthony Skillen once wrote a paper called ‘Sport is for Losers’. It really is: consider the World Cup finals, where of the 32 teams that start out, 31 of them go home as losers, and that’s not to mention all those that don’t even reach the finals. Football can be the ideal testing ground for learning to lose. Life is full of defeats from which you have to recover and fight another day. Sport provides a harmless arena for coping with such set-backs, since nothing really hinges on the results. Disappointment is the norm to all but a few in football, but what an education that experience can provide.
The dynamic
We can still make a good story, then, and learn some lessons from defeat. But there is no instance in which defeat is ever the aim in football, unless the game is fixed in some way. Everyone wants to win, and that provides what I call the dynamic of football.
There is a distinction to be drawn, however, between wanting to win and aiming to win. Victory is the dynamic in football because of the former but not necessarily the latter. The distinction is required because there are clear cases in football where a team is aiming not to win but to do something else. As we get to the end of a league campaign, for example, there comes a point where some teams can no longer, not even mathematically, win the championship. They may still aim to win individual games, but this is not because they seek to win the league, since they know they cannot. Rather, they will have more modest ambitions, such as to finish as high as possible in the league or simply to avoid relegation. There can be financial incentives behind these aims, but even if not, pride still counts for a lot, as does a desire to do as well as one possibly can. The latter is a big factor in sport. In the London marathon, for example, there are thousands of entrants but only one winner. The vast majority know they have virtually no chance of winning. But that is not their aim. Instead, they might want to beat their personal best time or, if it’s a debut marathon, just to complete it at all. People take pleasure in maximizing their potential, and this seems to apply just as much to professional sportsmen and -women. Some might have an unrealistic over-estimation of what their potential is, and have harsh lessons to learn. In other instances, though, there seems nothing so tragic in sport as when someone fails to realize their potential, because of either bad luck or personal failings. In such a context, it is perfectly reasonable for some teams and players to be satisfied with relatively modest ambitions, such as avoiding relegation.
This means, too, that there might be individual games in which they are not aiming to win. They might hope to win but also know that avoidance of defeat is enough to finish above the relegation zone. Footballers always say that it is hard to play for a draw, but there are plenty of matches in which teams behave as if they are at least content with such an outcome. Take the France–Denmark game in the 2018 World Cup. The French knew that a draw was enough to win the group while the Danes knew, once they heard the score in the other group game, that a draw would see them through to the next stage. Either team would have taken a goal if it came their way but, since both were happy to avoid defeat, a 0–0 result was the natural consequence. I also see nothing wrong in another kind of case, where a team realizes that it’s in for a beating and reduces its aim merely to keeping the score down. This could count for goal difference, in some competitions, but there is also the matter of pride where a 5–0 defeat looks considerably worse than a 2–0 defeat.
There are perfectly understandable instances, therefore, when victory is not the aim. But it remains the dynamic, I say, since it is what each team wants, hopes for and does what it can to maximize the chances of getting. Avoiding relegation makes sense if you have hopes that next season you could win, and since this is exactly what happened to Leicester City in 2015–16, the hope seems valid.
Victory is the dynamic in the sense that it is the incentive. There is little other incentive that the game can offer, after all. It is what drives teams on to further effort, straining to the last in order to achieve it. It is what directs their overall endeavour. It is what coaches are ultimately judged on: perhaps not always the final victory, but at least how many victories are achieved during the campaign. Victory is the dynamic in that it is what counts as success in the game. Playing the most beautiful football, in contrast, does not count as success if it is accompanied by defeat. A team that consistently ‘achieved’ beautiful defeats would be rightly criticized as failures. Victory accompanied by beauty might be praised, but the praise follows because the team is victorious. Beautiful football gains a team additional credit if it is also successful, but beauty without success gets little credit. Defeated coaches even feel patronized if opposing coaches praise their style of play. Any coach would prefer to win ugly than to lose beautifully.
Victory is the dynamic in that it explains what the players do when they are playing football. Suppose you received an alien visitor who really knew nothing at all about football and you took them to a game. This theoretical visitor might ask why a player passes the ball, why the players are running so hard, why they kick or trip each other, and so on. You might be able to explain these actions in terms of something else: the players want to stop their opponents, they want to get into a good scoring position, and so on. But the visitor could well ask why they want to do those things as well. Eventually, you might just have to say that the players are performing those actions ultimately because they want to win. If you are asked why they want to win, there seems no further, informative answer. They just do. That’s the point. If they didn’t want to win, in a sense they wouldn’t properly be playing at all. And if you wanted to know why people like winning things, the answer would be found not in football itself, but most likely in psychology, philosophy or sociology, some might even say evolutionary biology. Apart from that, all that we can say about a football match is that the players are performing the actions they do because they believe that in some way those actions will, in the circumstances, contribute towards increasing the chances of victory. Footballers often fail, of course. They make mistakes when they lack skill or are beginning to tire, late in the game. But they will always try the best they can to make a positive contribution to success even if they cannot always execute their plans.
