Epistemic frustration is the curse and the genius of soccer, which, compared to, say, basketball, obscures causes, disguises responsibilities, and makes all forms of knowing and categorizing moot. Not in a radically skeptical way, but just in terms of guys kicking stuff, I sometimes wonder whether it’s possible to know anything at all.
By now, you’ve heard it said that Messi’s greatness depends on winning the World Cup. That’s a sentence that makes sense in terms of the narrative machinery surrounding the game—Messi’s compared to Maradona, who won the World Cup, so if Messi wants to be as great as Maradona, he has to win it too—but as a form of knowledge, or of expectation, it completely takes itself apart. It’s the kind of statement that can’t be made without simultaneously collapsing its own logic. Not in a radically deconstructive sense, but just in terms of guys kicking stuff, I direct your attention to the nation of Bhutan.
Say there’s a Bhutanese Messi. He’s all-time in potential, but rather than playing for Spain, where he went to live as a boy, he’s chosen to ply his trade for an ancestral homeland that’s currently on the chilly side of 195 in the FIFA World Rankings. You would never hear of this tiny patriot that his greatness depended on winning a World Cup, because with Bhutan, the greatest player of all worlds and epochs would stand no chance of even qualifying for the World Cup. One player can only do so much. And so unless greatness is reserved for players from certain neighborhoods, the Messi of Lho Mon would have to be judged on club form and raw awesomeness alone.
In other words, you can’t say “Messi’s greatness depends on winning the World Cup” without implicitly acknowledging that Messi happens to play for a team for which winning the World Cup is a possibility. Argentina are capable of winning the World Cup, so Messi is capable of winning the World Cup, so the test is relevant. But if that’s all true, then the test is irrelevant, because the fact that Messi needs a good team even to enter the arena in which his legacy might depend on winning the World Cup more or less dispenses with winning the World Cup as a test of individual achievement. Messi could play brilliantly, but a bad day for Demichelis could still flick him over on the chessboard.
You could argue that Messi only has to play well for Argentina to cement his legacy—to “show he can get it done at the international level”—but say they hadn’t qualified, or that they hadn’t advanced past the group stage? The record is (probably) littered with early-round heroics that don’t mean much to history because they didn’t reach the peak. In any case, “getting it done at the international level” is essentially the preface to “he has to win,” or do you think not winning the World Cup has had no effect on how we think of Cruyff? Also in any case, your ability even to play well at the World Cup is dependent on your teammates. Say Messi never gets the ball?
Of course, this is true not only at the World Cup, or at the international level, but at all levels, which is why I sometimes wonder if instead of ranking great players, it would make more sense to rank great “other 10s.” And maybe remove stars from ranking altogether, like mountains that are hors catégorie. After all, a player can only be selected for his national team if various factors, including the right circumstances at club level, align, and can only make a club team if he’s, say, been to an academy where his teammates could pick him out with a precisely weighted ball so he can show the world what he can do when so precisely picked out. If he hasn’t, then he’s just an unraveled set of circumstances. Maybe instead of just exempting great players from rank, we should erase their names altogether, declaring that greatness is simply a set of potential outcomes that happened to be fulfilled many times in a row, and focusing on the conditions that created the outcomes rather than the apparent agent of them. After all, if an individual player can’t win the World Cup, in some sense it’s meaningless to say that there are great soccer players at all.
Obviously, or I hope obviously, this is a sketch of a—what? Tolstoyan?—theory of soccer that I don’t really like or believe. It’s crude and false to rule out individual agency to this extent, not to mention talent; it’s context without text. I want there to be great players, and I think I’ve seen them play. If nothing else, though, it’s scary how flimsy some of the narratives we build on the game (and care about, and invest hopes in) turn out to look when you think about them for a second. Very generally, that is, I’d say the argument above is just about as distorted and self-contradictory as its opposite—which is what we usually think of as the truth.
Read More: Lionel Messi, World Cup
by Brian Phillips · June 29, 2010
This may have been the case for George Weah, the great striker from Liberia that was once elected the World’s best player. The next generation will probably not even know who he was. What if he had played for a great nation?
Ryan Giggs
Tolstoyan is a brilliant adjective for this
Much of our thinking about these matters — or sportswriters’ thinking anyway — is founded on a transference of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history to sports. Carlyle believed that Great Men possess extraordinary reserves of sheer Will which they are capable of injecting into others, so that what they want to happen just happens. This is how many fans and almost all sportswriters think of great athletes: they will their teams to victory. No matter how magnificent and dominant an athlete is, if he does not win championships, it is never, ever because he is on an inferior team, bur rather because he lacked that superabundance of Will. Thus you simply cannot convince someone who holds to this theory that if Kevin Garnett had played for the Spurs and Tim Duncan for the Timberwolves their career levels of achievement would have been reversed. It’s just not a thinkable thought; you might as well try saying that Dan Marino was a better quarterback than Joe Montana. Not thinkable — even if it’s true.
