and the Beautiful Game

David Kilpatrick

Soccer fans often claim their sport is “the beautiful game.” But anyone who has ever played or watched the sport must concede that not all games are beautiful. The history of soccer tactics can be characterized as the tension between creative and result-driven ambitions. Whether or not a side emphasizes the objective of scoring or the objective of not being scored upon, the means employed to achieve either or both objectives is often a source of debate among pundits and punters. “Its football, not figure skating” is a popular phrase that dismisses the ideal in favor of a more practical approach. The will-to-win often negates creativity and sporting expression; the “best team” doesn’t always win. Nonetheless, such a result can be pleasing, even to the neutral disinterested spectator. Soccer isn’t a judged sport—the winner isn’t determined by ideal spectators whose trained eyes allow them to discern the truly great from the merely good. How then can we account for a well played game if an anti-aesthetic approach achieves the pleasurable result? Is there a method we can employ that will help determine the aesthetic quality of soccer games? Throughout this summer’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the use of the word “” was de rigueur, if non-reflective, among the professional commentators in various media. This wasn’t a critique of the “bad ” on the part of players appealing for fouls but to convey the tension and excitement of the games as the tournament’s narrative unfolded. This isn’t unique to soccer and the term’s use extends to the vocabulary of sport marketing: “The most memorable [sport] event experiences build drama from the playing surface outward” (Mullin, Hardy, and Sutton 153). The critical evaluation of sporting events isn’t dissimilar from the assessment of theatrical events (both are, after all, forms of play). Though many philosophers of sport, such 80 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 as David Best, are keen to distinguish sport from art, the art of drama can provide us with a means that will allow us to judge the aesthetic value of a sporting event. Critics judge dramatic effectiveness with reference to a play’s constituent elements, first identified by in Poetics as plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), melody (melos), and spectacle (opsis), a critical methodology that allows for an assessment of the aesthetic appreciation of a play, but I will argue likewise allows for a clearer sense of what constitutes a truly beautiful game. I hope, then, to justify the use of the word “drama” in contemporary popular sporting discourse to demonstrate that a dramaturgical appreciation of the sporting event enhances critical engagement, while contributing to the ongoing debate regarding sport as an aesthetic concern. Indeed, I seek here to counter David Best’s denial of the use of the term “in the same sense as when it occurs in the context of discussion of a play, since the relevant convention is lacking” (123) as well as his larger claim that “it is high time we buried once for all the prolix attempts to show that sport is art” (125). While I’ll attempt to avoid the crime of prolixivity, I hope to convey why the aesthetic is a central—indeed essential—concern for the sport of soccer (if not for sport in general). Sociologist Richard Giulianotti observed more than a decade ago that “academics have contributed relatively little to our understanding of football’s playing styles and techniques” (127), and that “playing techniques, styles and their aesthetic appreciation have been notably absent from scholarly work” (129). While scholars from the social sciences might well be the intended audience for Giulianotti’s call, likewise scholars in the humanities, especially those engaged in the study of drama, can play a crucial role in exploring the aesthetic dimensions of the global game. Matthew Kent’s “Aristotle’s Favorite Sport,” makes the case that “Aristotle would approve of soccer as theater” (58) due to the unity of action (the continuum of ball in space through time as a continuum of inextricably interrelated events) and the emergence of plot, allowing for the purgation of emotions among the audience. While I disagree with Kent when he claims that a one-nil loss is “truly a ,” he’s certainly onto something when he says “defeat succeeds as a form of theater” (59). Kent touches briefly on these concepts found in Aristotle’s Poetics, but I want to further the exercise by exploring how Aristotle’s identification of drama’s constituent elements may be applied and adapted as a critical methodology, one which will allow for an enhanced engagement with the aesthetic concerns the game provokes. Aristotle defines tragedy as “a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself, and of some amplitude; in language enriched by a variety of artistic devices appropriate to the several parts of the play; presented in the form of action, not narration; by means of pity Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 81 and fear bringing about the purgation of emotions” (38-9; 1449b 21-29). One might argue that the work of art is the representation of an action whereas the sporting event is action itself. However, the mimetic nature of the movements inimical to the