Sometimes I find myself walking home from work around the time the local elementary school dismisses its charges for the day. When this 
happens my daily journey becomes a little more interesting and a little more complicated, because children don’t walk the way adults do. Children will run past you, then stop and squat to look at a slug on the sidewalk, then run past you. Even when no stimulus, sluggish or otherwise, presents itself, they’ll slow down and dawdle for a while before hoofing it again. Also, for any given weather they might be wildly over- or under-dressed. The other day the temperature was in the high forties when I saw ahead of me two girls, ten years old or so, one of whom was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans while the other was bundled into an Arctic parka, with the hood raised and tightened. They were walking home from school and so had accoutered themselves, but neither seemed to notice the differences. They dawdled, and ran, and dawdled. I dodged them when necessary, which was often.
Adults aren’t like this. Adults dress appropriately and move steadily towards their goals. By and large we’re like Kant in Königsberg, predictable enough for neighbors to set their clocks by. And by and large soccer players are adults. They have settled and predictable work rates, so much so that when you’ve watched a player for a while you can easily find them on the pitch because you know the speed at which they’re likely to be moving: your eye slides across the field of vision to the right spot surprisingly often. Even when they play positions that require them to alter their speed from time to time, they do so in a kind of rhythm: X many times a game Gareth Bale or Ashley Cole comes shooting up the sideline, or Leo Messi zips diagonally towards the goal.
Some players seem to have reached a kind of Kantian perfection of workrate, rarely seeming to vary from their established pace. Xavi is one—he runs far more than most people think: without moving very fast he almost never stops—and Dirk Kuyt is another. But soccer has its children too, the ones who alternate, in ways no one else can understand or predict, between sprinting and dawdling. There’s a reason why the inner life of Zlatan Ibrahimović looks like this.
Most of these childlike players are strikers, and I think there are two reasons for that. First, play that way as a midfielder and you’ll be subbed off at halftime; play that way as a defender and you’ll be subbed off by the twenty-minute mark. But second, irregular levels of energy constitute an effective technique for strikers: they can do nothing for long enough that defenders become distracted by the movement of others, and then they suddenly poach.
Also, this kind of player fascinates spectators, on the sound Skinnerian principle of intermittent or variable-ratio reinforcement—the same principle that keeps people obsessively checking their email and Twitter feeds. The predictably lazy or predictably energetic player doesn’t tap into our cognitive eccentricities the way the childlike player does: the latter always provides something for us to react to, whether that reaction is frustration or delight, and we react all the more strongly because we don’t know, at any given moment, which of the two he’s going to provide. When Berbatov is on the pitch the stadium turns into a giant Skinner box. And we’re the rats.
Read More: Dimitar Berbatov, Zlatan Ibrahimović
by Alan Jacobs · February 21, 2011
Well done, Jacob. Well done.
To support your suggestion I can give an interesting example: Abou Diaby at Arsenal. The more defensively he plays the more infuriated the fans get with him, but move him higher up the pitch and he becomes insanely dangerous. His game has no rhythm, it is based on changing the speed of the typical Arsenal attack, sometimes speeding it up and sometimes slowing it down. People get so frustrated with him but his unpredictability must make him a nightmare to play against.
It is Monday morning, and I’ve got my article mentioning Kant.
Thank you kindly.
@Tim The Run of Play at your service, Tim.
Great stuff, Alan. I think the children-striker comparison you lay out is also apt because being a striker is perhaps the one position on the pitch that feels the most regressive and reminiscent of our youth.
Why? Because it’s fun. It’s less-pressurized with defensive responsibilities, all of which seem horribly boring and adult. Stopping the other team? Tracking back! How dull! How brittle! How grown-up!
Playing as striker, you get to skip and bound around, looking for the ball, and hoping to complete the act of scoring. In the playground, everyone wanted to goal poach. At least I did.
Romario was like this. I remember his incredible season playing for FC Barcelona (season 1993-1994). Once his teammate Quique Estebaranz shouted to him: “Romi, run a bit more, dammit”. Romario came to him: “Run you, that’s why they pay you. They pay me for scoring goals, not run”
I remember a quote (from whom, I can’t recall) but that quote described Fernando Torres exactly as you described strikers. The quote said that he could disappear for a minute or two and then out of nowhere strike with deadly accuracy.
@James T I think that’s a great analogy – as someone who is burning out the last embers of my playing days, I hate it when my coach puts me out wide as a “carrilero” and always beg to play forward. Why? Little to no responsibility and all the glory.
