Archive for category Arsenal
WHAT BARCELONA – CHELSEA MEANS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Arsenal, BLOGADINHO, Barcelona, Champions League, Chelsea, Manchester United, Premiership, Style on May 5th, 2009
Language and Contradictions in The Beautiful Game
The Barcelona – Chelsea game tomorrow is one of monumental implications. It might affect our conceptions of the game’s aesthetics, morality, and function. Don’t believe me? Check out all the philosophizing, pontificating and aggrandizing going on about the game in columns, soccer-culture blogs, and chat rooms the world over. In every imaginable language, fans are quoting Shelley to Garcia Marquez to Galileo in desperate attempts to place this game within an appropriately abstract and meaningful context. However trifling or hyperbolic, though, the narrative of this debate touches the core of the contradictions that drive the Beautiful Game.
Barcelona, a team steeped in vibrant Catalan culture and a history of stylish soccer, have understandably staked claim to an abstract moral high ground over Chelsea and the cowardly/negative tactics the Blues employed last week in the team’s first Champions League clash. As compared to the more mutable and calculating identity of Chelsea, Barcelona represent a heroic form of beauty. They cling to a form so pure that after the draw in the first leg many have questioned whether Barcelona falter by focusing more on achieving this ideal of the game than on the game’s purpose, ie. winning.
This notion has caused some serious discussion about the tensions between form and function central to the Beautiful Game. The main tension is this: As a competitive game, soccer functions via the one utilitarian goal of winning, but the game attracts us and resonates with us not because of results but because of its form. This can be true of any sport, but especially soccer for reasons that books have been written about. Brian Phillips probably hit the root of the matter when in a second post on the topic he said this: “The two words in the term ‘beautiful game’ are always struggling against each other in some ways, but they have to coexist. That’s why, for me, the necessary dream is to find a team that resolves the tension, that plays beautifully and coherently and defeats both the chaos of the game and all the studs-up, 10-men-behind-the-ball bullies who try to stop it.”
I think this is the dream for most of us (except maybe Chelsea fans and stubborn fans of the Premiership who, given circumstances, might not be able to admit it). We want a team’s function to grow out of its form, or vice versa. We want surreal and fluid soccer over calculated tactical positioning that stifles the organic nature of the game. This isn’t to say that defensive soccer cannot be beautiful, or that the tearing pace and sharp angles of the Premiership do not give it a form. But its form, both sleek and powerful, is somehow too real, too adaptable, too logical in the way it works to have the same kind of soul-lifting warmth as Barcelona’s. Barcelona plays like a dream. And us romantics want our dreams to bloom, to become more real. We want them to mean something. Right now, for those who pray to the lyrical Gods of the game, Barcelona represent a team on the trembling verge of a clarifying coherence between both form and function. For this reason, Barcelona’s season has taken on much more significance than results. They are playing for immortality, to uphold a form that fans might remember as it: the most beautiful soccer ever.
A team in the truest sense, this year’s Barcelona team plays a game so deft and connected that you don’t want to touch it. Their goals hang like dewy webs, too fragile and perfect and mysterious to replicate. Then you see another one, and another. They play whole games that hang together like the most illuminating prose of this, or any, language. As Phillips suggests, their artistry eschews the way most teams rely on, and adapt to, the game’s inherent elements of chaos and entropy. While big-money Premiership teams tend to employ negative defensive schemes, while they openly commit fouls to break up attacks, while they hammer the ball over-the-top to over-priced strikers in the hopes that one defensive mistake will change the game, Barcelona weave every stitch in time and space. They score despite perfect defenses. Not only do they control the game’s order, they create it.
Barcelona have scored a stunning number of goals this season by passing the ball into the net, as if they knew the result before it happened. They know where they want the ball to go and how to put it there, eventually and exactly. As Joao Jorge suggests in a recent response to Brian Phillips’ posts, Barcelona present “the possibility of truth in the random and chaotic world of a game.” I agree.
Jorge also suggests that Barcelona are “attempting to create a new paradigm of football. To create a dominant team from the front. Their success may force a rupture in the interpretation of the rules of success in football.” While I agree that in winning Barcelona might change the way we view success in modern soccer, the underlying force beneath such a change doesn’t represent anything new. It stems from an old faith in attacking soccer that not only deserves to re-emerge in the modern game, but needs to triumph for the game’s sanctity and progress. Soccer America’s Paul Gardner has been preaching such faith for a long time.