action—indeed, each action that occurs as the action unfolds—demonstrates Aristotle’s recuperation of the mimetic from its Platonic pejorative. Just as the “instinct for imitation is […] natural to us” (35), each player is repeating the techniques learned through mimetic means: muscle memory encodes a player’s skill, allowing for control of the ball and instilling patterns of movement in space both with and without (but always in relation to) the ball. We should not commit the error of understanding the mimetic in some sort of fixed and objective conception of the real (though this isn’t to say that literary, cinematic, photographic, painted, and musical representations of sport ought not receive further attention from philosophers of sport). And this is where Best’s argument is flawed as he claims “it is an understood part of the convention that tragedy in a play happens to the fictional characters being portrayed, and not the actors, i.e. the living people taking part” (122). This distinction between the actors and the characters, the real from its re-presentation, is naïve at best, as this divided line is far from a safe assumption with modernist drama and the theatrical avant-garde. Mimesis, after all, is essentially ludic, denying any fixed and static reference of an ideal condition, state, or form. The game, then, is always already an imitation or re-presentation of the game as conditioned by the seventeen Laws of the Game with players who imitate or re-present the actions they’ve done and seen countless times before. One might argue that the game’s global appeal renders it worthy of “serious attention,” but I’d rather take a somewhat different approach and say simply that the game attracts serious attention, so it is our task then (as philosophers of sport) to understand why and refine how such attention is given. The game is “complete in itself” within its ninety odd minutes or more, depending upon the conditions of the competition. As with Western theatrical convention, the action is divided by an intermission, the conventional match having two acts, with a third act only for contests of ultimate import (ones that must decide a winner from a loser). There are several parts to the “play” of each game, which we will identify, as the play or game itself is presented not through narration (and this would indeed be a representation of the representation) but the action itself, and that there is indeed a purging of emotions among all the players, both the athletes themselves and the fans in the audience. Conflating the play with the game reminds us of the ludic nature of sport. What little we know of medieval pastimes comes to us via church and civic bans on “ludus” or play without discerning between acts of or sport. Disciplinary boundaries prevent scholars of sport from communicating with their theatrical kin when their shared object of inquiry, the performative, 82 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 ought to be obvious. Robert E. Rinehart, however, attempts (in Players All), to break this boundary when he discusses the prevalence of the “sport-as-drama metaphor,” which he rejects with an alternative metaphor of “non-narrative formations” (25) whereby sport “is examined in terms of a postmodernist avant-garde movement” (23). Rinehart contends that “sports contests are not inherently dramaturgical,” for, he observes, “not every sports contest is a ‘masterpiece’ […] even though someone may commoditize it as such” (24). I agree with Rinehart when he claims that “consumers of […] a sport contest have become enmeshed in its linear, narrative, and dramaturgical discourse—so that the drama of sport feels, unexamined, as real as sport itself,” but just because something remains unexamined doesn’t mean that its examination ought to be neglected. Rinehart cautions that “while sport as drama as a ‘master narrative’ is rampant in popular, personal, and scholarly discourse, reliance upon the sport-as-drama metaphor limits research to narrative formations, ostracizes the study of non-narrative formations, (re) creates unexamined assumptions of linearity and causality in sport, and perpetuates hierarchy, canonization, and the privileging of scholarly over popular texts” (24-25). Odd, then, that Rinehart neglects giving a single example of such scholarly texts that commit this modernist sin of narrativity. The task of sport scholarship shouldn’t be simply to reject the unexamined but to commit that which is unexamined to reflection, to understand what’s being taken for granted and why. Where I find Rinehart most instructive is with his insistence upon the collapse of the viewer/participant binary in contemporary sport, that we are indeed “players all,” but I would argue this convention was never authentic but is itself a critical aesthetic presumption whose fallacy informs sport and theatre studies in the very same manner. While I wouldn’t want to silence studies that would explore non-narrative formations, I think there’s a profound need for more volume from a thorough examination of the narrative elements Rinehart rightly views as unexamined. One relatively early such examination can be found hidden in the aforementioned widely anthologized essay by David Best, where he quotes Reid quoting Kitchin [not cited properly by Best], who in turn argues in “Sport as Drama,” in the pages of the BBC magazine, The Listener. Having discussed the action from the FA Cup Final of 1966, Kitchin claims that by watching the game one finds: [E]xactly the dramatic effects which it is the declared policy of the avant-garde drama to seek: that is, it is charged with the collision of conflicting environments and racial temperaments, climaxes as revealing the individual in extremity, bizarre “happenings,” and Dionysiac ritual. [Football] is now the most formidable of all rivals to the Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 83

