It used to be that men were men, thighs were fierce, kits were muddy, fields were gouged, and every match was a wet November night away to Scunthorpe. It wasn’t pretty, but English football knew what it was. If you saw a ball, every fiber of a being that had been handed down to you through generations of hard-kneed public-house titans cried out to kick it as far as it could sail. If you saw the Mona Lisa, well, tosh, you’d knock her over once just to let her know you were there.
Then, somehow, things got murky for “Route One as religion”. TV was invented at some point in the 1970s, and there was a girlish team of ginger dancers from Holland that played the game like it had nothing to do with rugby. Everybody started getting rich, you trimmed your sideburns, the rain let up for the first time since 1865, and before you knew it, your son was doing a degree in philosophy and Arsenal was his favorite team. Your own son! It wasn’t all bad, but…who were you supposed to be, exactly?
The vexed identity of English football is not a new topic; often it’s not even a very interesting topic. But, like it or not, it’s the topic that shines forth from Paul Hayward’s Observer piece on Barcelona yesterday. Hayward’s point (which, by the by, touches on a topic I wrote about in these parts last year) is that what he calls Barcelona’s “rhetoric of artistic endeavor” might possibly get in the way of their ability to win. The idea, which has never been committed to prose before, certainly not by Premier League announcers who were accusing Arsenal of “passing the ball about without ever scoring” while Arsenal were leading the league in goals, is that you can play beautifully, but you also have to win, and if it’s a choice between playing beautifully and winning (and it’s always a choice to the person who presents this argument), then you have to slaughter your luscious ideals, and Barcelona (maybe) won’t slaughter theirs, and thus Barcelona will lose (maybe).
Okay, fine. The tension between utility and aesthetics in football is a fascinating topic; I can’t quite embrace it as the basis of a column that doesn’t take it any further than Hayward’s, but you probably have to write fast when you’re the chief sportswriter of the Observer. What’s really interesting about Hayward’s piece is how it stakes out a position with respect to Barcelona’s style by using a technique that I think might represent the exact median of English footballing masculinity at this moment. The technique is to hedge your bets on both sides, or to practice what we might call “the rhetoric of approving by disapproving.”
You’ve seen this before. Every color commentator in every Arsenal game lapses into it at some point. Hayward himself applied it just a couple of weeks before the Barcelona piece in yet another quasi-takedown of Arsenal. The essential step is to set yourself up as someone who cares about the team that plays beautiful football: you dwell in the cosmopolitan present, no partisan of Dirty Leeds, and if the world yearns for a pretty passing move, well, you know that yearning, too. But because you care about the team with the beautiful style, you’re also concerned about them—concerned precisely because you’re afraid that their beautiful style will defeat them, that they’ll be daintily vulnerable to teams that foul hard and thump the ball forward. Thus, making common cause with the aesthetic vanguard, you somehow imply that your darlings might foul a little harder and maybe just occasionally thump the ball. You’ve transcended England to reconnect with England. Arsenal are admirable but just need more bite (cf. “it was all Patrick Vieira”). Barcelona can only cement the legacy of their style by being prepared to abandon it if necessary.
Now, this turn of rhetoric might be based in a sincere consideration of tactics, one that has nothing to do with cultural legacies or anxiety about the self. But in practice, it’s almost always accompanied by just a hint of secret flexing, which often comes through in sudden unwarranted military metaphors or exaggerated depictions of violence (Hayward on Arsenal: “This is no time for sugariness…[they] ought to have wiped out relegation-threatened opponents”; on Barça: “this brilliance must obliterate, too, it must crush”). It’s an air of proving one’s own toughness by telling adherents of “the rhetoric of artistic endeavor” to get real. Maybe you’d rather watch Barcelona than Blackburn, but a murmur in the corner of your brain is telling you that that’s soft (Hayward: “there is also a voice that urges them to kill teams off and not just enchant in bursts”). So you tell Barcelona to turn into Blackburn, and—I hope—you hope they won’t listen to you.
For what it’s worth, and as I wrote last year, I think it’s vital that Barcelona win, too. But I want them to win by enchanting. The “football equals toughness equals hard fouls” equation is historically confused and massively self-defeating, and if it holds and Barcelona’s idealism is a weakness, then reality is cynical as far as this game is concerned. And winners are just variations on the same template of doing whatever it takes.
Paul Hayward’s phrase from yesterday’s Observer.
