footsmoke

I dream about soccer as much as I do about sex. These dreams are equally pleasurable and frustrating. I might wake up the moment a ball gets served to me from the wing, my body corked to snap a volley into the top corner, the ball holding like a moon against a sky of blinking eyes and flashbulbs, my heart in my throat. Then it’s gone, before I know who or what I was playing for. I’ll try to will myself back there, but never can.

Maybe these dreams represent oppressed sexual frustrations, as Mr. Freud might insist. Everything in the dream—the ball, the field, the goal—could serve as symbols for desires and demons culled from a deep place in my subconscious. Or maybe sometimes “a ball is just a ball.”

Sex as metaphor probably predates humanity. It’s not hard to picture a bunch of apes cracking themselves up over a stick and a hole. And why do you think chimps go crazy for bananas? Sports merely upped the anti and the depth of the metaphor. No matter the sport, there are bound to be sticks, holes, balls, sacks, goals, sweet spots, and terms like “penetration” that provide infinite one-liners and chuckles on practice fields the world over. Sports and sex share a language that works on a few levels. Besides all the words and objects, in sports you also have the long term metaphorical ideas of “dry spells,” “rut busters,” and “hot streaks” that work in eerily similar ways to their sexual counterparts. Ask any guy if he has ever had to sleep with some munter to get his confidence back up. It’s common. It’s the same as needing to get a bloop hit in baseball, or a lay up in basketball. You need these small accomplishments to get going again, to get the feel back, the confidence flowing. Success takes persistence, a little luck, and a lot of confidence. Soccer, like any sport, follows the same principles. But there are unusually sexual elements involved in soccer, besides the language, or even its many exotic languages.

First, the players themselves are the sexiest of sex symbols. Soccer players are too pretty. Even us straight men start to question our sexuality when watching Torres evade a defender and slot one home in super slow motion, his golden locks waving in some Salon-sponsored wind. It hurts to look for too long because we are spiteful and jealous, but also because we fear popping a semi. But we keep looking. As opposed to jock-strap-scratching, hairy-beer-gutted baseball players, soccer players’ slim physiques, flowing hair, and baby faces can make them look more like women than the ideal picture of a man. That many flaunt their flamboyant sides, diving for calls and crying to the heavens for fake injuries, only adds to that image.

Whatever the sport’s sexuality, the rhythms of the game keep it throbbing with sexual appeal. It is a dance, for ninety minutes, with teasing feints, swerving hips, and soft touches, at once both suggestive and purposeful. Despite the complex foreplay, the object of the game is simple: to gain momentum toward one final, orgasmic thrust, which bulges the back of the net. Release. Ecstasy.

One goal often wins a game. You might get two in a night if you’re lucky. Three is pushing it. But so much can go wrong en route. Soccer, for fans and players, is like a permanent weekend night in which you’re desperate for a lay. As in Dave Chapelle’s “Great Moments in Hookup History” sketches, infinite factors can block any initial momentum or promise. These sketches parody an NFL Films show, but they could more accurately present a soccer game.

While you try your hardest not to look desperate, after somehow getting interest from a chick whose braces look pretty hot in low light, you still have to sort through a web of chitchat, competing predators, and a slew of overly protective, fat-oozing-over-the-waistline-of-their-jeans, friends. One stupid line, one awkward silence, or aggressive suggestion could ruin everything. And so it is with soccer. One miscommunication, one obvious pass, one offside call, and you start from ground zero.

All of this helps explain why my dreams about soccer have always been somewhat correlated to my sex life. When things are rough and I am in a dry spell then I toss and turn in my sleep, trapped in an eternal Rec. League game on some scorching field of dust and divots. I butcher traps and simple passes. Balls skip over my feet. I hammer gimme-goals over the crossbar. I wake up shaking my head and blaming the field and shitty teammates, but I know it’s my fault. This is how I slept for most of my high school and college years.

Things are generally better now. But not recently. My girlfriend is out of town and a few weeks ago I had one of the most frightening/astounding dreams of my life. I was successfully sucking my own dick. When I told my roommates about it they offered the logical conclusion that I needed to get laid. This was a given. But I think there is more to it. What did it mean regarding soccer? Maybe I need to start playing more, or better. Or maybe, without any meaningful soccer on TV (coverage of the Olympics is pathetic), I’m desperate for anything I can get. Thank God the Premiership starts soon so I can at least get my weekly fix. Even the Euros couldn’t assuage my craving this summer.

Or maybe the dream has something to do with this blog I just started.

-Cyrus Philbrick

I recently spent a semester working as a coach for America SCORES Bay Area, a chapter of a national nonprofit program that runs after-school soccer and creative writing classes at under-funded public schools. I worked with a team of sixteen girls, age eight to twelve, every day of the week. I taught my kids a few things—I hope. And I learned a few things—I think.

I started coaching with SCORES knowing that I would dedicate only a fraction of my time to actually coaching soccer, that I would also be coaching many life skills. But I couldn’t have predicted the extent to which this was true. Controlling a group of hyperactive young girls brought unique teaching challenges every day. I found myself teaching them about topics as diverse as the life cycles of worms, about the finer points of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and even about sex—I’ll explain. I’m not a sicko.

Our soccer field, a beautiful oasis of grass at the top of a hill in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, couldn’t escape the raw marks of teeming city life, like dog crap and used condoms. I usually used sticks to discreetly remove these things from the playing field. But one day one of the more curious girls on my team spotted a Magnum at the same time I did.

“A balloon!” she said, reaching for it.

“No, ah,” I stuttered, trying to come up with something. “Oh, yeah. It’s a dirty balloon though. Don’t touch it. I’ll just throw it away.”

“Oh, I know what that is!” One of the louder girls came up behind me.

I thought this girl might save me from having to explain the details to the rest of the group. She would whisper it in their ears one at a time, they would snicker, and it would be over. This didn’t happen. She knew it was gross, but couldn’t explain why.

