I have a piece in The Modern Spectator, Austin Kelley’s brilliant literary sports journal, on the subject of draws in soccer and how they’re perceived by soccer fans and non-soccer fans. It begins as a late-night debate in a typical American bar:
I’m sitting in an American bar, looking and being American, my American self, at a table full of men in gigantic Carolina Panthers jerseys. A faux vintage jukebox, the kind with neon bubbles running up its flanks, is playing “Look Out Cleveland,” by The Band: an honest song, though performed by men of cunning. The grease on our cheeseburger patties glimmers democratically in the unsteady light.
It then follows the subject through some twisting thoughts on differences between America and Europe, the problem of crowd violence, and the implicit militarism of sport. Please take a look, and explore The Modern Spectator while you’re there. If you enjoy The Run of Play, there’s a good chance you’ll want to give it a place in your RSS reader.
Read More: Football as Drama, Football as Philosophy, Football as War
by Brian Phillips · January 19, 2009
Interesting article, though you never did rebut your opponent’s point about completion being more inherent to the appeal of sport than finiteness.
I think its a little silly to analogize sports and war, given that almost anything can be seen as representative of war. Babysitting? War! Politics? Massacre! Tipping the waiter? Oh, the horror!
To me, there are two reasons why ties are preferrable: they add a third outcome of the game, and more outcomes equal more suspense, and they ensure that rewards are proportional to actual on-field success (why should a team that couldn’t win a game in regulation be granted an opportunity to gain extra points that others could earn it in standard time?)
I think the connection between sport and warfare is a lot easier to demonstrate, and a lot less trivial, than a connection between war and babysitting.
That’s especially true of a sport like football, which involves collaboratively staging a tactical invasion of your opponent’s territory in order to penetrate his defenses and strike at the target he’s protecting.
The utility of sport as a way to foster implicitly military virtues like discipline and self-sacrifice in young men has also been recognized since the early days of organized athletics. The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, etc.
Where does the sport of track & field fit into your paradigm?
I’d say it’s one of those sports like tennis and baseball that contains everything it needs to determine a winner without relying on a time limit. It’s not based on doing an activity for a set amount of time but on doing it until someone fulfills a victory condition.
I guess the non-racing events like pole vaulting and shot put depend more on the logic of finitude, since there’s an arbitrary limit (do it X times and count your best). I don’t know what the provisions are for a tie in pole vaulting, but that might provoke the same kind of choice between finitude and competition that you see in sports like basketball and soccer.
i’m a little late on getting to this one, but great article. really well written.
i love this debate, and it’s one that i have with my dad all the time. (he doesn’t like soccer)
you are spot on when you said that a draw is actually more fair than a win in some cases. To add extra time, is to change the way the game is meant to be played. No longer is the goal to score in 90 minutes, but instead in 120.
I do hate when at the end of my father and I’s argument, he brings up the “riots in soccer” bit, because i don’t think a tie, or how the game is played really causes the violence. There are way too many other variables like social tension outside the match, the outer culture that surrounds the game, and the actual location of where the game is played that make anything that actually happens in the game mute and beside the point.
sound philosophy though. i will have to use it the next time i get to defend soccer. haha