I’m also a bit bothered by the presumption of run-soccer-run. I actually like to watch standout wingers like Robben and Ribery in the off moments, when the ball is meters away with no way of making it to them. Too many players run when they should be idling and conserving energy. Is it a mere coincidence that Italians score late goals after passively defending/idling for 90 minutes?
Great piece. Reminds me particuarly of Original Ronaldo when he was at Madrid. Even when overweight he could just spark in to life and change the game.
@ Alan – Just noticed my little mistake earlier calling you ‘Jacob’. That’s what years in the private schooling system will do to you.
Lovely.
@Elliott Idling and conserving energy also explains why modern-era players like Berbatov and many others can succeed at the highest level while also maintaining a vigorous smoking habit. Funny how approaching the game like a child also allows an aging man to continue huffing down heaters as part of his daily routine – and score a few goals along the way.
@Jim reminds me of an article by alan tyers from a while back i could only find snippets of.
“As it stands, non-smoking is the enemy of breeding correct, technical footballers, and as such Wayne should be lauded, not criticised, for his holiday snout. Our third suggestion for fixing football, therefore, is that Every Premier League team must field at least four smokers per match.
Because smokers can’t run around as much, the pace of the Premier League would inevitably be curtailed. No more death-or-glory runs from box-to-box midfielders, hiding players who are basically athletes not footballers, because they’ll all be too wheezy. Instead, English players will have to learn how to put their foot on the ball, while their heads stop spinning, and pick out a pass. The World Cup will inevitably follow within a few years.
Obviously, there will be attempts to cheat, with clubs attempting to field social smokers, the “only after a few drinks brigade”, but with the resources and reach of the FA, this should be easy to counter. Random smoking tests will be introduced, with players forced to smoke a cigarette in front of officials at any time of day or night. Suspicious cases will be visited first thing in the morning, and made to bang in a coffin nail or two while drinking a mug of strong java: those rushing off immediately for an emergency sit-down will be easily identifiable as the part-time puffers. ”
great article by the way, alan jacobs.
@Miguel – I remember this being on Football365 if that helps? Great article. Would love to see a development of this article along the lines of which psychological conditions make the best players in each position.
Great stuff.
I’m reminded of my favourite Gary Lineker maxim on the art of the striker being the ability to be in the right place every time (http://thetim.es/hLFGmc) and whether Gary’s approach of making the right run every time – a proactive approach – rather than reacting to the ball, appeared to the spectator to be instinctive and childlike, or systematic and rigid?
@Elliott I think you owe it to yourself as a fading player to pull an Anelka and demand restoration to the forefront. No more water-carrying! You’re old, and yet wonderfully young at heart.
Possible Couterexample: “Zindane: A 21st Century Portrait”
My single takeaway from the film was how low Zidane’s work rate was for a midfielder (and one of the best ever in the game). It seemed even lower than a striker’s. For long stretches he was like a spectator on the pitch. That could be a function of my expectations. I don’t think I was expecting Kuyt or Tevez; but watching only him, Zidane seemed almost lazy.
@Alan Jacobs speaking of freezing… I was at graduation in Wheaton for a brother of mine a couple years ago, and having grown up in the global south (and gone to college in the American South) I thought it was freezing. Of course my brother was running around in a tshirt and shorts and making fun of my parka, but whatever. On the variation of pace- it’s a really effective tool at the high end of the bell curve, because pace alone is really not enough. A somewhat underrated part of Messi’s game is how he can sort of jog, really run, and then sort of warp, making defenders take bad angles when trying to close the gap. “Suddenness” is one of those traits in the American Football game that’s prized, but sort of overlooked and undervalued in soccer.
As a psychology grad student teaching organizational psychology this semester, I love the reference to variable-ratio reinforcement. Well played Alan!
@Joe Re: “pace alone is not enough,” see Theo Walcott, Aaron Lennon.
@Alan Jacobs I think both Lennon and Walcott have more than just pace. Tony Daley might be a better example.
@Alex You’re absolutely right. I was just thinking that both of those players tend to rely on their pace in circumstances when they ought to be using other skills.
@Alan Jacobs They’ve certainly both been guilty of relying a little too much on pushing the ball past the full- back and clicking on the afterburners. But I feel Walcott in particular has more of a footballing brain than Chris Waddle gives him credit for. The more games he puts together, the more we start to see this, but the continual stop-start nature of his career to date has prevented him from building any kind of flow.