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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