For the faithful, attacking with the right blend of touch, guile and pace produces at once both the most entertaining and effective version of the game. Jorge himself points to the way older Barcelona sides played inspired offensive styles. For example, see their 2006 team or the team in the 70’s led by Cruyff and Guardiola. There was also Arsenal earlier this decade, and the many incarnations of Brazilian and Dutch sides throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 90s. Some won. Some didn’t. These teams had flaws (not all of which were defensive, which I’ll attempt to address in a future post) but they all honorably strived for some immortal truth in union between form and function. Like all of us hopeless soccer-romantics, I hope Barcelona can win in a way that will help us more fully realize these truths. As Jorge suggests, although Barcelona are riding the wave of an old idea, they offer the possibility of changing the way we look at the game.
The only right way for Barcelona to achieve immortality would be to win. As Jorge suggests, “Barcelona is trapped in its own rhetoric of moral cause.” The truth behind their style is as important as winning; But you can’t achieve the first without the latter. This points back to the central paradox of the form/function relationship. As much as we pray the two work together, they can’t, in any perfect sense. This is because no matter how much Barcelona illuminates the game, no truth can overthrow the game’s fundamental entropic nature, the element of chance that ultimately determines wins and losses, the flawed and contradictory black and white terms that give the game definition and weight. In this sense, soccer creates a paradox much like the paradox of language that so many postmodernist authors point to. Soccer, caught in reflexive web similar to language itself, allows us to create order and beauty and even truth out of chaos – if only for fleeting moments. But such order can never transcend the laws of the game. Rather, it depends on the game, the rules and chaos it provides and allows, to mean anything. Truth means nothing without nothingness.
I’m not calling Chelsea evil or the equivalent of the Dark Side or anything. Their winning just means a less beautiful future, even if we can never know this future’s meaning.◊
Afterthoughts
Maybe each league, each team, is a different form of language. As Brian Phillips suggests, Barcelona could easily represent some effusive romantic poetry. Like Shelley or Keats, they are at once visual and sensual and mysterious. If this is true, then what are the Big Four Premiership teams? Against the gushing narrative of Barcelona’s intricate passing game, they appear more results-driven and fractured modern art forms, whether visual or literary. Maybe Liverpool are the blockbuster movie of a bloodied heroine down but never out, guns taped behind its sweaty back. Chelsea are the serial TV drama, with a revolving cast of actors and writers and interweaving plotlines. They will stoop to any level for ratings, as long as they deliver enough juicy drama to make us believe in the promise of more. Manchester United are somehow the Avant Garde flick that succeeded in the box office, a Coen Brothers film, safe form the snobby criticism of the other two, more powerful in effect but possibly no more brilliant. Or maybe each of these teams has a counterpart in modern literature and I’ll have to do some soul searching to see if Cormac McCarthy really writes most like United play.
All I know is that watching Chelsea refuse to play against Barcelona in the first leg was like trying to read poetry in a movie theatre, through blinding strobes of explosions while buttered popcorn and Coke spilled onto the pages. It was like trying to complete a word jumble for a non-existent word. It was like looking at stars from underwater. It made me wonder: is hoping for Barcelona to win like hoping younger generations of children retain a love for reading, for the playful but deeper truths of words? Or is this over-dramatic and absurd? Hopefully, I’ve ballooned the meaning of this game too far out of proportion and reality for anyone to say anything else of any meaning.
It’s fucking huge.
I could probably explain all this a little better. For those interested, Brian Phillips’ posts on these matters are pretty damn illuminating. And Don Delillo wrote a twisted book largely about the above topic called End Zone, except it uses American Football, instead of soccer, as a vehicle to explore the paradoxes of language and a whole lot of other apocalyptic and ascetic and head-bending shit.