Victory is the dynamic, too, of the excitement of football. The main things that excite fans are the moments that contribute most to the chance of victory: getting the ball in the opponent’s goal mouth, a wing-back beating a defender, a ball being cleared off one’s own line and, ultimately, the scoring of goals. The most exciting moment of all is that winner in the closing minutes, where there is almost no time for the opposition to reply. The game changes, at the last opportunity, from uncertainty to a likely win. The goal scoring is even more exciting than the blowing of the final whistle, at which point the victory becomes definite. The excitement is in the changing of the game, imposing on it a new outlook, more so than the official ending of the game. When a team has a single-goal lead, it is relief that accompanies the game’s end. It is not so much that a victory has occurred that creates the excitement but that a victory is in the process of being achieved.
Competition
This talk of winning brings into question competitiveness itself. Some people are not competitive at all. Football is most likely not for them. Winning is of no
interest to them, they might say. Someone like this might enjoy sport and physical activity but prefer to do yoga or go jogging. These are uncompetitive sports. It is hard to argue against someone who adopts this attitude. One reason might be that they simply hate losing and perhaps think that the joy of winning does not compensate for the pain of defeat. It might be that they are actually competitive after all: competitive people really hate losing, so much so that they would rather not compete in the first place.
Another way in which someone can be uncompetitive is that they really don’t see the point of competition, or think that it is not fair, or that it is not the right way for people to behave. After all, someone wins only if someone else loses and is then unhappy. Is it right to enjoy winning if you know you have saddened someone else? Isn’t that selfish? In other walks of life, we like to cooperate and do things together, finding solutions from which all benefit. The neoliberal political agenda has introduced competition into areas of society that many think inappropriate, such as universities, railways and hospitals. Shouldn’t we resist this ruthless, selfish agenda?
There is no answer to someone who simply sees no point in winning. However, it need not follow that being non-competitive, when it comes to resourcing the health service, requires a parallel rejection of competitive sports. Instead, it might be that there are some practices where competition is appropriate and others where it’s not. Sport is mainly harmless, since, as I’ve said, nothing significant hinges on it. It is a ‘safe’ space in which to find competition fun, since the losers should not be materially damaged. I can have fun watching Sheffield United since when they lose it does not lower my salary, make me ill or increase the chance of world war. If football did any of those things, we would need to look again. In the health service, people’s lives can, indeed, be at stake. There would then need to be good evidence that competition was not risking harm.
It would, in any case, be an over-simplification to think that football is solely about competition. As explained in detail in chapter 3, football is primarily a team sport and, to that extent, any competitive success is also founded on cooperation and togetherness. Victory provides the unity of purpose that can bring together 11 individuals and see them merge into an organic whole. A team in which the players saw each other as rivals – for adulation, fame, the highest salary or just a place in the starting line-up – would be unlikely to maximize its potential. Rather, it tends to success in football if the players can put the interests of the team ahead of their personal ones. It is no real surprise, then, that football is conducive also to a socialist interpretation. Socrates – the Brazilian footballer rather than the Greek philosopher – famously championed this leftist vision of the game. It can be felt also among the fans who find their own identities sometimes subsumed into that of the crowd, united by a shared purpose, love and loyalty. There is, thus, a tension and a balancing between competitive and cooperative strands in football, as in a number of other team sports. It is through cooperation that the chances of competitive success will be highest.
The paradox
That victory determines the dynamic of football is a claim that has a bearing on a topic that we considered earlier and to which we can now return in a better position to understand. In chapter 2, we noted that football produces aesthetic value. Some speak of this in terms of beauty, but we saw that there are distinct and specific aesthetic categories that apply to football. We also saw, however, that a chip shot is more aesthetically appealing when it scores a goal than when it misses. We can now explain why, with reference to victory. We have also noted that victory is not exactly the aim of playing football, since there are some instances where one can play without aiming to win, but that football does nevertheless have a close connection with the desire for victory. I said that victory provides football’s dynamic, by which I mean that it explains what happens on the football field and can be taken as the end in itself when playing, since there is nothing further that can be desired by someone playing or watching it.
