Sense and sensibility or: What is the point of Erling Haaland?
It has—I don’t mean to upset you, really, but at some point facts must be faced—it has become socially acceptable in recent years to claim that Zinedine Zidane is overrated. Of course (as his detractors glumly acknowledge) he produced several match-winning contributions on some of the sport’s biggest stages, but in terms of week-to-week, season-to-season consistency, he simply did not do enough to be counted, as he generally is, among the true greats of the sport. I’m sure this argument has its merits, but it seems to me rather like criticizing a motorcycle for not having enough doors. The man had sensibility, goddammit!
I like this word, sensibility. A distant, I think much better, relation of the now-ubiquitous vibe. A hateful little syllable. Every time I hear it, a small but not unwanted part of me walks the mental plank, as it were, and is lost. But sensibility ... sensibility I can get behind.
I steal the word from Von Humboldt Fleischer, Saul Bellow’s fictionalized version of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and the main attraction of his novel, Humboldt’s Gift. "You have sensibility," Humboldt tells the narrator, Charlie Citrine (Bellow’s fictionalized version of himself), upon meeting him for the first time. "Humboldt was a pioneer in the use of this word," Charlie tells us. "Sensibility later made it big." To which I say: not big enough!
My thesis, insofar as a tirade can have a thesis, is this: all else being equal (or, for that matter, unequal) between two players, we should count the one with sensibility the better footballer. Sensibility is, if you will permit me some idiot-jargon of the Contemporary Analytic Philosopher, a good-making property of a football player. And Zidane, whatever his deficiencies, was absolutely dripping with the stuff.
Then again, perhaps saying Zidane had sensibility is like saying a cow has stomachs, or Roberto Firmino teeth. The question is not whether, but how! Let me try to be more specific, then. I don’t just mean that he made the game look beautiful, which of course he did, or that he was an especially elegant player, which of course he was. What I mean is that he was aware of himself, indeed conceived of himself, as an aesthetic agent, as someone capable of producing beauty. And, crucially, I mean that this awareness informed his decision-making on the pitch.
Now, one of the nice things about treating football as an aesthetic, as opposed to a tactical, object is that it allows me to say more or less whatever I want about it with absolute conviction, reality be damned. But I really don’t think I delude myself at all when I say that it is inconceivable to me, truly inconceivable, that at least some of Zidane’s choices on the pitch were not deliberately, self-consciously, aesthetic choices. Imagine you could do what he could do, and then imagine not allowing yourself to do it, to revel in it, to feel it, to let it move you. That is the behavior of a psychopath.
I use Zidane as the exemplar because he is the exemplar, but many players have sensibility, some have it more than others, and all of them who have it have it in their own way. One day I should like to produce a complete taxonomy of footballing sensibility, but for now we will have to settle for a few instructive examples. Dennis Bergkamp had sensibility. Riquelme had it. Ronaldinho, of course. Among current players, Thiago Alcântara, for whose feeble musculoskeletal system the fair-minded among us can only weep, is probably the standout.
I do not want to give the impression that sensibility is a function of quality, however. There are lesser examples also, that is, examples of lesser players who nonetheless possess the spark of sensibility. Azzedine Ounahi has sensibility. Curtis Jones has sensibility. I have not yet decided whether Rayan Aït-Nouri has sensibility, but he shows promise. Isco has sensibility. Ederson has it with his feet, but not his hands. Allison has it with his hands, but not his feet. Jordan Pickford thinks he has it, but is (as usual) confused.
And just as there are lesser players who have it, there are great players, even the greatest, who do not. Lionel Messi doesn’t, for example, not really. I have seen him display it in moments, often late in matches, with the result already settled, but it doesn’t pervade his game in the way it does some of these others. A beautiful player to watch, no doubt, but he is too ruthlessly efficient, too direct, possibly he is just too good. I think the same could be said of Ronaldo, the Brazilian one, the Good Ronaldo.