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RONALDO VS. FABREGAS AND THE FORCES OF CHANGE
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Arsenal, Fabregas, MLS, Managers, Manchester United, Premiership, Ronaldo, Style, World Cup on April 20th, 2009
Placing Ronaldo and Fabregas Within the Evolutionary Trajectory of Soccer
Cristiano Ronaldo, 24, and Cesc Fabregas, 21, are emblematic of modern soccer. Barely on the backside of puberty, the two have become indispensable players on two of the biggest clubs in the world. They share boyish good looks and European-underwear-model hairdos. Despite their similarities, however, these two wunderkinds have evolved in very different ways. Together, their examples will change the sport.
When Ronaldo entered the public eye he was the cock-sure, crybaby prince— Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator—who we, at least at first, loved to hate. He came on the scene as if everybody—referees, players and fans—owed him something they weren’t giving. He would sell straw-legged flops with a pout and wet eyes. He bickered with veteran teammates about taking free kicks. He played with a reckless disregard for fundamental soccer and the benefit of his team to show off his twinkle-toed feet and You-Tube-ready tricks.
Seething in front of televisions, I used to count his turnovers in the defensive third, wanting to get on the field just so I could break his toothpick-sized legs. I predicted that United would dump him after two seasons of painfully inefficient football. I would have.
Thank god I’m not a manager. Sir Alex Ferguson showed consummate faith in the talent, and there has never been an athlete on this planet about whom I have more resolutely changed my opinion. Besides becoming arguably the best player in the world, Ronaldo has even begun to shed his abrasive, crybaby demeanor. Taking cues from Rooney, he chases on the defensive end, even tackling once in a while. He wins headers over center backs twice his girth. He makes smart and incisive passes. And despite all the harsh tackles aimed his way, he has established himself as a relentless and surprisingly durable force.
Now everybody does owe him something, and he plays as if he always knew it, a smile-cracked pout when a defender commits a foul to prevent him from skipping to goal. None of the other superstars on his team ask questions when he lines up for spot kicks, which he snaps toward net with some freakish combination of swerve and knuckle.
During the 1998 World Cup, Adidas ran an ad in which a tour guide led the way through a future fictional player’s back yard. The guide said something like: “And this is where he perfected his revolutionary kick, the double helix.” Maybe it’s the modern balls, but Ronaldo has proved that Impossible is, indeed, nothing. In a Champions League game against Sporting Portugal last season, he scored the clinching goal with a free kick that looked as if two separate magnetic forces guided the ball, which spiraled into bottom corner of the net.
Instead of turning his moves down to make them more manageable, Ronaldo has learned to use them effectively, absorbing them into a repertoire of technical brilliance. He has made routine what were once once eye-catching tricks like back-heel through balls, behind-the-leg crosses, and behind-the-leg direction changes. They are no longer disgusting or ineffective displays of pomp. They beguile. They slice defenses apart. And kids around the world try to emulate them.
Ronaldo, like no other player in the modern game, has raised the bar of possibility. Where as a player like Ronaldinho showcases skills that those with good touch, passion, and enough time can grasp, Ronaldo’s warp-speed moves come from a more supernatural realm, where time and space have different properties than we are used to. It’s as if he’s transferred all elements of personality, some of which might have even been endearing, to the shimmering gloss of his technical makeup. As vacuous as he may be, Ronaldo suggests that in the modern game personality only slows you down. Sports evolve by getting faster, and Ronaldo has upped the anti. A hummingbird that knows no stasis, he darts sideways and then back to the same spot in a blink, vibrating above the context of a game, irrespective of the rooted defenders and teammates surrounding him.
Ronaldo also possesses a quality crucial to both his own evolution and that of the game; he is hungry. Over the past few years his facial expression during games has changed from a wet-eyed adolescent looking for pity to a moist-eyed, near-adult who knows he doesn’t need it. Maybe it’s his long-necked complexion, which brings to mind a fledgling gawking for food, but Ronaldo looks famished compared to other superstars. He doesn’t simply want the ball; he needs it for his team to win. This hunger clashes with the complacency that other superstars like Ronaldinho have slipped into over the years. While Ronaldinho’s carefree attitude may add to his magical appeal, it also makes us believe that he could do more.