One rule of the group was that if two people were interested then everyone was interested.

“What is it then?” the rest of them chimed in, tugging at my shirt. “Why is it gross?” I looked around for a bold fifth grader to offer an answer, but they looked as dumbfounded as the rest. So, unable to think fast enough to come up with a satisfactory lie, I explained it terms as succinct and PG-rated as possible. I still looked out across a sea of confused faces. I told them to go home and ask their parents or older siblings for more detail.

Some of my friends were disgusted that I didn’t lie. But in retrospect I think I did the right thing. Kids, particularly girls on the verge of puberty, should learn about these things before it is too late in this crazy day in age. And they should learn much more than what I told them. For many of them, it was almost the right time to learn, but wholly the wrong circumstance and teacher.

Working as an after-school coach taught me predictable, but important, lessons that privileged white young adults tend to learn when working in under-funded school systems. I learned how organizations like SCORES serve a vital role plugging educational gaps (hopefully those regarding life skills besides sex) which schools are often not equipped to cover. Many of the students that benefit from the program, for example, grow up in environments that prevent them from participating in extracurricular activities so crucial to instilling positive values like creativity, community involvement, communication, and confidence. Besides such poster-board lessons, however, I also learned things that I couldn’t have prepared for. Primarily, I learned to cope with frightening issues of child management, psychology, and group dynamics that are unique to groups of young girls. And while I learned to rely on my own creativity and energy to keep the girls distracted and busy, I also learned to rely on soccer, which did just as much to solve these issues.

I was naïve as to how ferocious, malicious, and crafty a group of young girls can be. And I don’t mean this about my group of girls specifically. I mean this about every group of girls ever assembled, probably anywhere. Maybe I grew up sheltered, but somehow I knew very little of these things; I grew up blushing every time a girl looked at me. Still do. So I knew nothing of their witch-like scheming behind closed doors, jungle gyms, and trees.

Don’t get me wrong. My girls all had really sweet sides, but they played nasty, psyche-damaging games against one another. Unlike the boys’ team, which often played next to us and got into the occasional pushing and tripping scraps, the girls talked about how much they “hated” other girls on the team. They said this behind their teammates’ backs and sometimes straight to their faces. And when they didn’t voice their hatred, they would show it through games of vicious exclusion that could cripple the unlucky ones to tears or to hunched over piles of braids in the corner of the playground. Or they could do it just with their eyes. In the constant struggle to stay on the popular side the girls would swarm like magnetic filings away from the “unpopular ones,” a tag which might change daily. This happened during games of tag and even during homework sessions.

One girl on my team got it worse than anyone else; her tag didn’t change. Other girls would deny her requests for a pencil even though I could see lead tips poking out from pockets of their backpacks. I would look up from a game to see this girl sulking away from the field, tearing up grass with her head on her chest.

“I don’t want to play anymore because everyone hates me,” she said.

I tried to say anything I could to get this girl back on the playing field. I stumbled through an explanation to her about how the rest of the girls didn’t mean it, and how people say a lot of things they don’t really mean. I told her how much I admired her for staying on the team and for being one of the strongest girls out there. I told her to come play whenever she was ready.

If she did find the will to come back out on the playing field then the laws of the game would usually wash inequality away. When given a chance to compete, she would make her presence felt. She tackled harder and ran after the ball more aggressively than anyone else on the team. Her teammates couldn’t help but appreciate her for it. They would cheer and call for the ball after she won it. And her opponents couldn’t help but fear her presence. They would get rid of the ball when they saw her coming.

The sport couldn’t solve everything. There were times when this girl’s teammates purposely wouldn’t pass her the ball. I still had to give a number of speeches about all the buzzwords we began the season with: sportsmanship, teamwork, and respect. The season marked a constant struggle for these things. On many days it could be difficult to even begin games. After I divided the girls into teams they would be too concerned with which friends were on their team to start playing. They would also reject simple directions with frustrating insolence. Some would just say, “No, I’m not doing that.” Some swore under their breath. Some even said they “hated” me for putting them on a certain team or making them play a certain game. I would re-choose teams. This was a big mistake. Their insolence, now validated as effective, could prove infectious. If they didn’t immediately like a game or their teammates, I might have a team full of girls leveling hateful eyes up at me. Those not busy hating me were busy arguing over which boys liked them, or where a bug went. It takes a little more patience and creativity to get girls involved in games than it does with boys, who naturally like to run around a little more.

I also lacked the authority to pressure my team into obeying. Out on the soccer field or the black top I had little leverage to punish these girls in the same ways that teachers might. Although I threatened to punish disrespectful behavior by telling the principal or the kids’ parents, which might mean suspension from the team, they realized quickly that these threats were often empty. I didn’t want to punish them. I wanted desperately for them to have fun, for them to want to come everyday, and for them to realize that I wasn’t against them.

My niceness and refusal to punish caused a classic case of control slippage. The best cure would have been for me to lay down the law early and often, as the Principal of the school suggested I do. “Don’t smile for the first week,” she told me when I started. This time-tested technique would have scared the girls into showing more respect. From respect would have stemmed more listening, learning, and eventually, fun. The girls would have been forced to give inherently fun games, both soccer-based and other, more of a chance. I learned this. Girls on a team don’t want their coach to be their friend or someone who simply wants them to have fun. They want and need a coach, who maintains consistent authority and demands respect. This probably applies for any coach of any gender at any level. Friendship can come after respect.

Despite the way my control would slip away from me daily, I still had one impenetrable weapon in my side: soccer. When I could prevent the girls from hi-jacking the ball bag then I held all the magical powers of those brilliant size-four orbs. I used the promise of playing a scrimmage as leverage over the girls’ behavior. If they played with respect and without argument then they would get to play a long scrimmage at the end of practice.

