Writing about football can be an especially fraught exercise. For, as the Mexican novelist Juan Villoro wrote, in God is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs and Scandals of the World’s Favourite Game , “football is so strictly codified, and involves the emotions so totally, that it includes its own epic, its own tragedy, and its own comedy.
There isn’t any need for parallel dramas, and the writer’s invention is left with very little space to work in.” It’s entirely likely, therefore, as we spend our evenings glued to our screens watching the World Cup from Russia, that we might feel we have very little use for a literary companion — the football, after all, can quite well speak for itself. But how do we react to the discourse on the field?
What is it that runs through our minds when we watch the ball being kicked around, when we watch Lionel Messi driving through a maze of defenders to score an improbable goal, or when we watch David de Gea pulling off a miraculous save with the outer edges of his fingernails?
Why does it consume us?
Some of these questions are meant to be at the heart of Simon Critchley’s enquiry in his book, What We Think About When We Think About Football .
Indeed, the book’s premise, as its title attests, is hugely promising — all of us, football fans, have surely at some point wondered what it is about the sport that consumes us in this way. Critchley presents the question as follows: “Association football is often called the beautiful game without that thought ever going anywhere. Why is it beautiful and in what does its beauty consist?” To answer this, Critchley says, at the book’s outset, he’ll lean on phenomenology — the study, in his words, of making “explicit what is implicit in our experience.”
This approach, he writes, will lead us towards an idea of a “poetics of football,” a theory of understanding the sport’s undoubted beauty.
This poetics, which Crichtley writes can evoke football’s “often powerful and deeply moving beauty,” is necessary, in his belief, to save both the sport and us from oblivion. As much as the premise was encouraging, Critchley is likely to lose us all here. Football certainly isn’t going to perish because we fail to understand why it stimulates us.
Yet, the basic questions that Critchley flags remain interesting. And some of them are met with far more effective answers in Laurent Dubois’s new book, The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer .
Football, Dubois, who teaches a course on the politics of the sport at Duke University, writes, is a “possibility,” and the ball is “unnecessary, in the end, because soccer, more than anything, is an idea.” Dubois doesn’t always claim to have the answers himself, relying instead on what’s already been written on the sport to tell us why it so excites our senses. He cites, for instance, the German literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht who once wrote that a beautiful play “is an epiphany of form,” which occurs through the “sudden, surprising convergence of several athletes’ bodies in time and space.”
And such plays are delightful, he added, because they often surprise the players themselves, seeing as they achieve the apparently impossible “against the unpredictable resistance of the other team’s defence.”
Myriad factors
Dubois points to myriad factors that make football beautiful — that it is democratic because it accommodates all kinds of body shapes and sizes, for example, in contradistinction to, say, basketball — but, more than anything else, the sport, he writes, is “human.” Not only does the sport explain the world, as Franklin Foer memorably observed, but equally Dubois writes it must also be “true that the world explains soccer.” Unlike Critchley’s book, which makes similar claims, Dubois proceeds to establish his assertions through illustration: by showing rather than telling. In this, his book works as both a history of the sport itself and as a literary account of all that’s been written on it.
Some of these might be familiar to many of us, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s musings on the goalkeeper, “the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.” But there are other more unfamiliar references he makes, including from the Argentinian writer Osvaldo Soriano’s short story, The Longest Penalty Ever , in which the tale involves a penalty kick, which has to be retaken the day after a match is played, allowing everyone involved too much time to think about which way the kicker might shoot.
In speaking about the midfielder’s role in football, Dubois takes us to the great contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marias’s writings, and shows us how football’s most critical task, the art of finding the back of the net, can occasionally be so transcendental. “Among memorable goals,” Marais wrote, on Zinedine Zidane’s astonishing volleyed goal in the 2002 Champions League final, for the Madrid newspaper, El Pais , “there are great ones, there are wonderful ones, and there are supernatural ones.” Zidane’s goal, for the author, belonged to the last type. “Supernatural goals have an air of gratuity, of the unthinkable, of gift. They seem like gifts fallen from the sky.” Now, as Dubois shows us, it’s just as possible to see football itself as one such gift. For in the end, it is the “search for beauty, for transcendence, for communion with others in moments of joy,” that keeps us returning to the sport.
What We Think About When We Think About Football ; Simon Critchley, Profile Books/Hachette, ₹399.
The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer ; Laurent Dubois, Basic Books, ₹1,285.