Maybe Ronaldo’s transformation came as much from circumstance as from within, from playing under Sir Alex Ferguson in the Premiership, a league that doesn’t forgive complacency. The league’s relentless expectations have forced him to constantly bring his best and to keep improving. The league’s physicality forced him to develop armor. And the league’s pace made him even faster. Also, Sir Alex Ferguson has provided Ronaldo the magic combination of guidance and freedom. Ferguson has prompted Ronaldo to be more intelligent and conservative in his own half. At the same time, Ronaldo gets more artistic license on the attack than anyone in the game. Good idea. He teleports around the field, free to exploit weak points in an opponent’s defense. As a result, he took the scoring title in Premiership last year, as a wing midfielder, by an absurd margin. This year he has more quietly topped the table again.
Messi serves as the most apt counterpart to Ronaldo in the modern game. Another mutant, Messi possesses similarly freakish speed. He plays a similar position. And compared to Ronaldo’s dives and flashy moves, Messi shrugs off challenges while using simple, efficient jukes, and an innate understanding of the game.
But Fabregas counters Ronaldo on a larger, more ecological, scale. The opposite of a freak, Fabregas has no stunning athletic abilities. He is one of the most unassuming players in the game. While Ronaldo conjures some pomp bird splaying blinding feathers, as Brian Phillips suggests in his portrait of the winger in The Run of Play, Fabregas might conjure a kind of spirit-organism instead of simply an animal. A mushroom, or the fruiting body of some highly intricate subterraneous mycelial network, Fabregas seems more essential to the life of his team than any higher-order animal. He recycles errant possessions, keeps attacks alive, and gives them the nutrients to bloom. Highly sensitive to the requirements of everyone around him, Fabregas binds every element of his team together: backs to strikers, wings to wings, past to future, nothing to life.
Good central midfielders do this. But Fabregas plays with a sort of contradictory brilliance, somehow all the more brilliant for the way he deflects attention. Instead of soaking up the spotlight when he has the ball, he deflects it in a way that forces us to pull the spotlight back, to uncover light and a connectedness of movement and understanding that we didn’t see before. While appearing every bit the pretty boy as Ronaldo, while probably wreaking just as much of gelled hair and cologne up close, he plays with a modesty that makes irrelevant any highlight reals or snap shots of his game. The fluidity of his game makes it more significant than the the sum of its parts. He makes complex plays look easy, with a smoothness that makes them mundane, as natural to his being as blinking, or pumping blood. He links these plays together, one by one throughout the course of a game, until we see the larger picture and purpose of his work and his team. In this way, he connects Arsenal and their fans as one body, as one collective consciousness of their beautiful purpose.
To appreciate Fabregas, you also need to see the context in which he plays, how he reads and pushes the narrative of any game, how he controls the ebb and flow of all the players around him. The cornerstone of Wenger’s offense, he makes Arsenal’s gears hum with a cool, measured efficiency that he holds the levers to. He links quick passes to diffuse pressure. He uses a deft first touch to evade a defender and switch the field. He slips perfectly weighted balls behind a back line. His own game has a million predecessors. And as professor Wenger’s understudy, he will test the limits of its’ perfection.
Fabregas, like history itself, is all context – the opposite of Ronaldo, whose game functions as a sum of unrelated clips. Ronaldo is one sparkling pop single after another; Fabregas is an album that reinvents itself over time. In this way watching Fabregas is somehow so much more edifying than watching Ronaldo do the impossible. Fabregas helps us better understand the game – its’ roots and its’ future – the way its’ relentless simplicity belies its’ indecipherable complexity.
As with Ronaldo, Fabregas’ accelerated development could only have come in the Premiership. He has said so himself. If Fabregas chose to stay with the Barcelona youth team, where he trained alongside Messi in the midfield, he would have had to wait his turn behind a pecking order of talented central midfielders: Deco, Xavi, Iniesta, Motta. At Arsenal, Wenger threw Fabregas into the fire. As a result, at 18 Fabregas was a man-child, one of the most consistent players in the game.
Unlike Ronaldo, Fabregas doesn’t get embroiled in clashes with opponents, referees, or fans. He doesn’t show a self-conscious awareness of the dozens of television cameras idolizing his every step. For Ronaldo, like many other players, maybe the fracases with referees and the winks toward cameras serve as evidence of caring too much. But Fabregas’ isolation from these external distractions reaffirms his Zen-like focus on himself and his place within a larger schema. When he scored the 25-yard clincher against A.C. Milan at the San Siro last year he didn’t taunt the fans or dance around the pitch. He ran over to hug his coach.