Although not an ideal way to run practice, as it detracted from the spirit of the other games I tried to run, this method worked as a last resort—pathetic but effective. Most of the girls loved, or grew to love, the purity of the game. Many started bringing soccer balls to school to play with during recesses and lunch. When I arrived after school, they couldn’t wait to show me moves that they had practiced on their own. This passion usually took over whenever I dropped a ball amongst them for a full-fledged scrimmage. I could sit back and watch the positive momentum of the game sweep them up in its tide. Although the girls still whined about teammates and talked trash and occasionally ran away in tantrums, for the most part they played. Attitudes melted away. They forgot about not passing to those they didn’t like. In this way, the game of soccer provided a battlefield where positive values had a good chance of winning out. The sport requires teamwork and respect for its rules for players and teams to succeed.

On game days, which came every Friday when they played against teams from other area schools, their brashness and combative nature would almost disappear. As part of a team, they felt a sort of vulnerable pride that would disarm their most devilish weapons. Before boarding the bus, they buzzed with nervous energy, fretting over which part of their uniform they forgot, or which positions they were going to play that day. They were nervous of losing. They would have to answer to their friends, their teachers, their parents, and the boys’ team. They felt accountable. In such a vulnerable state, they had to listen; they needed to know their positions, or whom they would sub for. They had to show teamwork and sportsmanship; they relied on their teammates and cheered them on for the greater good. These days came as a welcome relief from, but also an affirmation of, all the work I put in during the rest of the week. I only had to remind them, and myself, not to talk trash after goals or wins.

Soccer serves as a powerful and dynamic vehicle for education. By joining soccer with after-school writing classes, a program like SCORES relies on the magnetism of the sport to unlock values like responsibility, pride, and self-expression so crucial to a child’s behavior, character, and sense of self-worth.

In this way, soccer works. But, especially with teams of girls, focused on so many things peripheral to the game, the sport can do only so much work by itself. It needs the right coaches and the right tactics to really affect lives.

I tried. And I like to think that I did some good. But I think I learned much more than my students did. As SCORES continues to grow, it will provide more comprehensive, and more gender-specific, training that will help new coaches like myself cope with behavior problems. Like so many non-profit organizations, however, SCORES suffers from limited resources. It can’t afford to provide extensive training. It maintains a stretched presence in as many schools as it can, and it can’t afford to help a number of schools that would benefit from its programs.

I want to encourage young women, especially recent graduates of either high school or college, to consider working, or even volunteering, for programs like SCORES (1). While I don’t think a coach’s gender should affect the way a team gets managed, I do think it affects some deeper psychological connections between coach and players. Women, inherently more attuned to the minds of a team of young girls than a clueless guy like me, can be more sensitive and adaptable to their wants and needs. Young women can more easily develop a charged connection to young girls. They can gain respect by sharing their similarities, like taste in music or clothes. If I told my team that I liked some of their music then they would say that they didn’t like it anymore.

As I found out, working as a coach can make for a tough balancing act between friend (or at least confidant) and supervisor that can cause a loss of control. But, if handled the right way, it is this balancing act that can also let you into kids’ lives in such an impacting way. Working as a coach provides a rare opportunity to toe the line between role model and teacher. You are a role model with significant responsibility; you must set rules and demand respect. At the same time you are a teacher with a significant lack of responsibility; you have the freedom to improvise and adapt lessons and activities in fun ways that you wouldn’t in a traditional classroom. You can also afford to spend time getting to know and relate to kids in ways that teachers normally cannot. And you are equipped with one of the most powerful teaching vehicles in existence, soccer, to help guide your work (2).

Promotional video for America SCORES

(1). Currently SCORES Bay Area is the only branch of the national organization that accepts non-certified teachers as coaches. But I don’t think any chapter would turn down volunteers. There are also a number of other programs throughout the nation in need of help. The US Soccer Foundation’s website, ussoccerfoundation.org, lists a number of organizations that support soccer as an educational tool in inner cities. Some include: Soccer in the Streets (Atlanta, GA), City Kicks (Boston, MA), Project Goal (Providence, RI), and The Eddie Pope Foundation (Centreville, VA). There are also many programs that work internationally, such as Soccer Without Borders or Play Soccer.
(2). Writing isn’t a bad vehicle either. It’s just tougher to get the kids in it.

Russians have always had a knack for chess, a game of mathematical awareness, spacing, and baiting moves that open counterattacks. Recently, the nation has been playing a similar style of soccer, only it’s much faster and a little more fun to watch.

It’s too early to believe they can maintain this style against tougher competition. So far they’ve clicked for only one game. They struggled to possess the ball against Spain. They might get steam-rolled by a well-oiled Dutch machine. But in dismantling Sweden and advancing to the quarterfinals, Russia has turned some heads with their dazzling passing and break-neck counterattack. Their approach rivals the Dutch’s in energy and fluidity.

It is currently the most refreshing style in the world game. Say what you want about the mesmerizing passing of hoodwinking nations like Spain and Portugal, Russia’s attack is blinding in its’ speed and purpose. Players pour down field in wing-overlaps and triangles. Against Sweden, they scored two of the prettiest goals of the tournament, all one-touches and angles.

“It really is magnificent football,” Andy Gray gushed after Russia’s first goal, “played at a pace that just ripped Sweden apart.”

Gray, prone to exaggerations, was right on here. Russians are making such incisive soccer a part of the country’s fabric. Anyone who caught glimpses of Zenit St. Petersburg’s run through the UEFA championship saw some of the quickest and most fluid soccer played anywhere this year. Zenit didn’t give Rangers a chance in the final. They filleted the Scottish back line in every way possible, completing triangles even in the eighteen.

Euros almost passed Arshavin by. But after the Sweden game, the baby-faced midfielder’s secret is getting out.

This seems to be the start of something new and unique in Russia. Their adaptable Dutch coach, Guus Hiddink, has easily taken to such an efficient and speed-driven style. He grew up around it. And he has chosen many of Zenit’s players to serve as the driving core of Russia’s national squad. The speedy Andrei Arshavin, who had to sit out Russia’s first two matches of the tournament, proved why he is one of the hotter commodities in Europe this summer. He cut into Sweden’s back line over and over.