This is why George Weah (brilliant example there, svartman) will indeed be forgotten, and players of far less accomplishment will be celebrated as great winners. Will is the sovereign idea of the reigning philosophy of sports history.
So Messi essentially wouldn’t have the opportunity to be truly “great” if he were from, say, Northern Ireland?
And in a way, doesn’t this just get back to the whole club v. country debate?
Valid point but I’m sure a lot of people acknowledge the ‘greatness’ of players like Weah, Giggs and Best despite having little to show for it at World Cups. Messi is only being compared with those like Maradona, Pele and Zidane – those who were blessed with circumstances allowing them to take part in World Cups. And though there’s a huge element of luck in a team sport, there is a case to be made that Messi’s chances are at least in the same ballpark as those of Maradona’s, Pele’s and Zidane’s (unlike the Bhutanse Messi, who is again an outlier).
I am not saying Messi’s legacy must be decided on this World Cup alone (that will ultimately boil down to an individual definition of ‘legacy’) but to say it’s ‘impossible’ to be a great soccer player maybe stretching it a bit. After all ‘greatness’ lies in the eyes of the beholder.
@sidvee That is very sensible and thus completely out of keeping with the spirit of this post.
Messi is already a Great Player. Like Drogba is a Great Player. Like Maldini was a Great Player. And many others before them, such as Eusébio, Cruyff or Puskas.
But Pele and Maradona are Legends. Messi is not a Legend, yet. Maybe he will become one if he wins the World Cup, maybe he will have to win two, who knows?
And of course legends, heroes and saints are made of chance, circumstance and context, it is part of the story and crucial to the narrative that grants them such status.
As for Bhutanese Messi, he would undoubtedly become a great player. And he would go on to become the first democratic President of Bhutan, turning him into an Historical Figure – almost as good as legendary status.
I am surprised that all the comments so far are focused on the matter of whether there are gerat players or not, and whether they are properly recognized. For me, this post tapped into something much deeper, which is the question of how much of the game is socially constructed: do we think that Torres is a brilliant striker because we’ve seen it with our own eyes, or do we think that because we’ve told that he is?
I think there’s some level on which the World Cup defies the possibility of successful epistemology, while club soccer confirms it. The Cup is ephemeral; it’s short; it’s ruled by chance, and bad refereeing, and the introduction of new balls. If there are elemental truths to be perceived in the sport, the Cup is too short to allow them to assert themselves definitively. Which is not to say that they never do — Brazil, after all, are always in striking distance of another title — but to make a claim about the relative likelihood of knowing that you know something.
Club play, on the other hand, is, like the baseball season, long enough that averages assert themselves, and small differences — really, I think, it’s a vanishingly small distance between an Alexis Sanchez and a Cristiano Ronaldo — add up into significant gaps.
From the Cup, though, you’d have a hard time discerning whether Torres, Ronaldo, and Lampard or Bradley, Suarez, and Annan are the highly-paid trio of superstars. You’d have an exceptionally difficult time deciding which of, say, England and the United States is the team that was given reasonable odds to win the tournament.
If that doesn’t make you doubt whether the narratives and predictions and relative evaluations we’ve laid over the game are not at least half collective delusion, then I don’t know what will.
This is football, narrative is king. Every player is its thrall and we its willing supplicants.
The Bhutanese Messi would probably still have heretical scholars who sought to disseminate a different narrative of his greatness but they would be like those of us who claim Matt Le Tissier was one of the greatest English players in a generation – subdued always by the volume and weight of the orthodox.
Can a player be great? As commented above, greatness is in the eye of the beholder. It takes on the aspect of the splintered title belts in boxing – seldom will a player come along who can gather together all the narrative strands and unify them under the auspice of greatness.
For now it is enough for Messi to be a great player, maybe even a legend under the glittering authority of his current fight record, but there will always be a slavering promoter or columnist calling him out for not taking a tilt at the other belts.
“. . . but as a form of knowledge, or of expectation, it completely takes itself apart. It’s the kind of statement that can’t be made without simultaneously collapsing its own logic.”
Okay then. And such a quintessentially Brian Phillips move. See, e.g., . . .
“‘Taste’ is a contradiction; the word is no sooner brought to mind than it begins to oppose itself. . . . “
@Sparkle Motion! Well, sure. Only this piece is serious.