Read More: Barcelona, Guardian
by Brian Phillips · April 5, 2010
Before I start reading: hooray for footnotes!
Also: I don’t think I’ve seen footnotes alongside a piece before, but it strikes me as possibly the best way to incorporate them on a computer screen. Of course, some despise footnotes. Look carefully and you’ll see that their eyes are a little too close to each other.
So glad you’re back, Mr. Phillips.
I chalked Hayward’s barf into the ‘jealous English pundit’ column and left it there to rot.
The reason more teams don’t play like Barca is that they don’t have the players with the skill to make it happen, not because they are railing against the ‘modern beautification’ of the game.
The first half of the Barca/Arsenal game had me rolling in fits of laughter at the sheer brilliance of it all. Not unlike listening to a great jazz combo that makes you giggle as it astounds, I’ll take that kind of ‘weak’ football any day.
Oh, and welcome back!
This is just terrific Brian. It’s so refreshing to read great writing on this sort of topic.
How much more successful could Barcelona possibly be? Didn’t they win like 87 trophies last year anyway? The whole premise of Hayward’s point seems astray, even in the guff about a ‘dynasty’. They have a pretty nice page in history already.
In any case, they’re not as pretty as the Run of Play is.
Well said Brian. It’s encouraging to see you back at it.
Oh dear. This blog is seriously taking things to the next level. Superb work!
What I’ve noticed as a Barça fan and blogger is that many people have called Ibrahimovic the Plan B for the squad when he arrived this past summer. That “Plan B” seems to be more like “Plan A” most of the time, with the same old “daggers on throats” trope being hauled out anytime it’s 1-0 or worse with 20 minutes gone in the first half; if we draw or lose, it’s “Shouldn’t we hoof it a bit more? Not too much, mind you, but more? It can be effective, after all…”
It’s that penchant for returning to the nonsense that we all derided last year during the glorious years that gets me the most. It’s not just people looking in on Barça that say this stuff (the whole “I hope they don’t listen to me” thing is perfectly put), but also some of the most devoted fans.
Anyway, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir at some level.
Just one more thing: the site redesign looks great. I am, however, the type of guy who reads almost all blogs on Google Reader and the footnote that so enchanted Fredorraci sadly didn’t appear in the feed. And I agree that on the side is best. I do footnotes, but they’re all at the bottom* and I should learn to do what you have done. Great work and welcome back into my life (I have missed you more than you realized, I suspect), but I’ll have to visit the site itself now to check for footnotes.
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*Like this.
@Isaiah Yes, sadly, Google can’t cope with the code that sets up the sidenotes, which won’t appear in RSS readers. You’ll still get the full body text, though, and I hope coming to the site to see the footnotes won’t be too onerous…
Why do writers/commentators feel compelled to tell a team like Barca how they should play? Can we not just enjoy the spectacle?
Good piece Brian, Barca to win 3-1
First of all, it’s so nice to have you back.
Secondly, I agree with Tom – for a Cule especially it’s a little confusing to be informed that this current Barca team (with its godfather Mr Cruyff standing over Guardiola’s shoulder) is a one-off.
Thirdly, the term ‘concern trolling’ needs to be introduced into footie fandom, because every single article I’ve read about Arsenal in the past month has been full of it.
@Linda “Concern trolling” is genius. I officially introduce that phrase.
This is right, as far as it goes; and yet I find myself wondering (as a close reader of yours) if you’re not just deflecting a bit onto the masculinity issue. I want you (unreasonably, no doubt) to go further, to finally follow up to “Barcelona and the Idea of the Beautiful Game” and talk about whether the win against Man Utd meant for you that Barcelona had finally resolved, if only for 75 minutes, the tension between beauty and effectiveness amidst the game’s otherwise consuming chaos.
I took your silence after that (and hey, maybe I just missed the follow-up) as a sign that, of course, the question could never be answered, that the game is far too difficult to permit that resolution, and maybe that we really don’t want the stars to align, anyway — that habitual beauty in mastery would itself become intolerable, no longer the game as it means to us. And I took Ibra’s signing — coupled with your profile of him in which you talk about his clarifying nature — to be an even further rarefaction of their mission, not an evolution or a Plan B. You wrote about him:
“I’m talking about a way of playing the game that can only function when a player’s capacity to gain control in chaos is a matter of such certainty that it begins to be an assumption that feeds his instinct. So that he can go into chaos with such a refinement of skill or understanding that he can take inspiration for granted. So that we can watch, and see that all the moving pieces of the game were in someone’s mind at once, and chance wasn’t able to stop him.”
