Football

The Philosophy Behind the Game

Stephen Mumford

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Football is the most popular sport on the planet partly because it's so simple to play – but as philosopher, novelist and avid fan Stephen Mumford shows, behind the straightforward rules of the game there lurks a world of intriguing complexity.

Mumford considers the intellectual basis upon which football rests, guiding readers through a number of issues at the heart of the game. How can a team be greater than the sum of its individual players? What is the essential role of chance? Should we want to win at all costs? What does it mean to control space? And can true beauty be found in football?

Rich with colourful examples from football's past and present, Mumford's book is both a love letter to football and a reflection on its enduring capacity to enthral and excite.

1
Introduction

Kick-off

This was my introduction. On 27 September 1980, I paid £1.50 to enter through a rickety-clickety turnstile and then ascend a tower of concrete steps to a black, peeling structure made of corrugated tin, looking to the outside world like a cowshed. There were gaps in the walls, through one of which I followed the expectant crowd. And there it was: a new, magical, vivid tableau stretched out in front of us; a lush expanse of green amid this drab corner of an industrial South Yorkshire city. Thousands of tightly packed fans, adorned in red, white and black, looked down from on high at the same sight. This was my first visit to Bramall Lane, the home to what is now, and will always be, my team, Sheffield United.

Everyone will remember their own introduction. The only people I’ve met who don’t are those who were taken first as infants. An introduction is a significant first encounter. Typically one is introduced to live football by someone else, as happened in my case. But it was not the first game I had seen. That was on television: the 1974 FA Cup Final, Liverpool versus Newcastle United. Green, red, black and white: how could that not fascinate a child watching on the family’s recently rented colour TV? I loved football right away. Nor was it my first match in person. I’d already visited The Shay, Halifax, and Elland Road, Leeds. But my Bramall Lane introduction was the one that stayed with me as it was a true beginning. Some introductions are by-the-by, quickly forgotten because they fail to initiate anything of note. Others are life changing, and this is certainly what happens when you first visit your home ground. When I ask others about their first such experience, they also volunteer, in dewy-eyed reminiscence, details of who gave them the introduction. A parent, grandparent or friend took them along and an eternal debt is owed. It wouldn’t be easy to go alone the first time. Someone has to initiate you into the conventions and routines of how to use a football stadium and how to watch a game. You need to know when and what to cheer and also how to cheer, which I’ve since found has variation across cultures. Football supporting is a learning experience.

As long as the introduction works, football has you for life. I have never known anyone who stopped liking football. I have met some who have never liked it in the first place, such as my grandfather, who called it ‘fool-ball’. But once the love is formed, it is going nowhere. I know some who stopped going to games but they just watch football in a different way, on TV. And there are plenty, such as myself for a time, who get annoyed with creeping commercial interests that corrupt the sport. It wasn’t football that I disliked, though, it was what surrounded the game, and I simply went to watch the amateur version instead. Now I’ve made peace with this transformed version of my first love. I’ve accepted that I don’t stand on uncovered terracing anymore, that the toilets are indoors, that I have to buy advance tickets instead of paying with cash at the gate. I’ve even come to accept, worst of all, the music that booms out when a goal is scored. In return for my reluctant acceptance of these inconveniences, I now watch a brilliant team. The football is fast and fluid. Sheffield United play short-passing tiki-taka, and commit defenders forward constantly. The players are strong and fit, running tirelessly. They would beat any of the former sides of the past that I knew and loved. This is not only true of my team. All over, we are in a glorious epoch of skill, fitness and tactics. Just consider Portugal and Spain playing out a scintillating 3–3 draw in Russia in the summer of 2018.