I’m curious to see if Russia’s youth and speed will hold up against the more experienced originators of their style. How will the long-legged Orlando Engelaar deal with the Russian middies darting around his waist? Hiddink has proven himself a master tactician. But will he match fire with fire? I don’t know if Russia can succeed playing any other way.

For these reasons, I’m looking forward to the Holland–Russia match more than any other quarterfinal. Other clashes will have more star power on display. Others might have more powerful dark horses. But none will be played at the same pace. It will be a knife fight.

It is sad to think that sports teams, specifically soccer clubs, like microcosms of corrupt political systems, can uphold some of the most disgusting aspects of both capitalism and fascism at once. In the insanely free-market economy of world soccer only those who fall under the “stupid-rich” category of wealth come to own clubs. Those with complete control over their club, like Chelsea’s Roman Ambramovich or Manchester City’s Thaksin Shinawatra, can do whatever the hell they want without any checks and balances or heed of fans’ desires. Maybe such power comes as a natural and necessary evil of all the money in modern sports. But I think that we need to stop thinking of some owners as the untouchable saviors of our clubs and start treating them more like the self-serving and fascist control-mongers that they have become. Thaksin’s ignorant nut-flexing over Manchester City and that poor google-eyed Swede has become too detrimental to the club, the fans, and the sport as a whole to accept. If he does axe Eriksson, it will serve as an ignorant decision from both a despot and a shameless entrepreneur. And If this doesn’t serve as solid grounds for revolt for fans of the club and fans of the game then I don’t know what does.

“Thank you Mr. Blair. I don’t know much about soccer. But you can’t blow money this quickly on anything else.”

Like the flippant owner of a fantasy team, Thaksin has openly stated that Sven-Goran Eriksson did not achieve enough in his first year with the club. A “disappointing” second half of the year, in which City fell from the top six to ninth, prompted Thaksin to say that he will pursue Portuguese National team manager, Philippe Scolari, in the off-season.

For Thaksin to dismantle Eriksson’s train, still picking up the right parts but rolling along nicely, would be tragic and unfair. By any realistic standard of measurement Eriksson had a good first season while he laid the foundation for future success in the next two years of his contract. He made a number of shrewd purchases (Elano, Petrov, and Corluka), brought up quality youngsters within the system (Fernandes, Harte, and Johnson), and turned a basement-dwelling team into a challenger for European competition. At times they played some of the sharpest, toughest, and most dynamic soccer in the league. They finished in the top ten, as the league’s most improved club. They were the only team to beat Manchester United twice. And they won without a deep or complete squad, weaknesses that ultimately crippled them, playing most of the year without any sort of bonafied striker.

Eriksson’s work this season has earned him the support of City players and fans alike. Players have been vocal about their faith in the manager and the defensive-minded but fluid system of play he has established. Fans have recently made stadiums echo with chants to “Save Sven!”

But ultimately, the man who signs the checks will determine the direction of the club, humanity and democracy be damned. Players and fans have no meaningful voice and no power to change this. Why? The simple answer, and the right one, is that this is the way sports work in a society driven by money. But to an extent, players and fans also don’t speak out for the same reasons that people living under corrupt fascist regimes or crushingly capitalist societies don’t. They fear retaliation and they fear losing what they have. And although I am exaggerating the extent of this powerlessness, it should make us think about why and how we should change this.

City’s players haven’t revolted against their owner, with strikes or any other form of resistance, for fear of losing their jobs. Eriksson has already warned City players against striking during this month’s tour of Asia so that they can protect their careers and their future at the club. Eriksson knows that if his own job is disposable, so are the jobs of any of the players in the club.

A real team player.

Many City fans have also proposed various strikes, suggesting boycotts of ticket and merchandise sales. But the more prevailing view has been that such forms of resistance wouldn’t loosen Thaksin’s control over the club or affect the economic standing of the team. Thaksin seems bent on making the type of moves that will make City a more internationally marketable team (first laughably proposing to sign magnetic players of the likes of Ronaldinho, and now proposing to sign one of the most desirable managers in the world in Scolari). The team no longer belongs to Manchester. It belongs to the world.

Also, City fans might fear the result of a revolt. Undermining Thaksin’s control could mean undermining the team’s financial sway. And a billionaire with an open pocketbook doesn’t come along very often to a second tier soccer club. The Shinawatra era, like the golden years for many Russians under Stalin, holds the promise of the good life, glory and fame that lowly City fans have only previously dreamed of. And for all the criticism of Thaksin’s manhandling of the club, many fans have an inkling of curiosity, even hope, to see what sort of magic Thaksin’s monetary powers can conjure. The majority of soccer fans, without strong bonds to the club, also probably don’t want to stand in the way of Thaksin’s blank-check-wielding. For them, the drama with Manchester City has been intriguing. There remains a possibility that Thaksin could create a “joker” of sorts that could disrupt the stranglehold the top clubs have on the league.

How can we ensure that Thaksin keeps Erikkson as the man to create that joker? As it seems like a foregone conclusion that he won’t, then I don’t know. Maybe fans could stage a grander display of loyalty to Eriksson and the current club. Maybe they could bring back hooliganism in its purest form, beyond the fanatic signs and chants that exploded around stadiums at City’s last few games of the season, in a way that truly shows fans’ loyalty to the club and not loyalty to violence for the sake of violence. How many angry, loud, beer-buzzed fans can we get to picket around the stadium? How much noise would it take to bring Thaksin out from the gold-studded walls of his Thailand palace to address a crumbling local fan base?

A little thing called the internet might also help fans galvanize support. On a quieter, but potentially much larger scale, on-line networks of fans and supporters can make their keyboard clicks heard. Web sites like savesven.co.uk are popping up that aim to “Save Sven from the boot!” through petitions and by creating a collective voice for those busy, civilized, but still concerned protesters. A few swirling petitions to “Save Sven” have tallied signature-totals over five digits. We need more of the same, especially from international fans, as these fans seem to serve as Thaksin’s target market. Enough criticism and Thaksin might think twice before firing such a beloved and supported manager.