The analysis puts us in a position to resolve a dispute between futebol arte, embodied by the Brazil team of 1970, and the artless futebol de resultados taken to extremes by Argentina’s Estudiantes in the 1960s, and a number of others. Is football about creating art or getting results? On the basis of what has gone before, we come down on the side of results. Victory is what we want. As before, though, this verdict has to be qualified, and when we look at the nuances we find a surprising, almost paradoxical, result.
The aim of football is not to create art. Were any player to have such an aim, it is arguable that they would no longer be playing football at all but be engaged in some other activity. I had a frustrating personal experience that shows this. In 2002 I went to see Paris St Germain play the Hungarian side Újpest in the UEFA Cup. Ronaldinho scored an early goal and there was soon another from Pochettinho, giving PSG a comfortable lead. The two-legged tie was far from over, however. With the away leg to come, Ronaldinho nevertheless decided to put on a show of tricks and ball-juggling during the game. Some in the crowd were happy, but I wasn’t. I didn’t see that any of his actions increased the chance of PSG scoring, which they should have tried to do with the tie still alive. The problem I had was that if he was trying to display artistry, to literally be an artist, then his primary purpose was no longer to win. He had effectively ceased playing football. Now ball-juggling can be impressive to watch, since it requires a high level of skill and coordination. But it is a skill that has only minimal relevance to a game of football. Good ball control might help beat a defender, but no one needs keepieuppie to do that. Because Ronaldinho’s play did not contribute to the prospects of the team, I should add that I found it neither beautiful nor entertaining. I was there to see football. There seems to be a consequence, therefore, that if your aim is to create beauty, then you cease to play football. As a result, even if you do produce beauty, it is not beautiful football, since it is not any kind of football. This is the first side of what I call the paradox.
The second side is this. It is in striving for victory that the aesthetic values of the game are realized. Wanting to win is what makes the player run as fast as they can, displaying a fluid, efficient motion, being quick, dashing, dynamic. The desire to score is what makes a striker leap as high as possible, looking to get a header in on goal, emerging from a cluster of surrounding defenders. The urgent need to stop a goal-bound shot is what makes the goalkeeper dive and attain full extension of their body, almost as if they can fly. We witness the human form pushed to its limits. Any player who doesn’t really want to win, in contrast, is likely to not push themselves, not run in the strongest way they can, not strain every muscle to get as high as they can, and not make every effort to curl in a shot from 25 metres.
Similarly, we see sporting drama in the quest for victory. That Liverpudlian miracle in Istanbul would not have happened without the incentive of victory. Why try to pull back a 3–0 deficit otherwise? Some of the greatest games are those where the lead changes hands, when we move from 1–2, to 3–2, to 3–4. It is in the desperate effort to win that this dramatic beauty is really produced. When teams do not have an incredibly strong desire to win, as neither France nor Denmark did in that 2018 World Cup game, we get very little to please the eye. Both sides were booed off the pitch. Our inevitable conclusion, then, is that beauty is produced in football when it is not the aim. It is instead when the team wants to win that it creates aesthetic value in its play.
We can now sum up the paradox thus: if you aim for beauty in football, then you will not get it. If you aim instead to win, then that is when you might create beauty. This sounds puzzling, as paradoxes do, but we can now understand the message behind it: if you want beauty, then you should play to win. This conclusion also explains why it is the successful shots, crosses, dribbles, passing moves and free-kick routines that are the most beautiful. If you just watch the flight of the ball, a shot that misses by a couple of centimetres is superficially not all that
different from one that goes an inch the other side of the post and in. There can be a significant aesthetic difference between the successful shot and the unsuccessful one, however, since the former contributes to the win. We might see countless slow-motion replays of the scoring shot, but only a single replay of the miss.
Now it might be pointed out that what I have offered is not strictly a paradox, as understood by a philosopher of logic, for instance. A paradox is where apparently valid reasoning from apparently true premises produces a false or self-contradictory conclusion. What I have presented is a paradox in the less formal sense, however, where what would usually be regarded as standard reasoning is rejected as false. My account of aesthetics and the aims of football is similar to the so-called paradox of happiness (see chapter 7 of Mike Martin’s Happiness and the Good Life). If you want to be happy, you won’t get it by pursuing happiness. You have to do other things, and then happiness might come to you indirectly. The air of paradox in both this and my account is that they say that if you want something, P, then aim at something other than P, and then you might get P. In the cases of both happiness and aesthetics in football, it is plausible that this unexpected structure is exhibited.
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