While Ronaldo might represent the game’s biggest evolutionary jump, providing new laws that require time to test properly, Fabregas reminds us all how the game can and will remain tied to the past, how it depends on the same beautiful laws it always has to move forward. If only we could crossbreed the two. Or maybe we already have, and we call him Messi…◊
6 + 5 AND THE CELLING OF THE HIVE
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in 6 + 5 rule, Arsenal, BLOGADINHO, Blatter, Champions League, Chelsea, FIFA, Manchester United, Premiership, Style, globalization on April 13th, 2009
Why FIFA’s 6 + 5 Rule Represents The Wrong Fight Against the Globalization of the World’s Most Global Sport
FIFA’s proposed 6 + 5 rule is supposedly gaining traction. The law would require club teams to start a minimum of six players eligible for the national team of the country in which they play. This would affect the way the world sees, plays, and relates to the game – in a scary, and undetermined, way.
The guiding principles of the 6 + 5 rule puncture some of the softer spots in my already gooey emotional attachment to soccer. In theory, the 6+ 5 rule serves to improve the financial and competitive equality of club teams while protecting the national identity of those teams, and by association the identity of the national teams they feed. This sounds good. But the proposal doesn’t suggest a sensitive or realistic understanding of its own implications. Beneath FIFA’s ideal portrait of improved “equality” and “competition” lie vast questions about the proposal’s economic, moral, and cultural shortcomings. As FIFA and the European Union work out the crucial details and lawfulness of this proposal, maybe the argument will become more clear and convincing. Right now, it isn’t either, in principle or possible affect.
The 6 + 5 rule would shackle the international marketplace of soccer by design. I doubt that placing such limitations on the marketplace will produce any more financial equality than the current capitalistic system of club management. How will requiring club teams to field a certain number of homegrown players force the managers of these clubs to make more frugal investments in players? Won’t the biggest and richest clubs still buy whichever players they want? Without implementing spending caps or more economic-driven incentives, FIFA seems powerless to change the deep-rooted financial inequalities of clubs. As opposed to making more frugal expenditures, big clubs will pay inflated prices for homegrown talent. Market inefficiencies will balloon. More than fans or bottom table club teams, the big winners will be vastly overpaid English players – the Michael Owens and Darren Bents – who will benefit from their noble birthplace and bidding wars that make me sick even imagining.
Blatter seems to have his heart in the right place. He wants clubs to focus their resources inwards, on what should be the roots of their success, on developing players and national identity instead of on buying the best available talent. Overtime, this might produce more parity in domestic leagues, as more clubs develop and keep better domestic players. But how will this work when the roots of any club’s success are so clearly tied to capital? To change the roots of success, FIFA will need to change the form, or the rules, of club’s development systems. So I wonder: in addition to the 6 + 5 rule will FIFA need to include additional stipulations that wed players more completely to the clubs whose development academies they train under? Will the richest clubs start vying for national talents at younger and younger ages? Will clubs need to start signing players before grade school to best protect their assets? I worry about the gross culture of speculation and ownership such policies might accelerate.
I’m not saying that the current capitalist player-market is without its own gross inefficiencies. Inequalities in spending cash produce reckless, imprudent investments. The war-chest-sized budgets possessed by clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City have caused salaries to balloon worldwide. And that these clubs operate at losses causes concern about the economic stability of the marketplace they are producing.
There are other ways that FIFA might encourage clubs to spend more prudently and equally that don’t involve limiting players’ mobility. American policies like salary caps and revenue sharing, ironic in their anti-capitalist purpose, come to mind. Another innovative policy I’ve seen thrown around in forums is that of a “Deficit-Free Incentive,” which would reward clubs financially for prudent spending and staying in the black. For these policies to work, however, multiple different teams and leagues with vastly different budgets would need to accept the same stipulations – an unlikely event. Also, more budget-equalizing policies would loosen the stranglehold that the richest teams have on European and domestic titles. While FIFA representatives suggest they want this, proposing the 6 + 5 rule as evidence, I’m not so sure they mean it. The 6 + 5 rule might create more parity, over the long term and only with additional stipulations that castrate clubs’ spending power, or it might not. Also, losing the biggest teams from the Champions League would mean revenue losses from those teams, and therefore losses for FIFA, which depends on the cash-generating powers of those teams.