I am new to the sport of futbol, but I have learned that the media and the narratives follow the same pattern as my favorite sport American Football. In American Football, it is even worse because teams have a totally different set of players for offense and defense. So a top offensive player could be considered a failure as a “winner” because he plays on a team with a horrible defense.
@Alan Jacobs summed it up best with his point about the narrative being about the “Will” to win. Luck and circumstance make up so much of the sports world, but that isn’t fun to believe in and it doesn’t sell papers/get hits. I think this is because of the role of sports to most people in their lives, which is an escape from the mundane of their own lives (I know that’s what it is for me, though I process it differently). I believe people don’t wish to think about sports scientifically and philosophically any more than the average Ancient Greek or Roman citizen wanted to think about the lives and stories of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in philosophical and scientific terms. That’s not an escape for most. The narrative of greatness, overpowering Will, drama, and a host of other intangibles are what people want from sports. In regards to then how sports is covered, the media, as a whole, will give the masses what they want because that’s the way of the free market.
I think a lot of “greatness,” too, depends on audience, and the size of the audience. Millions of witnesses fill Messi’s reserves of greatness, as he plays for one of the most popular clubs in the world, a club that also happens to have a gigantic media apparatus doling out sainthood. If Messi were the player he is for, say, River Plate or Fulham (unlikely, as you point out, because his greatness depends at least partly on the other ten), would the World Cup still hold the key to Andre’s “legend” title?
And because of the exponential power of today’s television and media compared to even when Weah played, to say nothing of when Best or Puskas (even at Real) played, are Messi and those two even on the same chess board?
@Brian Phillips — If only Lionel Trilling had lived long enough to finish his real magnum opus: The Moral Obligation to Cheer Against Everton . . . .
Interesting stuff. Plenty of people are remembered despite not doing a huge amount at the World Cup:
George Best
John Charles
Jari Litmanen
Alfredi di Stefano
Valentino Mazzola
Bernd Schuster
Some did great things at international level (Schuster for example led the Germans to Euro 1980 but never played in a World Cup).
Don’t forget Alfredo di Stefano, arguably the greatest ever, never played in a World Cup.
RCM
@rob just reiterating your great quote “I think there’s some level on which the World Cup defies the possibility of successful epistemology, while club soccer confirms it. The Cup is ephemeral; it’s short; it’s ruled by chance, and bad refereeing, and the introduction of new balls. If there are elemental truths to be perceived in the sport, the Cup is too short to allow them to assert themselves definitively.”
There is an interesting parallel in US sports to college basketball, which ends each season with a semi-random, one-loss-and-you’re-out tournament that captures people rooting for the shirt (mascot, college) rather than the specific players. Nobody’s greatness is defined through this tournament, though several players are remembered fondly for great tournaments; true stardom must be achieved after college, in the NBA. Of course, it’s easier to separate in this case because college is age-limited and the best players are not there; it’s like U-20 or Olympics football.
What I find perhaps most interesting in this tension over epistemology is the bleed between the two – the idea that we expect Gerrard and Lampard to do well in the World Cup because they have proven club pedigree; and the clubs every year who buy the hot-name striker who impresses in his 240 minutes for a mediocre national side. Human nature to over-value short samples and under-value random chance in short samples, I guess, which is why we really expect that Messi will win, because we know how great he is, and we want him to confirm it for us in each and every instance.
We question his greatness because we believe it already proven, perhaps?
Perhaps we need to define levels of winning? To illustrate:
In 1986 Neri Pumpido and Maradona both “won” the World Cup. That is to say, they were both members of Argentina’s World Cup winning team.
However, the identity of Argentina’s goalkeeper was probably not crucial to that outcome insofar as you could exchange Pumpido for another goalkeeper and still imagine Maradona winning the World Cup. Could we say that Neri Pumpido would have won the World Cup had Maradona not been in that team? Regardless of which player took his place, almost certainly not.
Whilst the other 10 provided the base camp for Maradona in 1986, he was the only “variable” that could have conquered the summit.
The same might apply to Pele in 1970, or Zidane in 1998, but Maradona in 1986 is the most clear cut example.
In that sense I would argue that an individual player can “win” the World Cup.
I would further argue that “achieving greatness” is a different thing entirely to being “a great player”. As @Andre suggests, Messi is already a great player, but he has yet to achieve greatness in the way that Maradona did.
From a book review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: “Challenging our cherished belief of the ‘self-made man,’ he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: ‘they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.’ Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, ‘some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.’”
Is this not the same argument? That greatness has as much to do with opportunity and luck meeting preparedness as innate skill or capabilities alone?