That’s of course the Barça dream, the necessarily unattainable dream. But it’s the dream of a chess player, not a man of action.
This is why I don’t see all that much space between your opposition last year between virtue and effectiveness and Hayward’s between beauty and crushing. I mean, of course yes there is, in terms of style; but the ultimate measure is still the same, and so is the doubt. You were making the same argument about the sterility of style as ethos; but it seemed to me to mask an anxiety about advancement. But of course they won; and one was left to wonder whether the win, however convincing, was also a counterargument or even a proof; that we had seen a higher plane of life, not just a really good team.
It’s telling, I think, that much of the commentary this year during Barcelona matches has focused on their “work rate.” It’s not just the system, we’re now assured, not just the typical Catalan devotion to doomed but beautiful causes, but the way Barcelona fights to get the ball back once they’ve lost it that sets them apart. The anxiety is labor’s — there must be a sheen of sweat on beauty, otherwise it’s not real. Is it masculinity or class (or at least the rhetoric of privilege and those who resent it) that’s at play here? Have not Arsenal — dauphin Arsenal — now suddenly assumed the role of Henry V’s band: scrappy, undermanned, full of fighting spirit?
Anyway, welcome back, and now I have to go back to building the rest of tomorrow’s recommendations around this post.
Very nice read.
Not sure if the defensive position English pundits –or EPL followers- take against Beautiful football has its roots in that Tour the national team once made to South America and suffered a trash. Or is it the game against Hungary? If there is a nation that must admit Beautiful football CAN win, it has to be them. They’d seen, tasted, and witnessed.
I wrote almost about the same subject in the first leg preview between Arsenal and Barca. At the end of the day, what made this sport that popular were the likes of Brazil 1982 and the Dutch 1974 (both failed to win titles) I doubt that we gained new generation of football fans after watching Greece 2004, or Italy 2006.
If Mr. Hayward and co are enjoying their life under the spotlights “analyzing” the game called football, its thanks for the Joga Bonito that made him a football fan in the first place, and attracted enough fans for the game for him to have more readers and for the clubs more supporters so that every businessman who has a debt feels encouraged to buy a football team hoping that through winning trophies the club can generate money to pay this personal debts. And thats where winning became more vital than playing, and titles became more important than football.
It’s about supporting football teams, or titles teams.
great stuff Brian. This is the sort of writing i have been missing. I think there is something to thinking about how these two teams who both claim beauty and elegance interact when they face each other.
It feels like a gun fight at the o-k corral, this town’s not big enough for the both of us, style of winner take all high noon shootout.
can two teams such as these remain beautiful through 90 minutes when they play each other?
I think we saw an answer in the first leg, but I still can’t see how it works. how it can actually happen.
It’s the strongest piece I’ve read in some time. Great stuff, Brian.
English football has always had this leaning towards robust football. In Victorian times, the “manliness” was basically the whole point of the sport, and we’ve never overcome our mistrust of the more aesthetic method, despite the beatings we have taken from time to time over the years.
It is one of the reasons why many of us try and tell ourselves that Rooney is better than Messi, why some of us believe that Emile Heskey is the world’s best target man, and why our “experts” accuse Arsenal of overdoing the “tippy-tappy stuff”.
As for winning at all costs, would we remember Brazil in 1970 without the beauty of their football? Pele’s dummy and his shot from the half-way line are two of the great moments, yet neither resulted in goals.
I side with Brian in wanting Barca to win by enchanting, but if I had to choose between the two, I would prefer to be enchanted. That perhaps is the advantage of not fanatically supporting one particular club, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Absolutely love the new site design, itself a fine example of artistic endeavo(u!)r.
And they completely miss the point of what Barcelona do. They don’t play skillful, possession based, attack minded football for its own sake but because they believe that that’s how to best win a match against any opposition. It takes massive planning and investment of cash and soul to on a club’s part to produce a team founded on such principles though. Much easier to take the pragmatic route of building teams on their defence; after all, you don’t need as much skill and therefore as many skillful players to defend as you would to attack.
Btw, love the new look site. Welcome back, Brian!