But I fear that Thaksin will act before fans can create a loud or powerful enough revolt. Erikkson will get axed in the next few days or even hours. And I, along with the majority of other fans, will continue to watch from afar, fixed on the internet and TV to see the news, alone and helpless at a time requiring some sort of mass action.

I hope the club at least sells Erikkson jerseys to the public after he goes. That way us fans could show subtle displeasure with Thaksin’s rule while we still support the club financially, which sadly seems like the only thing we can do these days to undermine the fasci-capitalist owners, teams, and sports that we love too much to tear apart.

When I spun the idea of this blog to a few of my more football-astute British friends I got some skeptical responses. One friend from Scotland told me that the site probably wouldn’t be that popular in Britain because I would fill it with “shite” about all the “bitches on the Chelsea team and the rest of the shit you lot play with yourselves over.” Naturally, that cynical cunt got me thinking … great idea. I can think of no more appropriate, stupid, and obviously-biased American way to kick off this blog than a List of the Top Six Biggest “Bitches” in the Premiership over this past season. And yes, most of them come from Chelsea. I had to scrap to include players on other teams. I even included Bianchi for fuck sakes.  

In this case, I am using “bitches” as a vague and sweeping term to refer to the biggest wusses, whiners, divers, patsies, and easy targets in the league …      

#6 Michael Ballack

I try to admire Michael Ballack. I try to admire his calmness on the ball, the way he coolly defuses pressure and picks apart defenses. I try to admire his cock-sure attitude and unwavering sense of purpose. I try to admire his consistency. But something about Ballack’s model-cool demeanor makes him appear too conscious of the fact that everyone might be admiring him. He looks like an actor trying to perfect that, “within yourself,” stare. And somehow this makes him appear even more inhuman than Frank my-life-is-an-epic-drama-that-should-be-picked-up-by-Universal Lampard. Ballack does everything with the same expression, one that looks like it hurts just a little bit to hold, which he also probably wears when taking a shit. When Ballack gets a chance to let his emotions loose and give back to the crowd, as he did when he scored in the huge league win over Manchester United, his stiff personality unfortunately comes through as painfully as his stiff nipples poking through skin-tight Under Armor. He is too professional. And you can’t help but imagine that, after a game, he hurries to the locker room to slam a personalized Ph-balanced recovery shake. Then he takes a five-minute hot tub session. No more. No less. He is a stalwart professional, and also kind of a bitch.

#5 Christiano Ronaldo

There might be a day, when Ronaldo is in the twilight of his career, six Premiership titles and Three World Player of the year titles later, when the majority of the English speaking population will no longer call him a patsy. Until that day, most of us will just use the word “fag.” Most haters, however, use this term out of sheer frustration with Ronaldo’s freakish talents and not because of his wind-blown flops. Despite his soft reputation, Ronaldo has shown surprising resiliency and durability, which are forms of toughness. One of the most fouled and physically targeted players in the game, Ronaldo is more of a bitch for his teary-eyed adolescent facial expressions than his lack of grit. Ferguson has Ronaldo working harder than anybody these days. During a game this season I think I even saw him spring up, after taking an elbow-tackle to the jaw, and chase down the offender with a slide tackle. He was so fast under the lights, though, that his scissors tackle might have been more of a coy suggestion as to what that player should do to Ronaldo later that night. 

#4 Ashley Cole

Cole is an extremely subtle, and effective, kind of bitch. One of the most underrated divers in the game, Cole can make a nudge in the back look like a full-fledged spear tackle. He also takes advantage of increasingly chummy and willing-to-listen Premiership referees. At first he whines to them, but before you know it he is trading flirtatioius smiles, backslaps, and possibly butt pinches and cell numbers.

# 3 Rolando Bianchi

Manchester City brought in Bianchi because of his reputation as a tough forward and a solid goal scorer. He left with a reputation as a fragile, dirty, and whining bastard. He belongs in Italy. It will be better for everyone.

#2 The British Media

It gets worse every year. For all their convincing linguistic skills British pundits and reporters are just as gullible and twice as fickle as their counterpart American blowhards. Like dogs in heat, they change their path whenever the warm scent of some possible criticism comes along. A number of columnists and commentators, for example, had some serious trouble making up their mind about Arsenal’s season. Before the season started, most respectable publications picked Arsenal to finish third or fourth in the league. After the team’s stellar first half, however, a large majority of the British media convinced itself of Arsenal’s superiority. Then the flip-flop commenced. When Arsenal got spanked by Manchester United in the FA Cup they were “Exposed!” When they beat Milan at the San Siro they “could still win the Double,” the Premiership and Champions League! When they dropped to third place, they were always “inexperienced and outgunned” compared to the other League giants. “They’re fucked, this year and next!” Reporters and commentators naturally dramatize the ups and downs of team’s season, but what ever what happened to some good old perspective. Arsenal finished about where they were expected to finish. They even exceeded some of their expectations, challenging the top of the Premiership when healthy and only bowing out of the Champions League because of a questionable call.

#1 Didier Drogba

I couldn’t find Drogba’s actual interview, but this is almost as good.

