Poor Sergio Ramos — not to excuse or justify him, of course, but he’s an elite athlete, accustomed from childhood to running circles around other people, and now, before an enormous world-wide audience, to have people running circles around him — and so evidently enjoying it — well, that’s an insult not to be borne, I suppose. Everyone gets beaten sometimes: even Messi was dispossessed a couple of times yesterday. But to be humiliated for ninety minutes almost without respite, as Real Madrid’s players were yesterday . . . that doesn’t happen very often at that level of sport.
There’s something fey abut how Barça plays when they’re at their best, as though they’re engaged in some odd game of their own and are not even aware of what observers (including, or especially, the other team on the pitch) think about it. Real played an extremely high defensive line yesterday, and for minutes on end Barça seemed content to pass the ball around at midfield — and then there would be some sudden, inexplicable drive forward and the ball would be in the net and everyone would be thinking, Wait, what just happened there? Commentators talk about 22-pass build-ups, but that’s not really how Barça does things: more like 20 exercises in midfield tiki-taka and then a two-pass attack. (Think of the first and third goals yesterday especially.) When they move forward, they do so fiercely and without a millisecond’s hesitation.
All this sends writers to the metaphor box: we turn over everything in it looking for some reasonably valid descriptor, usually with no success. But I’ll venture this: Barcelona plays like slime mold. Slime mold is sort of an organism and sort of a collection of organisms: it combines or divides according to circumstance and need. Sometimes it will assemble itself into one vast colony, sometimes split into hundreds of them. Its intelligence is not directed but collective and emergent, swarming; there’s no one player or coach making the crucial decisions, those decisions just happen. Take a video of a slime mold, speed it up appropriately, and trust me, soon you’ll be saying “Is that Camp Nou?”
Read More: Barcelona, Real Madrid
by Alan Jacobs · November 30, 2010
When I saw the words ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Slime’ in the same sentence, I automatically thought this article would be Joan Laporta / Rossell. Good as they are, as a Gooner I still haven’t forgotten the Barca of July. Nice parallel tho.
Sergio Ramos got beat by Clint Dempsey. We can’t be THAT surprised about what happened to him yesterday, can we?
In musical terms, Barcelona is all counterpoint.
The last paragraph instantly takes me to Pierre Bourdieu’s famous quote (and I’m paraphrasing, not having the book at hand at the moment) of how decisions are often made by no one in particular; they just happen. It feels very applicable on this Barcelona.
Good piece!
You’re absolutely right. The one about Barca’s two pass attack. Everyone seems to think that the tiki-taka is part of some build up, seeing it as Barca’s brand of Total Football. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen that there’s build ups in attacks, every team has them. But Barca’s style is tiki-taka almost to the level of wasting time until there’s a slit in the defense, through which someone threads a ball to the attacker.
It’s like a bunch of kids kicking a ball around in a parking lot, waiting until something happens. That something is a defensive error, then whoever’s the one with the ball plays it to the attacker.
@Salman Thaw
Thanks for the post, Alan. I know it must be difficult to come up with new superlatives and metaphors to illuminate and pay tribute to Barca’s style. A slime mold is certainly unexpected but oddly apt.
Its good; but slime mold is frail to petroleum i’m sure. could someone play ugly physical football, and get the right result. not ethically, or beautifully…but deadly to the fragile spores? We’ll see how it evens up in the last 16. BUT, god what a game. what a freaking great game.
Perhaps “rhizome” would be a more appropriate term? I know it’s the same thing, in a way, but I feel the connotations are more appropriate. A sort of Deleuzian empty center mirrors Barca’s swirling maelstrom of football, without that true enganche and constantly flowing in and out until the moment, the punctum really, of attack.
Anyway, love the site!
@Angharad ~”Yes, except that I think you’re still selling Barca short. They don’t wait for the defensive error, they often create it.”
Spot on. Barca are able to ‘empty’ defenses, rather than move past the back line.
“Barcelona plays like slime mold.” Should that be “Barcelona play like slime mold”?
Is this an american use of sports language (in that a team is regarded as a single entity rather than as a loose collective of semi-autonomous agents)?
If Barca are slime should it/they be collectively grouped or grouped as a single entity?
Why has it taken a as long as it has for Deleuze to sneak his way onto this site (but now he’s here he is just going to multiply – as is his way)?
discuss.
@Phillip Oh, I wouldn’t say this is the first time.
Tip-top. On the feyness: did you happen to hear the great Ray Hudson effusing /commentating on GolTV? Said going up against Barcelona was “like playing poker with a witch.”
‘Its intelligence is not directed but collective and emergent, swarming; there’s no one player or coach making the crucial decisions, those decisions just happen’
Just to take this to the geek level, they sound like the Borg from Star Trek.
@Dave’s Football Blog No we can not be that surprised. He didn’t know how to mark space or a man. Both full backs were awful and only aided Barcelona in pulling apart the defense.
@Angharad You’re right. I didn’t mean to imply they just wait for the other team to nod off, but that certainly happens. Not all their goals are created equally. Sometimes they make holes in the defense, sometimes the defense does nod off, and often, the sheer intimidatory force that is Barca makes defenders make errors they normally wouldn’t.
“Its intelligence is not directed but collective and emergent, swarming”
It reminds me of a documentary titled Football: l’intelligence collective, touching upon the subject of tactics, and comparing a football team to a swarm of animals flocking or shoaling around. Throughout the documentary, manager Christian Gourcuff explains how his team will scatter after regaining the ball to create more passing options, and how they will contract space when they lose possession, to (com)press the opposition so that they don’t have time on the ball.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbs1k1_football-lintelligence-collective_sport
But Barça’s game is more sophisticated. It’s as if the team was solving a giant puzzle, a blaugrana Rubik’s Cube. Each player is a little cubelet, they’re permuting according to a secret algorithm. The other team can’t really grasp the whole situation and that’s why they’re so frustrated once Barça scores.