The Portugal–Spain game was a World Cup match, which leads me to acknowledge that there are different ways in which we watch football. My preference is always to watch a game in person since I like to be able to look at the whole pitch and see how play and formation develop. I like the fresh air on my face and to be surrounded by others who love football as much as I do. But many watch football on TV, and even I probably still see more games this way than at a stadium. And when we watch on TV, we are usually in a very different position as viewers. At Bramall Lane, I am a supporter, watching in hope of seeing a home win, and encouraging my team to achieve it. In most World Cup matches, I am doing something very different. I typically don’t care too much who wins the game, when it is Morocco versus Iran, for instance. I watch because I want to see a good game of football. Of course, that might involve wanting to see some drama and a last-minute winning goal. But I wouldn’t care too much whether it was Morocco or Iran who got it, since I am not a supporter of either. So with all the focus we get on fandom in football (see Paul Brown’s Savage Enthusiasm), and the post-Fever Pitch paradigm of watching the game with an allegiance, I think we should not be misled into thinking that the fascination of football belongs only to the loyal supporter. Football has an even stronger grip on us than that. We like to watch it even from the perspective of a neutral spectator, and sometimes even more so, since there is no stress from fear of defeat. There is no supreme moment of joy, either, when one’s own side scores a goal. We will come to the significance of that experience in due course.

Infinite possibilities

How can football acquire such a grip on us? What explains its deep fascination? This is what I aim to investigate and I will do so with a philosophical approach. This means that I will be considering my subject matter in the most general and abstract kind of way. But I trust that what I say will make sense to any football enthusiast. Philosophical training is not required, and if this is your introduction to philosophy, have no fear. There are plenty of things that philosophy is not, however. Don’t mistake it for the moody obscurantism of José Mourinho, for instance. He may be a brilliant football manager but he’s no philosopher. Philosophy aims to make matters clear, not obscure, and being grumpy is not the same as being profound.

Why should philosophy be required here, since football is so simple? Part of the game’s success is that it is easy to understand. You just need goals marked at either end of a space and two teams trying to get the ball in the other goal while defending their own. Such simplicity is no doubt part of the attraction. There is more to the explanation of football’s universal appeal, however, for the simplicity of football is also deceptive. It can of course be understood superficially but also more deeply, and we can all watch the same game and take different things from it. It is a sport that is easy to grasp. Newcomers can instantly see the point. Yet it also contains a tactical and, I will insist, philosophical richness that will reward attention. There are many facets to football, many levels at which it can be understood. No matter what your level of engagement is, there will be something for you. I will substantiate this claim by defending football’s depth. Its superficial appeal I will take largely as given.

The multi-layered nature of football, permitting different perspectives and degrees of understanding, is not unique. Football has just 17 laws (not rules, but laws). From these, a vast universe of possibilities is opened. The laws permit any number of possible games. Similarly, chess has just six kinds of piece, each with its simple rules of movement. From them, and an 8 × 8 square board, we get more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the known universe. And we can understand the moves and tactics of chess to any level of sophistication. The possibilities of football are even more expansive, however, since there are no restraints on the number of possible games at all. Unlike chess, the exact same game has never been repeated twice. The same final score of a match re-occurs, of course, but each game is unique in the sense that the goals are scored in different ways, and play unfolds in a manner that no other game in history has ever matched. Different passes are made and the ball’s movement follows a unique path each time. There are infinite possibilities open at kick-off time. The spectator is always in a position of uncertainty, and while there might be reasonable expectations as to the likely winner, anything can happen along the way. The understanding of how and why a game develops as it does permits any degree of analysis.

Escape

It is little wonder that those who watch football lapse occasionally into thoughtfulness and start analysing what they see on a more philosophical level. Football provides welcome interludes of escape. It allows isolation from the practical and hum-drum concerns of life. These can be forgotten when one is absorbed in a game, enjoying a moment of pure idleness. Football affords the luxury of reflection where one can think about the nature of the sport and what it shows us about life, ethics, the world and metaphysics.