No player was more inconsistent and confusing this season than Drogba. He followed brilliant performances that kept Chelsea afloat with performances that threatened to corrode his team from the inside out. In one game, he would bulldoze through defenders that fell like straw. In the next, he would stroll around the pitch looking about as vacuous and disinterested as a sagging hooker recently demoted to the Monday night shift. During a few games this season there were probably some fans in attendance that covered more distance than Drogba just by going on a couple bathroom runs. Drogba does what he wants when he wants. This makes him a force of nature, that, when channeled the right way, cannot be stopped. It makes him a thug. It also makes him a huge bitch. There is nothing more ridiculous than a world-class athlete that doesn’t know the limits of his place on a team. Watching him squabble with Ballack over dead balls was like watching the tragic/comic moment on a cheesy reality TV show when two superficial characters’ deep-seeded problems with one another finally come out over something like doing the dishes. You have to pick sides, but it’s hard. You need to ask questions like, Who would you rather hang out with? Probably Drogba. Even though Ballack is more in the right, hanging out with ass holes is more fun. Is the problem a race thing? Probably not. The difference seems to stem more from the way Ballack’s is a tight-ass at his core and Drogba is completely the I-don’t-give-a-shit type. Who would win in a fight? Probably Drogba again. He’s an animal. But Drogba’s obvious strength makes him even more of a bitch on the soccer field. He will follow charging runs with flops that make him look softer than a Stawberry Charleston Chew. He will get up muttering and gesticulating to refs and teammates and opponents. But it’s hard to tell who he’s even bitching at. Sometimes I wonder if he even knows. “Sometimes I dive … I don’t dive.”

“Sometimes magic is very close to nothing at all. Nothing at all.”

-Zinedine Zidane

Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait immediately calls attention to the difference between experiencing a soccer game on television and the unique experience the viewer gets with this film: intense and personal. The film cuts from a regular televised broadcast of the game, the screen pixilated and fuzzy, to a crisp shot of Zidane tearing along at full speed; from muted crowd sounds, buried beneath the commentator’s voice, to the chilling roar of the thousands of fans at the Bernabeau in Madrid; from minute players in the distance to sweat dripping down Zidane’s chiseled face.

He is the specimen under a microscope, or, in this case, under the gaze of seventeen cameras that look more like rocket launchers, with military-grade zoom capabilities and lenses the size of small pizzas. We get as close as humanly possible to the player’s individual experience. We enter his space, insulated–but still affected–from all that surrounds him.

In doing so we don’t get the contextual information that naturally accompanies a game on television. We don’t know who Zidane passes to, or where, or why. We lose the typical measuring devices that we rely on when watching soccer. It is hard to read the flow of the game, or gauge the momentum of each team. We don’t have a narrator providing a story line or imposing significance on events. We don’t have a clock ticking in the upper left hand corner of the screen or ball-possession statistics confirming our suspicions about the game flow. We need to read the game through Zidane’s movements: his actions, his body language, and his expressions. Zidane is the protagonist. This is what lets us in. We begin to experience aspects of the game that he does, while he does.

Without context, we get an unfamiliar but personal sense of time and place. The soundtrack of the film, for example, approximates how Zidane, or possibly any player, hears things throughout a game. The sounds build and fall in layers, isolating noises from the crowd and then the yells and grunts from other players on the pitch. In this hyper-sensitive world even the most subtle sounds receive attention. At one point we get only the gentle scuffs of Zidane’s boots along the turf.

“You can almost decide for yourself what you want to hear,” Zidane says, in a caption that flashes at the bottom of the screen. He describes how he can hear coughing, or “someone shifting around in their chair,” or a whisper in the crowd culled through all the noise.

The affect of this shifting sonic landscape is both real, in the way it captures Zidane’s experience, and also dreamlike, in the way sounds impossibly uncover themselves, as if a giant stethoscope presses on different areas of the field. The hypnotic music of the Scottish group Mogwai, which slowly replaces the sounds of the game at different points of the movie, adds to this limbo between dream and reality. The music carries us along, mesmerizing us with the rhythms of the game, at the same time it pushes us to heighten our awareness of what we see. Details become unreal.

While the film purposely limits contextual information, it also serves to place Zidane in a time and place better than any footage or description has ever done before. It gives us a detailed and thorough record of Zidane at work, doing what he was meant to do week in and week out, in his natural environment. By letting us in, the film gives a weight to Zidane’s work, or even that of any modern athlete, which forces us to feel and think about his vocation in a more human and real way. The film therefore doesn’t add to Zidane’s legend, his larger than life status and magnetism, as much as it tears it down.

Not only do we see what is unique about Zidane as a player, but we see what is unique about him as a man. Under the microscope, his attitude bores through the frame. He scars the screen with the grave concentration he levies into everything. He plays with a “coiled intensity,” as Peter Bradshaw writes in his review of the film in The Guardian. Even at his most relaxed and still, Zidane’s intensity boils through his skin, threatening to explode at any moment.

He is a warrior from another era. We see it in his actions, and even his words. After Villareal scores the first goal of the match, on a questionable penalty call, Zidane comes back to his side and stares through the referee with his piercing eyes. He says only, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” Then play resumes.

As my good friend put it: “It harkens back to a day when things like shame and honor meant something.”

They mean something to Zidane. He demands performance. He gives Roberto Carlos a quick, “Come on,” after Carlos looses the ball. And after Zidane makes a dazzling run down the left wing, producing the assist for the equalizing goal, he doesn’t even crack a look of satisfaction. He grunts, and he returns to his half. When he gets the red card in the game’s dying minutes, for tearing fists-first into a Villareal player, we don’t know what happened, but we are sure that the offending player also offended Zidane’s honor and values.

Our viewpoint also allows us to get a unique sense of Zidane’s efficiency in his movements and touches. We don’t need to see the context of all Zidane’s passes and moves to know how he plays on this night. He plays fucking brilliantly, as usual. He kills balls on his chest, his thighs, his feet, then knocks them on to relieve pressure. He almost never loses possession, even after dozens of touches. He appears more at ease when he actually gets the ball, as if he knows the precious object is safe under his control. He spends so much time calling for it, showing for it, chasing it, that when he gets it he is grateful, comforted. He shuffles effortlessly around opponents, the ball glued to his feet.

We see Zidane as a specimen built to play the game. He romps around his natural environment like some wild steed might around a meadow. In between action he spits, or he toes the earth. He snarls. These natural habits serve as tiny, but revealing, outlets for his pent up energy and strength.