Quite the article that I wanted to read. As fanatical as I can get when it comes to Lionel Messi (and any discussions about the man), I couldn’t have agreed more with Brian. This article is not about the club v. country debate. It seems to be more about opportunity and a player’s sheer talent. Brian’s article now makes me wonder: what are the attributes of a great player? Winning a WC or the Euro or the CL? Not really. When a player, time and again, makes you sit up, in fact quite unconsciously, you sit on the edge of your seat, and every now and then you jump up because you’ve just seen something so beautiful that the game of football suddenly feels so much more exciting and worth watching (or playing in my case), then he surely must be a great player.
Lionel Messi, and all other great names that have come up in this discussion, are remembered for the same reason. They get us excited and they do things that we’ve never seen (or imagined) before. It really shouldn’t depend on what team he plays for and whether he won the WC or any other trophy. Like Brian says, it is a team-game and one player can only do so much. Unfortunately, the Bhutanese Messi would not be remembered in the same breath as the Argentinean one; and certainly not as Pele, Maradona, Cryuff et al. May be we should.
@Brian: Brilliant topic. Your writing makes it worth visiting this blog everyday.
Could never compare a champions league final with world cup final. A team built on legionaires is not a team built on the same set of bad guys who’re supposed to look good. Blame Bhutan for wasting a talent, but a football genius needs a team who slaves for result. Champions league only need hype. If Bhutan really gets to win the world cup having only one good player, then he is the man. Ape-ish logic, but ape-ish nonetheless. The alpha and his followers. Argentina 86 was a shambles of a team, until the world cup that is. Argentineans pay weekly to spot the next football god, Bhutanese couldn’t care less about organising a league. Brazilians, however, overdo it. Pele shares fame with the rest of his top class team mates, insisting even today, that they’re the real apha gang. As if such thing exists. There’s only one alpha, and a bunch of loyal followers. Maybe that’s the human touch in it. Loyalty. Apes don’t have that, I don’t think. If this is true, and then if a player lets his ape-instinct work, he’ll change nationality. But let’s say that loyalty has nothing to do with basic insticts. Still, why bother playing for a country that doesn’t care about providing you with eleven brave men?
errr, sorry for messing the last bit up. Spain Portugal failed to exchange penalties, or was it pleasentries?
again! spain paraguay.. arrrrgh
Epistemology, generally ways of knowing or knowing the world around you, in this case is directly tied to ontology, ways of being, as they relate to football. This World Cup has really made clear for me how the media chatter has infiltrated the epistemic process of football knowledge in a way that muddies our knowledge. Too much information, too much top-down information comes our way, and we accept it. It seems in my own football universe much of my football knowledge was bottom-up, similar to a feminist standpoint (but only in relationship to knowledge), rejecting the top-down narratives.
With Messi the narrative, if one watches him play regularly can be built from your own foundational base. With the World Cup, it comes top-down, built for us, Zidane’s electrical magnetics and all.
Ontology-Messi was stuck way deep, without midfielders to feed his game. Argentina would get bottled up in the middle, and while Tevez ran like crazy, at times he did little to create the necessary spaces. Messi’s game was targeted and ontologically, his game, suffered. Epistemically his game suffered, because it seems he too believed that maybe Maradona’s will was enough.
Ontology-I’ve seen Messi, fortunately and many other greats play in person.
Full-stop.
Holy Sh** Messi has something I have not seen in my lifetime. I am old enough to have seen Maradona on TV but not old enough to have seen him live. It is breathtaking, my being fills with awe in a way I can’t describe when I watched him play. That sense of awe translates to my own grounded epistemology, built upon my own sense of Messi.
I don’t believe I will see another player like Messi in my lifetime. My father, rip, never saw him play live, but he knows football from an older way of relating to the game and when he saw Messi play his eyes would light up and he would grin, that boy is something special.
@Mark (2ndYellow.com)
Well Maradona is far away from Messi when we talk about club performances. He also played for Barcelona but he left on the back door because of his ape-like behaviour when he started that fight in the game against Bilbao. Maradona didn’t have the goal scoring greatness that Leo has so for me, Leo is better.
@rob
Simply fantastic question analogy to a “baseball season” you pose. I would argue that Club football is more important in the 21st Century then World Cup football. Like you mention, there are to many external factors that can play a part in a teams demise in the short time span a World Cup is played. Tim Vickery argues that the better teams in the World are Club teams. I would have to agree. I would put Barcelona, Real Madrid, Man. City, Man U.(teams of old) against any national squad(with the exception of maybe Spain) and give them the odds of winning that match. Look at how many matches a player plays for his Club team! Astonishing! Xavi & Messi have averaged 60+ matches a year for 3 years!!! The consistency both show over that span is simply irrefutable evidence that their greatness trancends any “must win World Cup” sterotype