Among such thoughts, one can see how each coach’s approach is itself informed by a philosophy: some general over-arching principles or norms concerning what one wants to achieve and how to do so. Perhaps these are articulated only vaguely or in basic platitudes, but they can be powerful nonetheless. ‘Win at all costs’ sounds a reasonable philosophy to adopt, for example, but we see that it can also be challenged ethically. In The Republic, Plato showed the flaw in saying that the good was what was in the interests of the strongest. Similarly, the Argentinian, infamously rough Estudiantes team of the 1960s showed what can go very wrong when a ‘win at all costs’ philosophy is adopted. The game can become debased and brutalized. Instead, there might be commitments to fair play: playing football ‘the right way’. Within that, there could be different views about what is the right way. Does it mean all-out attack? Or are defensive skills among the higher values of the sport? Is it anti-football to adopt a safety-first mind-set? Should football allow for the expression of the players’ individuality or should they stick rigidly to the coach’s system? I say that these are philosophical questions because they are not matters to be settled purely by the facts of the matter. They are normative, concerning what ought to be done rather than what is done, and consequently are to be settled only through thoughtful reflection. And it is no good saying that one philosophy is better than another because it produces more victories since whether victory is all that matters is itself a normative question. In the case of ‘win at all costs’, it was rejected as a philosophy despite producing success. Having seen it, most football clubs decided that they just didn’t want to win that way. Normativity concerns our preferences for guiding principles, and it’s clear that coaches have those. For example, would a coach prefer to win 1–0 or 4–3? This is a philosophical decision and probably one that reflects whether defence or attack is the priority.

The coach is at work during a game, of course, and it is his or her livelihood. My experience as a spectator is very different from that of a football professional, however. For me it is leisure time, which allows me an escape from the problems and worries of my regular life. This is where idle thoughts can thrive: idle in the sense outlined by Bertrand Russell in his 1932 essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’, free from the constraints of practical necessity. Like other sports, football offers the possibility of escape precisely because it is ultimately pointless. Its ends are created and they are not for anything else. One farms so that one can have food and builds so as to have a house. But one neither plays nor watches football for anything else. It is for its own sake. Players play to get paid, but this is not what I mean. They are aiming to score goals only because that is the aim of the sport. It is not as if world peace can be achieved or cancer cured by scoring goals, hence what football does is very different from what politics or medicine does, or farming or building. This shows that football has intrinsic value to us. To use the idea of Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper, football is exactly the sort of thing that would occupy our time in a utopia, where all our material needs were met. Suppose there was enough food, warmth and safety for everyone on the planet, all of which could be achieved without work. Suppose it was just gifted to us by a generous and accommodating planet. What would we do with ourselves? Suits suggests that we would naturally do the things that are valuable in themselves. We play games, just as we do philosophy, because they are what we want to do: not because they get us something else that we consider valuable, but because they are valuable intrinsically, in themselves.

Here is the explanation of football as escapism: an escape from the mundane, the practical, the urgent, when instead you can enjoy, experience, think and be that child again who approached his or her first game with a sense of wonder. Football is a philosophical laboratory fit for thought experiments. It is exactly the venue for you to consider what is and what ought to be.

Over-intellectualizing

Isn’t there a danger, however, that I am over-intellectualizing? Although football can make you think, it doesn’t only do that. Indeed, the experience of watching football can be most immediately emotional, visceral, a roller-coaster. Watch the fans in the stadium. Only in occasional moments are they pensive. Most of the time, they are expressive, agitated and excitable. Might one even say that the escape provided by football is that it allows you not to think at all? For a time, you might even forget who you are, such can be your immersion in the game. You are not absorbed in an intellectual reverie, it might be argued; you are watching the football match, and concentrating only on that.

Similarly, for all one might talk about space, time, chance and other metaphysical subjects in football, one might also think it is primarily a game, there to be won with brute strength and individual battles. Consider the vital role of Real Madrid’s Sergio Ramos in the 2018 Champions League Final. He had two clashes with Liverpool players, Mohamed Salah and Loris Karius, that seemed to have an important influence over the eventual outcome. Ramos imposed himself on the game in a way that all opposition fans would hate, but anyone would be delighted to have him on their own team. Football is about strength, dominance, subjugation, the humbling, and ultimately the humiliation, of the opponent. Although there are proscribed actions and boundaries which you cannot transgress, within the laws, anything else goes. Football is often dirty and not meant for the theorizing of intellectuals. It is a hard game.

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