On interpretation
I begin with a brief (some would say overly simplified, others would say incorrect) history of the philosophy of art. Plato and Aristotle said that art was imitation, and for two thousand years no one really took issue with this definition. Then Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art gallery and all hell broke loose. Finally, in 1953, someone had the good sense to release Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to the public, and the search for art’s necessary and sufficient conditions came, mercifully, to its conclusion: there are none, art is a family resemblance concept. No one has published on the topic since.
The nice thing about having arrived at this conclusion, I find, is that it empowers one to ignore a whole range of questions that seem, to me at least, to be basically pointless—questions of the form is _____ art?—and to focus instead on asking about whatever one wants to fill that blank with the sorts of questions that have typically been reserved for those works we have all been taught to think of as obvious and unproblematic instances of art (paintings, novels, symphonies, etc.). Thus without stopping to ask whether football is art (a question from neither of whose available answers anything interesting follows), I want to see what happens if we simply allow ourselves to interpret it as though it were.
To interpret something is, generally speaking, to separate what it literally says (or is or does or depicts, etc.) from what it really means (or represents or shows or claims, etc.). So it is with some surprise the child first learns that Humpty Dumpty is not really an egg, with much eye-rolling the adolescent first hears that Moby Dick is not really a whale, and with great alarm that Jürgen Klopp first notices that Curtis Jones is not really a defensive midfielder (a joke, forgive me). On the one hand, literal content. On the other, interpreted content. Somewhere in between, the work of art.
Of course we interpret football in this way all the time, whether we think about it in these terms or not. It is widely accepted among non-idiots these days, for example, that there is an important difference between results and performances. A team may win while playing badly, and lose while playing well. Good analysis exists in the space created by this difference. It separates what is literally happening (e.g., Manchester United beating Wolves) from what is really going on (Casemiro disintegrating on live television). And just as good art criticism, by scrutinizing the relationship between literal and interpreted content, can heighten our appreciation for the work of art, good football analysis, by scrutinizing the relationship between a team’s results and its performances, can heighten our appreciation for football. As things get more complicated, however, the analogy may begin to strain.
The literal content of Duchamp’s Fountain, for example, is a urinal, while its interpreted content is something like the claim that what makes an object a work of art has nothing to do with the object itself and everything to do with the way we think about it. If this interpretation is to have any plausibility at all, however, it must encompass more than the urinal itself. It must encompass the urinal in combination with the artist’s decision to put it where he did, and its relationship to the other objects in the space in which he put it, and what this suggests about both that space and those objects, in the present and the past, and on and on and on until eventually it seems we have to admit that our interpretation encompasses not merely the urinal itself but the whole history of art (and its criticism) itself. But now the literal content of Duchamp’s Fountain seems as though it could not possibly be just a urinal, since if it were we would presumably interpret it in the same way we interpret every other urinal in the world—i.e., not at all. Art! How silly!
The reason things are able to become so complicated here is that we treat Fountain, almost without thinking about it, not as an object, but as a creative act, an act of creative expression. And if we are to interpret this act correctly, it seems obvious we have to take into account the intentions of the person responsible for it. Somewhere between literal content and interpreted content, then, we must also make room for the intention of the artist, which as we have now seen is capable of making all sorts of mischief, interpretively speaking.
If football is a creative act, which it is, who should we say is responsible for it? A huge number of people influence the outcome of any given football match: players, managers, referees, fans, owners, executives, sporting directors, politicians ... the list almost certainly goes on. Since it would be impossible to fully disentangle the intentions of all these different people, it seems to me the starting point for any piece of football interpretation has to be massive simplification. I do not say this as criticism, but because I want to emphasize that the kind of simplification we opt for is itself a significant interpretive choice.
As Todd Boehly attempts to creatively account his way to a Premier League title, for example, I have found it harder than ever (harder than when Roman Abramovich first bought Chelsea, or even when Abu Dhabi first bought Manchester City) to avoid interpreting football matches merely as an expression of the whims and the wealth of the people who own football teams. I really believe there is an important sense in which to ignore this particular simplification, simplification though it is, is to abdicate whatever meager shred of power we still possess as football supporters. On the other hand, this is depressing as shit. Given that most of us just want to enjoy the sport itself—by which I mean, and this is another interpretation, the game as it is played on the pitch—given this, other simplifications tend to dominate. A particularly common form treats the performance of a football team as, essentially, the creative expression of its manager. Pep Guardiola is Duchamp, Manchester City his urinal (excuse me, his Fountain).