The main argument for the 6 + 5 rule seems an emotional or moral one rather than an economic one. As Blatter suggests, the proposal would give identity and autonomy back to nation’s players and fans. Or, as Jose Mourinho says in a recent ESPN interview: “The world is global. Football is global. We cannot be too much concerned about nationalities, but I think the clubs, they must invest in their formation, in players made in the club, made in the country. I think this is also about the empathy between the team and the fans.” Mourinho, ever-political, saying nothing while saying everything, adroitly points to the tenuous balance that the proposal tries to strike between the necessity of national identity and the centrifugal forces of global appeal. Investing in national players and styles would help preserve the unique and beautiful cultures of the game. If more local players played for local teams, then local fans would feel more connected to their club and their homegrown players. At the same time, however, focusing on national culture leaves clubs disconnected from the real, world-wide marketplace.
This recalls the “Eat Local” Food movement, except it deals with humans and not vegetables. This is the problem. The nationalism that the law promotes inevitably produces an inequality of opportunity, a value that lies at the heart of the democratic world. As Brian Phillips points out in his brilliant blog, The Run of Play, the 6 + 5 rule would prevent an African or Asian player from getting the same “money, fame, and glory” as a less-talented European player simply by an “accident of birth.”
There’s also a major aesthetic argument against 6 + 5, and this is that it would immediately decrease the quality of the game at the highest level. The best clubs in the world have pooled the best talent money can buy. This talent, gelling and flowing together, produces mesmerizing soccer. The Big Four all play it on their day. And Barcelona, at least right now, plays it almost every time they step on the field. Sabotaging the talent pool’s of major clubs would lower the pinnacle of play, at least in the short term. How could FIFA divest world eyes of the highest quality game once these eyes have already seen such angelic purity of form? Is such brilliance really wrong?
The argument for lessening clubs’ talent in the short term relies on the theory that national talent will increase in the long term. Blatter suggests that redistributing the most talented players back to the clubs of their home nations will benefit the level of competition in these nations, which will produce more good players. I’m not so sure. This might be true in nations with weaker domestic leagues. But at the highest level, maintaining competition requires gathering world talent. If a nation’s best are competing against more of the nation’s best, instead of against the world’s best, how is this good for competition, and for the overall evolution of the game?
Blatter is right to point to the fading identities of clubs and national teams. This has been happening for a while. Arsenal, for example, plays with style that rejects longtime English directness and aerial attacks. They have only a few English players on their roster. They have many more fans outside of England than inside. In a way, this is sad. One of the aspects of soccer I enjoy most is the way it informs, and is informed by, national cultures. Different nations play with different styles – they identify to soccer differently.
But I question if preserving national identity and cultural autonomy is possible in such a globalized sport. One could make a strong argument that soccer serves as one of the most globalizing forces in the world, right behind the internet itself. More than any other game on earth, soccer causes cultures to collide and interweave. It accelerates diversity and erodes national barriers to communication. For most of us, soccer has made us more aware of foreign cultures, languages, and peoples. Such awareness, placed in global context, makes us more sensitive to our own individual and cultural identity.
I fear that a law that functions to preserve nationalism indirectly, by placing strictures on players’ international mobility, stunts the game’s power to connect us all. Preserving national identity is important, but FIFA needs to rework its policy so that it more positively affects the roots of the game, more directly affects financial and competitive equality. As it stands, the proposed 6 + 5 rule would do more harm to the global game than good for any national one.◊
FACT OR FAITH: CONSIDERING THE IMPACT OF STATISTICS ON THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Arsenal, BLOGADINHO, Managers, Manchester United, Premiership, Statistics on October 27th, 2008
*Originally published in April, 2008
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 averages, splits, percentages and ratios that keep Phd-level mathematicians employed.
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 as based 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 about 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.
Big Sam Allardyce - a big fan of using statistics to gauge player performance
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-based coaching produces stiff soccer, there is Wenger’s Arsenal, a team that wins while playing one of the most fluid, incisive, and enthralling passing styles in the game.
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 might 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.
More "Wenger" than evil?
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 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.
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