An introduction

Welcome to Ninety Percent of Everything, my (Jake Walerius's) newsletter. It is about football, more or less.

Several years ago now I wrote an essay criticizing what I felt to be the upsettingly low standard of contemporary football writing. The piece was primarily an attempt to work through various of my frustrations with an industry I had recently left behind. It was also, however, and maybe less obviously, an attempt to begin articulating a vision for the kind of football writing I would like, one day, to publish myself. I have often thought, in the years since, about starting my own site, but I never did. Partly this was because I have been busy with other things, but I think mostly it was because the vision I began trying to articulate in that earlier piece remained opaque to me, and I felt I couldn’t start a project of the kind I had in mind without a clear idea what it was. My new attitude is: no one gives a shit. After several years of thinking, then, I have finally decided to start writing. I intend to publish something at least once a month, and possibly as often as once a week.

It is not lost on me that I am launching this on the first day of the new European league season. The editor in me keeps saying that this is, vis-à-vis getting anyone to read this, really fucking stupid. In my (non-editorial self’s) defense, I cite my new attitude (see above). I never enjoyed having to cater to the whims of the football news cycle, and so I am simply choosing not to do this anymore. The piece that follows this introduction is an indication, blissfully free of any mention of this weekend's matches (there is barely even any mention of football!), of what to expect from this newsletter going forward. How accurate an indication it is remains to be seen, but my feeling at the moment is that it is probably mostly pretty accurate (maybe).

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The difficulty of football

As I said, several years ago now I wrote an essay criticizing what I felt to be the upsettingly low standard of contemporary football writing. The emphasis in that piece was on the word writing, as opposed—an opposition I did not make explicitly at the time, but perhaps should have, and am now—to analysis. Because while I still think the standard of contemporary football writing is upsettingly low, I also think the standard of contemporary football analysis (specifically tactical and statistical analysis) is higher than it has ever been. Since I am one of these freaks who think that form is inseparable from content, however, I do not take this to be a coincidence. The problem (if you can call it that) with football analysis, certainly football analysis produced for a popular audience, is that its primary mission is clarity. Its goal is to explain all the complexity and nuance of modern football in a way that the non-expert will be able to understand, and that will ultimately enrich their experience of the game itself. This is all well and good as far as it goes, but if you feel, as I feel, an inclination toward complication, this emphasis on clarity does not necessarily make for a happy state of affairs.

I suspect some people will probably balk at the mere suggestion that complication could be a good thing—these same people are probably also the sort to get irritated by all these parenthetical comments I keep making, all these sub- and sub-sub- and sub-sub-sub-clauses my sentences keep sprouting—so let me try to defend myself. First, it is probably worth emphasizing that by complication I do not mean obscurantism. And there is obviously a huge difference between clarity and brevity (as Kant once said, quoting someone whose name I can’t remember in reference to a book whose title I am not going to bother to look up, this book would have been a lot shorter if it wasn’t so short). My point is not about sentences, or paragraphs, or any other division of text. It is about the way that we think about the things we write about, and how this becomes manifest in the way we write about them. Because if it is true, as I said before, that form is inseparable from content, then to make clarity the highest virtue of one’s writing is at the same time to make a choice about content. What choice? If one’s aim, in writing, is to clarify, then it seems to me one is bound to choose to write about topics that permit of such clarification, or (more perniciously) to think about topics that don’t as if they do, or to think about topics that do in some ways and don’t in others only in those ways that they do. And this, I think, is a loss—both in terms of our ability to make sense of football itself and our ability to write about it in new and interesting ways.

I left football writing to pursue a PhD in philosophy, and I work squarely in what most Anglo-American philosophy types would call the analytic tradition. Now, clarity is to the analytic philosopher somewhat, I imagine, as God is to the religious believer, or Lionel Messi has recently become to Robert Taylor. Which is just to say: I am no enemy of clarity. But there are occasions, I think, where it can lead us astray. I once heard someone describe the activity of analytic philosophy (derisively) as that of putting everything in a neat little box and giving it a neat little label and tying it off with a neat little bow. Of course this doesn’t make any sense, and is literally false in several fairly obvious ways, but in other ways—literarily, maybe, spiritually—it strikes me as undeniable. The idea captures some of what I feel about the best of contemporary football analysis. The problem is not that it is unclear or unilluminating, but that embracing it seems to involve shying away from those elements of the sport that seem to me most interesting.