I was too busy eating nails and practicing headers with bowling balls to read every word, but after skimming this article I declare that you, Brian, are a nancy. Nothing more, nothing less.
But the site looks fantastic!
@Brian Phillips Oh don’t worry, I’ll be here quite often. The comments don’t come through the feed either, so I have to make the arduous trek all the way from one tab to the other to see what the denizens of this forum have to say.
“Now, this turn of rhetoric might be based in a sincere consideration of tactics, one that has nothing to do with cultural legacies or anxiety about the self.”
There does seem to be a change from the idea that Barcelona’s tactics are naive to a sense that Barcelona produce a certain type of player who may prove naive at critical points in a match. Last season I felt the talk of Barcelona’s lack of utility bordered on suggesting that they play 4-4-2 and sit Xavi and then maybe, just maybe, Chelsea would be willing to come out and play. Hayward’s piece seems to be a very long suggestion that Busquets should have taken a professional foul after his turnover that resulted in Arsenal’s first goal. Barca’s dominating season has proven their system can win everything, so the natural switch for the middle aged columnist is to question character.
Personally I think that is, by the standards of the footballing press, a step forward.
I don’t get this polarisation of beauty in football; that only weaving triangles through triangles, like pointy Olympiads is the divine way to play. Has there ever been a phrase as laboured as ‘Joga Bonito’, driven from murk and forged into myth?
I get why it’s pleasing to watch – I love the flow of these games and the way they move forcing, bursting. But art is passion and intensity – tired legs dragging up a scrap of energy to scream the unlikeliest of shots into your brain at the death of a match.
As a Liverpool fan, I’m all too aware of turgid play – but Arsenal and Barcelona always seem pleasantly soothing and oddly smooth. Where’s the tearing madness, tension in the thighs as you hover nervously above your chair, shaking beer over your sweating hand and screaming staccato high-pitched wails?
Is watching Kincaid’s cosy 4-1 cottage better than Caravaggio with the occasional panicked, hacked clearance?
Seems we have ourselves caught up in a hegelian dialectic? Well it seems that’s the rabbit hole some have jumped into, but as we have seen with Barca this year, their wins have come pretty, their wins have come ugly, but it certainly has been a ride!
And to George’s belief that somehow Barca does not elicit that beer shaking, whooping, hollering, nerve filled description…well tell that to a life long Barca supporter!
Glad to have you back Brian, and I too applaud the footnotes, though please don’t get too law review on us now
Brian, Great new look. I’m glad you’re back finally. This talk of utility vs. aesthetics is hogwash. Over the last two years (and probably last 5 years) what team has had the most overall success in the world? I would argue Barcelona. So their system is built for success. And their defense is way underrated. How their players fight to get the ball back when they lose it is amazing. I show all my youth players h0w hard they work as an example to be followed.
clearly illustrates the character of English football but it also highlights the game’s origins and how its now facing identity crisis . always wondered why they called it the beautiful game. barcelona fc then justifies this baptism.
One thing worth remembering is that while there are lots of historical reasons why Route One football became associated with England, there’s also plenty of evidence that early English fans valued flair and artistry. I’ve written about this somewhere else, I think, but one of my favorite passages in Harry Pearson’s The Far Corner comes when he writes about the what the game meant to his grandfather’s generation. I’m paraphrasing, but his grandfather bicycled miles and miles every day to work 12-hour shifts in a war-era munitions factory, and when he and his friends went to a match, they didn’t want to see studs-up tackles to make them feel tough. They knew they were tough; they wanted to see players who could tell them they were clever and creative.
England was never Brazil, but I think it’s easy to exaggerate the muddiness and violence of the English football past, particularly if one is compensating for qualities one no longer feels in the present. My guess is that the history implied by the caricature that I used to open this post is in large part an invention of the nostalgia that purports to miss it.
English football in the early days centred on dribbling; there’d be a goalie, a stopper, maybe 2 if you had an ultra-defensive mindset, and then the rest all drooling their way towards goal. It’s hard to believe but back then the emphasis was on foot skills.
Then they played the Scots, who realised you can pass quicker than you can run, and the rest is muddy convoluted history.
It’s odd that Stanley Matthews is such a revered character in England (with good cause) yet he was a largely unsuccessful player, winning precious little in the long run. He played gallantly and with flair. If only English fans were content with that these days. But it has to be express brutality; a hoof, a headbutt, a trophy, go home and bang the misses.
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