One advantage of this approach is that it provides a framework within which to judge the performances of individual players. Done correctly, this heads off some especially lazy forms of analysis. Trent Alexander-Arnold, say, has often been criticized over the past few years for being out of position, for getting caught high up the pitch when he should be defending at right-back. Of course this criticism simply ignores that he is only doing what he has been told, that his manager has clearly instructed him to occupy the positions he does, and if this occasionally results in Liverpool’s being vulnerable on the counter-attack, that is a risk his manager has been, at least until recently, willing to take. By focusing on the manager, then, as opposed to the individual players, we are better able to encompass the whole. Since football is a team sport, this seems like something we should want to do.
What I don’t like about this particular interpretive framework, insightful though it obviously is, is that it encourages us, however subtly, to think of the football player less as a person than as a chess piece. Each player possesses a particular skill set, but how that skill set is employed, and therefore how it ultimately manifests itself on the pitch, is up to the manager. To an extent, of course, this is true. Managers tell players what to do, and if a player doesn’t listen it is usually within the manager’s power to drop them. (Maybe this indicates that all managers wish their players really were chess pieces.) Try as they might, however, there is ultimately nothing they can do about the fact that players are people—people, moreover, with creative intentions of their own.
Something I think about often when I read analysis of this kind is how little it is able to account for this fact—the fact, not to be too overwrought about it, of the players’ humanity. Again, I do not say this as criticism, but because I want to emphasize that the kind of simplification we opt for is a significant interpretive choice. If we want to confront the players’ humanity more directly, a different simplification, a different interpretive framework, is needed.
To play football at the highest level requires, among many other things, an immense level of bravery. I remember several years ago watching Sergio Ramos getting tackled at the top of his own 18-yard box as Real Madrid were trying to play through a high press. It was a bad error in what was a close game, and Ramos was lucky it didn’t result in a goal. From the ensuing goal-kick, with the opposition again pressing high, Ramos demanded the ball from his keeper. I mean he really demanded it. I can’t remember if it was Keylor Navas or Thibault Courtois, but I remember him screaming at whoever it was until they passed him the ball. Then he passed it right back again and the game continued as normal. In an immediate tactical sense, Ramos’s receiving the ball in that moment served no purpose whatsoever. In fact, there were probably good immediate tactical reasons for him not to have received the ball in that moment. He did it (I can think of no other plausible explanation for why he did it) to demonstrate to his teammates, to the opposition, and to everyone else in that stadium that he was unfazed by his mistake. He was engaging in a kind of performance, an expression of what he felt the moment, his team, required of him emotionally.
The preceding paragraph was supposed to be a retreat from the tactical, but in the end it can only be a partial retreat. Because the reason Ramos did what he did was that he recognized that Madrid could win the match only by playing through their opponent’s high press, the success of which press, like the success of every other press, depended in part on its breaking the confidence of Ramos and his teammates. If this interpretation is correct, it is an example of how deeply intertwined the tactical and the emotional can be, and of what is lost when we focus only on one or the other. It may well be (I suspect it almost certainly is) that a full, theoretical understanding of modern tactics requires a significant amount of abstraction away from the emotional. This is by itself a good reason to abstract away from the emotional at least some of the time. But if we aren’t willing to bring emotion, the humanity of the player, back into the frame at some point, it seems to me we are limiting our interpretive horizons to our own detriment.
There is much more to be said about this, but I have said enough already, so I will set it aside for another time. In closing, I would like to call attention briefly to an assumption that seems to run through both of the interpretive frameworks I have been talking about. It is the assumption that managers and players alike are driven above all by the desire to win, and therefore that everything they do on the pitch must be interpreted in light of this fact. I am not so ridiculous as to suggest that managers and players are not driven by the desire to win, but I am so idealistic as to think that there is a lot more to it than that, and so curious as to wonder what new interpretive approaches we might stumble upon if we were willing, even just for the sake of discovery, to set this assumption aside for a little while.