I take my cue here from Cora Diamond’s discussion, in “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” of what she calls the difficulty of reality, characterized for her by experiences in which we take something in the world to be resistant to our thinking it, in which the mind is not able to encompass something which it encounters. Closely related to this idea is a process Diamond refers to (she borrows the term from Stanley Cavell) as deflection, in which one of these un-encompass-able experiences is displaced by a philosophical argument in its vicinity. Diamond’s discussion centers on J.M. Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures, published in book form as The Lives of Animals (and later expanded into a novel). The Lives of Animals tells the story of the novelist Elizabeth Costello, who is invited to give a lecture at Appleton College in which, among other things, she compares the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust to the treatment of animals by humans. The book includes comments from several prominent thinkers (among them Peter Singer, the world’s dumbest defender of animal rights).

These commentaries (according to Diamond; I have not read them) treat Costello’s lecture as what, on its surface, it appears to be: the presentation of an argument. This argument draws an analogy between the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and our treatment of animals, and concludes that if we consider the former to be morally reprehensible (which we do), then we should consider the latter to be morally reprehensible for the same reasons. To interpret Costello’s lecture in this way requires us to treat her not as presenting just any argument, however, but as presenting an obviously weak argument, since the conclusion follows only if we accept the legitimacy of its central analogy, an analogy whose force relies on our assuming exactly what Costello is, on this interpretation, trying to prove, namely, that humans and animals are moral equals, deserving of equal moral consideration. That many of us are not willing to assume this is brought out most forcefully by the fact that one fairly ordinary way of talking about what is wrong with what the Nazis did to the Jews is to say that they treated them like animals. What is lacking from Costello’s lecture, then, as Singer points out in his commentary, is an argument establishing this crucial assumption, a significant oversight if you accept this interpretation of what’s going on.

Diamond, however, does not accept this interpretation of what’s going on. She does not see a woman presenting an argument at all, let alone an argument to which the standard kinds of objections apply. She sees, rather, a woman presenting herself to her audience in order to display a certain kind of wound. Costello is, as Diamond describes her, “a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks her and isolates her. The imagery of the Holocaust figures centrally in the way she is haunted, and in her isolation. For thinking this horror with the imagery of the Holocaust is or can be felt to be profoundly offensive.” Diamond sees, in other words, a woman confronted by a difficulty of reality. The fact of our mistreatment of animals—her horror at this fact, the isolation she feels as a result of her horror, which is not shared by those to whom she delivers her lecture, displays her wound—none of this, for Costello, is the sort of thing to which arguments can be appropriately applied. To engage in this sort of argumentation is merely to engage in deflection, to fail to appreciate the un-encompass-ability of Costello’s experience for what it really is.

What (he finally asks, returning to the point) does this have to do with football? Nothing, obviously. But it is supposed to be an example of a case in which the embrace of complication is a better tool than the imposition of clarity for making sense of some feature of our experience of the world, where what is needed is not the presentation of arguments and the consideration of objections, but the appreciation of a deep kind of confusion or unsettledness. My idea is to try to approach football writing in this spirit. I will stray from football from time to time, as I did here, but mostly (probably) only in order to get back to it again, hopefully with fresh eyes.

The tactical complexities of modern football are many, and they are very interesting, but I have no light to shed on them that is not already being shed much more brightly by others. Similarly, the statistical tools that have been developed to analyze the game are more powerful than ever, but they are not tools I know how to use, and I will not be trying to learn how to use them here. (This is not to say I will not write about tactics and statistics; I definitely will). Instead, I will try to embrace the kind of complication I have described in this piece, not in order to obscure what should be simple, but in order to appreciate as fully as possible those elements of the game that seem to me to most resist our thinking them. What I publish here is not, then, intended as a repudiation of the sort of analysis I have been talking about, but as a supplement to it.

Whatever it turns out to be exactly, I hope it will be worth reading.