Is Football Dead?

Part 1

“Football’s finished and whatever this is has emerged, I don’t dare name it” - Juanma Lillo

These words are significant, not because they express a novel sentiment, but because of the person who uttered them. While he might not be a household name, football aficionados will know Juanma Lillo, long-time assistant of Pep Guardiola, as one of the thinkers behind the philosophy known as juego de posicion (aka positional play or JDP). Pep, Juanma, and JDP have their hands in some of the most successful teams of our time, but there is a growing sentiment that something is wrong with football. In his recent piece in the Athletic, Lillo fears that, as successful as JDP has been,  irreparable damage may have been done to the game we know and love. He claims that JDP has standardized the landscape on which the game has played. While this raises the floor, he feels that it has also lowered the ceiling - stating that there are no great players anymore. Here, I evaluate Lillo’s claim that football is dead and think about where we go from here. 

In this task, I find we inevitably confront the situatedness of the sport. Football is not a reflection of  reality; it is part of reality in its own right. This sentiment slowly overtaking the football world is not just a reflection of a broader phenomenon but actually a part of it. The story is not new, nor is it complicated to explain. There is something which houses us. The sensation of this thing being dead overwhelms us. The thing is oblivious to our proclamation of its death and carries on in some zombie-like way. We grow gradually more frustrated with this unkillable zombie thing around us. We look for a way out but find none. The fact that we could say Hegelian, Nietszchean, Heideggerian, Lacanian, Marxian etc. things about this basic narrative tells us it’s something pretty fundamental. While I’ve been influenced by those thinkers (and you may recognise some themes), I’m not an expert in any of them, nor am I going to provide analysis from their perspectives.

I want to frame the problem as an issue of succession. To be clear, I mean the way that events relate to one another, temporally. On one hand we experience a failure of the new to succeed the old in practice, but we also fail to understand succession more abstractly or theoretically. Succession is an inherently self-similar topic. Theories of succession succeed one another. We can say B follows A by such and such mechanism, but later on a new explanation of succession may succeed that one. I’m aware this is terribly abstract so let’s talk footy. 

There is some set of rules which govern interactions we call football. Those rules, of course, under-constrain the game, so we observe some process of change e.g. new styles of play/strategies etc within these boundaries. We can also talk about this process. For example Wilson’s popular book Inverting the Pyramid is among genealogical works on the game. We could also move on to a new understanding of how this process of change within the game works (leaving Wilson behind). So football itself evolves, but the way we understand this evolution also evolves. This creates a self-referential paradox and imposes a horizon of visibility. When we transition into a new understanding of the process, the previous mode of understanding becomes irreversibly co-opted into the new mode. 

The current state of football can therefore be read in two contrasting ways. Returning to Lillo’s recent piece, we recognise both of these attitudes at play. On one hand, he expresses regret and futility at what football has become. If you read between the lines, however, there’s also a certain omnipotence expressed. If the ultimate blueprint to football has been found, could it also be used to move past itself? Lillo is basically answering the classic question “can god create a rock so big that he can’t move it?” in the affirmative. JDP has not only defeated its competitors, it has redefined the ground on which the competition happens. 

He is correct, then, that we cannot go back to the version of football which existed before. As Lacan would remind us, the football which we remember before the Fall into our current state does not really exist. The particular transition into our current state has changed the way we see such transitions universally. There is no final time-line upon which we can place both states side-by-side. Emergence works both forwards and backwards in time. In other words, it creates a new kind of time. For example, if I try to remember my experience before being a self with an autobiographical narrative, I have inevitably done this from within my current perspective through the use of the concepts my and before. Using this familiar Edenic narrative we can understand some of the current discourse surrounding football.

We are currently falling into this trap when trying to imagine alternatives to positional play. We first associate the current tactical landscape with superior planning or modeling which exists outside of play but somehow determines it. Similar to the “time before time” dilemma, the alternatives we come up with are too often just some vague form of not-planning. Definition via negativa. This is why the European conceptualisation of South American play is so sticky. It happens from a European perspective which places South American play within its own “time before time” blindspot. To move beyond this romanticised ethnocentrism will require a transition to a novel understanding of the way football evolves globally. The only way out is through. 

Importantly, this should be able to explain why JDP has been so successful. If we disparage it solely on aesthetic or moralistic grounds we implicitly admit to a belief that it can not be dethroned competitively. I think it’s fair to speculate that Lillo might feel this way. If we only offer scolding sermons about neoliberalism, consumerism, and the non-existent attention span of “kids these days”, our vision of the future is only a fantasy of the past. In doing this, we allow JDP to retain its god’s-eye view.

In the second part of this piece I will try to bring JDP back into the picture which it has been allowed to sit above.