Still other players, often very good ones, mistake sensibility for flair. Showboating is a kind of degenerate sensibility, sensibility in poor taste. Ronaldinho often blurred the line between the two, but the sheer joy with which he played, the absolute delight he took in his mastery over a football, kept him mostly on the right side of it. Cristiano Ronaldo is a showboat. Neymar, in what I like to think of as his more existential moods, is a showboat. Showboating is designed to humiliate, and thus is directed, necessarily, at an opponent. Sensibility, in contrast, exists always and only for its own sake.
The players without sensibility, even in its degenerate forms, are too numerous to count. Craig Dawson may serve as a paradigmatic example. I think in general the football-watching public don’t even come close to appreciating how good you have to be to have the sort of career Dawson has had, but he is a blunt instrument of a player, he exists to fulfill a particular functional role. He does this with aplomb, but without artistic feeling. “Rub some funk on it,” Orlando Jones’s character in Evolution once said, sagely. The sad fact is Craig Dawson couldn’t even if he tried.
On the distant end of this spectrum, further along even than the Craig Dawsons of the world, there is Erling Haaland, the anti-Zidane, a man whose playing-style and general demeanor is so robotic as to have earned him the nickname, as apt as it is shitty, cyborg. Early on in Haaland’s Man City career, there was some hand-wringing over how rarely he touched the ball, how isolated he seemed to be from the rest of his team. How could this be, the pundit-sphere wondered, that someone so good, so decisive, could at the same time be so uninvolved? Asked about this in an interview, Haaland said that his dream was to touch the ball five times and to score five goals, and on his face flashed the cartoon grin of a man many of whose dreams have already come true. I await the day with the dread, for it will surely come: the death of sensibility.
If sensibility really is a good-making feature of a footballer, and if Haaland really possesses none of it, the question arises whether he is actually any good, or at least how good he actually is, or at very least how we should think about the nature of his goodness. On one hand, he is obviously exceptional. He does the hardest thing in the sport with such outrageous frequency and relentless ease as to lead real life journalists to think it wise to ask him whether he is concerned about touching the ball only (approx.) 17 times in a match, a mere nine (also approx.) of which touches resulted in goals. On the other hand, we have it straight from the horse’s mouth: the man dreams of scoring five goals from five touches. He has a sickness.
The problem is not that a player can’t display sensibility with a single touch. Bergkamp, for example, made a career out of such touches. The problem is the absolute disdain with which Haaland takes those touches. He gives the impression of a man who wants nothing to do with the ball. He has no feel for it, no respect for it. He seems to kick it as hard as he possibly can every time it arrives at his feet. We know he dreams of scoring five goals from five touches, but the truth is if he possessed even an ounce of imagination, any real ambition at all, he would instead dream of scoring one goal from zero touches: the immaculate conversion. For Haaland’s conception of the game, his role in the game, is entirely functional, and he is the goal function. The input is the ball, the output a goal. What happens in between could scarcely matter less.
It is easy to forget these days, what with all the death threats flying round the place, but football is an act of creative expression. Every touch, every pass, every shot and tackle, is thus an opportunity for such expression, an opportunity to manifest one’s creative vision. Not all players take this opportunity, of course. Some because they lack the skill, others for the much less forgivable reason that they lack the imagination. Haaland, you may have gathered, falls into this latter group.
I want to say that what separates those with sensibility from those without it is roughly what separates the novice musician from the expert. Any old moron can play a C#, only an artist can make you feel a C#. I don’t know if Erling Haaland plays any instruments, but I imagine him playing the piano, playing the same song over and over again. In fact, he keeps a tally. He boasts to anyone who will listen that he has played Bach’s Goldberg Variations more than any other pianist in history. He is probably playing it right now, at a high tempo, desperate to extend his record before bedtime. Just as he finishes this rendition, his 64,000th all time, Glenn Gould (of all people!) walks through the door.
When Haaland has finished, Gould asks if he might have a go himself. Graciously, Haaland gives up his seat. Gould plays. It’s a beautiful performance, up there with his very best. As the last note fades, he closes his eyes, allows himself a moment to feel the music, and he looks up expectantly at his host. Haaland frowns. "I think it would have been better if you played it twice," he says.