The film provides a number of still shots that recall elements of a Western, or even a Nature film. We see Zidane as a man, or beast, alone. He is both at home and at war with his environment. We see him in the twilight of his career, trying to make the most out of his abilities and his rusting joints. The field and the game become the things that give him purpose—sustaining his powers—while they also wear him down. In this way, as much as Zidane astounds as a specimen of strength, he also appears in a uniquely fragile light. We see the urgency in everything he does, expending strength and effort over and over to no result.

These are the details that allow the film to deliver heavy truths about the modern athlete that no other media outlet could. Up close, we see that despite Zidane’s ferocity, or maybe because of it, his life on the field seems impermanent and endangered. We become more aware that this life will come to a close after ninety minutes on this night, and then forever after just a few more years, in his early thirties. In experiencing more deeply the intensity of an athlete’s job, we also realize how short and temporary it really is. Zidane plays against all forms of time, not just the time in the game, but more importantly his time doing what he was irrevocably meant, and impeccably trained, to do.

Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait serves as a way to record, and preserve, Zidane’s existence. As filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno comment in the Making of Film piece on the DVD, the finished product works as something much more permanent and significant than the highlight reels and stock images that will survive Zidane’s retirement. It ensures that the end of Zidane’s career will be remembered for more than just a head butt to the chest of a trash-talking Italian.

The filmmakers do their best to give this particular game, played on Sunday, April 23^rd, 2005, a sweeping context that it couldn’t get from any typical media coverage. During half time, images of Zidane get replaced by images of an assortment of world events that happened on the same day. Some are newsworthy, like a report about lethal floods in Serbia and Montenegro. Some aren’t, like toads “swelling to three times their size” in some pond in Germany. Death happens. And birth happens. Inconsequence happens. Gordon and Parreno might have stretched themselves in trying to couch Zidane’s one performance in such epic scope. But they make the point quickly and emphatically. After this brief detour around “world events” the picture cuts back to the game–the magnetic appeal it has to so many thousands of fans at the Bernabeau and so many millions the world over. Then it cuts to Zidane, breathing. And again, we watch.

This technique reveals a paradox of soccer and one player’s place within such a massive attraction. For everyone tuned in, the game holds an immense significance. But, in shifting frames from extremely wide to extremely close, we also see the game as something as meaningless as one man’s workday, or, like a repeated caption suggests, “a walk in the park.” If we tweak our perspective, we can see the sport as the silly and tireless pursuit of an illusive ball. The game Zidane plays in is as significant or insignificant as anything else to occur on this day. Its meaning depends on our focus.

Soccer might go on forever, gathering momentum as the earth turns. But Zidane, like a dream we had that can never be fully recovered, won’t. This film captures crucial elements of that dream. It holds both a lightness and weight that everyone can experience in a different way. It captures Zidane at a moment that is both timeless and infinitely temporary, in moments that are dazzling and also ordinary, with a momentum that is effortless but also arduous.

As Christopher Clarey writes in his Herald Tribune review, “When Zidane makes something out of nothing down the left wing in the first half, avoiding a thicket of extended legs to get a cross to Ronaldo for a headed goal, there is more hard labor than magic dust in it.” In using a focus that flows between the peripheral, the detailed, and the hyper-detailed, the film dilates in a way that tunes us to frequencies of the game that we didn’t know existed. We can’t help but question and examine the thinnest differences between work and play, between the qualities we worship and those we neglect, and, as Zidane suggests as the camera pans above the stadium into the night sky, between magic and nothing.

-Cyrus Philbrick

Soccer has long had less capacity for statistical analysis than any other major sport. This is primarily because of the nature of the game, free-flowing and low scoring and simple to its core. It doesn’t offer the many frames for measurement that so many American sports rely on. Baseball, basketball, and football offer a slew of percentages, splits, and averages for fans to gorge on.

Soccer’s insulation from data and numbers is part of what has kept it romantic and hard for so many Americans, addicted to statistics-saturated fantasy sports leagues, to stomach. It is truly all about feeling—for players, managers and fans alike. Every sport runs on illogical passions and beer-fueled arguments, but none more than soccer. It is innately subjective. This preserves the ignorance and bias of all who analyze games and players, but it also preserves the game’s lyrical nature, the color and light of perspective and narrative. It protects soccer from the type of statistics-drooling fans that infest baseball—the kind that give you regrettably well-researched evidence of a player’s rating on fielding metrics technology even though they don’t know how a shortstop should straddle second base when making a tag out. In soccer, by contrast, maintaining an informed opinion about a game or a player has always required two things: you need to have a deep understanding of the sport, and you need to watch games unfold.

In the last ten years, however, the hot probes of science have been busy giving soccer a lobotomy. Software companies like ProZone, which give computerized video and statistical analysis of games, claim to provide an objective picture of both a player and team’s performance. ProZone, which doesn’t come cheep for the pro and amateur clubs that use it (yearly subscriptions cost around £130,000), can cut through some crucial aspects of soccer’s obscurity. Managers use it as a tool to improve team tactics and player technique. But how deep an impact can these programs have on a game so rooted to subjectivity?

Although they will have a permanent and valuable place in the game, computerized analysis programs will probably never replace the good old empirical one, a keen set of eyes. And although such programs make some aspects of soccer more transparent, they are also adding a new language to the surface of the game that tangles us in new arguments and new questions. They compound the game’s subjective mystique at the same time they erase it.

Some managers claim that ProZone proves most valuable when evaluating player performance. ProZone’s biggest champion, Arsene Wenger, praises the program’s ability to reveal the quality and speed of a player’s decisions on the ball.

“Technical superiority is measurable,” Wenger stated in a recent and often-quoted interview conducted by Total Youth Football Magazine. “In the past it was just about feelings, opinions. So I thought, ‘that’s not good enough,’ and I wanted to know a little bit more. I am always in the situation where I have to judge people, and the more concrete objective numbers you have the better you can achieve that.”

ProZone, which uses eight cameras to track infinitesimal movements of every player on the pitch, doesn’t only measure completed passes. It can gauge the circumstances of these passes, where they went, and the other options available. So a player can no longer blame a poor performance on his teammates’ lack of movement, or a lack of options, without this excuse getting scrutinized.

Getting such visual and statistical data gives perspective on a player’s performance, but it seems to prove more valuable as a coaching tool than as a way to rate player value. Reviewing a player’s decisions with the ball, seeing where they maintained possession and where they lost it, could help a player make more positive decisions or movements in a game. But breaking a player’s success down to statistics has flaws and gray areas. Unlike baseball, in which numbers reveal truth over time, soccer relies too heavily on intangible and immeasurable elements, like team chemistry and deception and creativity, for statistics to conclusively quantify an individual’s value. For this reason soccer will never see an equivalent to a book like Moneyball, which showed how certain stats (batting average and stolen bases) had long been overvalued at the expense of others (like walks). No matter how much we try to break soccer down, minute frame by minute frame, it can never have the same statistical framework as baseball.

In a 2005 article on ProZone published in The Independent, former Derby County Manager Phil Brown puts it succinctly: “You wouldn’t pick a team on it but it can back up your gut instinct.”

Relying purely on data to judge or scout players would skew pictures of player value and potential. For example, I am convinced that Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best player in the world, would have been rated as one of the most unproductive and inefficient players in the Premiership had he been gauged on ProZone software back in 2003-04. Maybe someone at Manchester United with access to these archives could prove me wrong, but I believe that only observing a budding Ronaldo in the flesh, bearing witness to his supernatural quickness and touch, could have suggested that he would become such a dynamo. The same can be said to extent for great athletes in other sports. But in other sports statistics are more closely linked with ability.

ProZone’s programs can, however, undoubtedly improve a team’s tactical sense and precision. In a 2005 interview with The Independent, Alan Pardew talked about how ProZone helped him see passing patterns in an opposing team’s offense that his team (then Reading) worked to cut out.

“For scouting the opposition and analyzing your team it gives you a wealth of information you cannot get with the naked eye,” Pardew said. “It is a supplement to your judgment.”

ProZone can make defenses more aware, so that they know where they break down and which spaces they need to better cover. And it can make offenses more aware of how they can link passes and find gaps in an opposing team’s defense.

But coaching by placing too much weight on data threatens to make teams one-dimensional. It can force teams into using too many pre-determined movements, stiffening a game that depends on the magic of creativity and improvisation. A few managers, for example, have used statistics to produce brutally predictable styles. As Matt Dickinson points out in a recent article for The Times Online: “You cannot mention [Aidy] Boothroyd and [Sam] Allardyce in the same sentence without someone saying that all statistics produce is robotic football.” Dickinson highlights the importance Allardyce places on getting measurable production out of each position, such as a “quota of crosses” from his outside wingers. And some pub teams play with more fluidity that Boothroyd’s Watford. Despite the boring nature of these two manager’s styles, however, they have both enjoyed success. And then, as a crushing counterpoint to the assumption that statistics produce stiff soccer, there is Wenger’s Arsenal, a team that wins while playing the most fluid, incisive, and enthralling passing style in the game.

More “Wenger” than evil?

Statistical analysis suggests that efficiency can take many forms. If anything, the meaning of the word efficiency has become increasingly blurred in the sport. Does it mean producing a certain amount of crosses? Does it mean linking the most passes in the least amount of time while going forward? Does it mean producing the highest levels of measurable technical superiority on ProZone? Although statistical programs can offer managers some logical conclusions about strategy and player performance, they also breed more questions. Because managers still need to interpret the heaps of data that ProZone gives them—deciphering a radar-like language of arrows, dots, and numbers—many interpretations exist. Different managers will have different opinions about how they can tweak their shape, strategy, and player roles to improve their team. Better information requires more refined and complex strategies, and also vastly different ones.

An overflow of statistics also poses another hang-up for managers. It can cause managers to focus on the minutia of the sport instead of taking a more comprehensive perspective. In striving for certain levels of efficiency, stat-obsessed managers might forget the root purpose of the game: putting the ball in the back of the net. Although we can attribute Arsenal’s drop in the league table to a number of factors, it might suggest that obsessing over efficiency can sacrifice results. Maybe Wenger will have the last laugh when his test-tube babies come of age in the next few years. But this season’s tables suggest that while Wenger was busy grooming players to rate highly on ProZone, Chelsea and Manchester United followed the tried and true formula of stockpiling proven players that produce goals and win games. Call me crazy, but I think the most “efficient” team is usually the one with the best goal differential at the end of the season.

Maybe in the future, when every club employs PHD-level statisticians and when ProZone-inspired technologies will be available in real time for the masses watching games from home, we will have a more refined statistical language that will come closer to revealing what efficiency truly means. We will throw around stats like “Attacking Third Productivity Rating” or “Forward Passing Success Rate” that could highlight underrated players and show which teams have been more effective advancing the ball. When this occurs I might eat some of my words. But I predict that even using this sort of statistical language will only produce more arguments about player value and playing style. We will more firmly pit statistical fact against observation and gut feeling.

Maybe scientific managers like Wenger have set the stage for a war of Lost-like proportions within the game. Soccer is the island, a mysterious, untamable, and beautiful beast. Wenger is (maybe a little unfairly) the character Ben, leader of the “Others,” a master of manipulation, bent on scientific methods of deconstruction. His tinkering has bred tensions between future and past, brain and heart, fact and faith, design and free will.

These tensions are not new in the sport, or any other sport. But as with Lost, in soccer it has never been more difficult than now to pull these forces apart from each other, to know which one is at work and which one to ever believe in. To dismiss ProZone and new forms of statistical analysis would be ignorant, but believing in them unconditionally might be more dangerous. Fans that do so will miss the true picture and beauty of the game. And managers that do so won’t survive.

-Cyrus Philbrick