theatre. It has conflict, character, a two-hour maximum, unity of time, place, and action. It has reversals and climaxes: in fact Aristotle qualifies as a founder member. […] Soccer is a drama without a script. (qtd. Reid 247) Kitchin challenges us to read the game as we would read the play, as one reads a play with Aristotelian dramaturgy as a reference point. Viewing sport as an emerging rival to theatre, Kitchin proposes that sport in general, but most specifically soccer, serves the same function as theatre with a surprisingly discernable comparable form. Kitchin’s notion of the theatrical avant- garde is clearly at odds with that of Rinehart, who is intent to emphasize postmodernity without full consideration of the modernist crisis answered by a popular team sport such as soccer—providing a mode of communication in the absence of a unifying transcendental signified, the void left in the wake of the death of God. The sheer magnitude of the FIFA World Cup Final, the unifying focus at one time on one event by so many globally, with an estimated billion players involved, makes this year’s Final match between the Netherlands and Spain an ideal text to serve as an example of how this Aristotelian dramaturgical approach works. That this match was considered by many media experts to be far from a masterpiece makes it all the more fitting an example of how the application of this dramaturgy allows for a better appreciation of what constitutes a good game. It may seem at first that taking the six constituent elements identified by Aristotle in Poetics will either be fitting the proverbial square peg in the round hole or necessitates deletion or wholesale adaption of these elements, though the first and, according to Aristotle, most important of these, mythos or plot, the sequence of events or “ordered arrangement of incidents” (39) poses no such problem, as moments of (discovery or recognition), peripeteia (reversal of fortune) and pathos (calamity or suffering) reveal themselves in a well-played game, if not in all games. Just as plot is what Aristotle calls the “life and soul” of tragedy, so too the incidents and their sequence are the most significant of factors that determine the relative quality of a game. A bicycle kick in the fiftieth minute that makes the score 7-3 is far less thrilling than one in the ninetieth to break a scoreless draw. The superiority of the complex plot to the simple plot holds just as true for the game as the play. The opening scene needs to achieve exposition, an incentive moment, revealing the conflict or crisis at the heart of the play. The Dutch take the kickoff and quickly pass back to their captain, Giovanni van Bronkhorst at left back. He boots a long ball over fifty yards upfield to whose header is too far for the onrushing , going out for a Spanish goal kick. A minute in, van Persie hacks the back of Busquet’s leg, somehow avoiding a yellow caution card, sending a signal to Spain (and the world) 84 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 that Holland would be happy to grind out a physical result, willing to forsake the virtue of their total football for the title. A moment later, the Spanish send a wave of three attackers to the Dutch penalty area, another wave of two and then three more as seven defenders hold their ground, van Bronkhorst clearing from the penalty arc as Pedro collapses from his challenge. Within the first two minutes of action, exposition is established. The other constituent elements begin to reveal themselves but we’ll continue to focus on the plot, discussing key events (signal moments out of a continuum that tend to cause an interruption) as they occur in sequence as the action rises towards its climax. The types of memorable incidents are key indicators of the relative aesthetic quality of the game. In the case of this year’s Final, mistakes and foul play ruled the day. Between the fifteenth and twenty-third minutes, English referee issues four yellow cards. But surely the most memorable moment of the first half comes in the twenty-eighth minute, when Nigel De Jong plants the cleats of his boot in the chest of , this gross display of cynical thuggery receiving merely a yellow caution. This incident marks an early peripeteia or reversal- of-fortune as the physicality of the Dutch is able to stifle the creativity of the Spaniards’ short passing game that had been on flamboyant display in the opening quarter of an hour. The final third of the half sees the Dutch— or more accurately —make some threatening runs down the right flank. Their best chance comes under most dubious circumstances, play having stopped when the Spanish goalkeeper Casillas collides with his defender Puyol, and play is stopped by kicking the ball into touch at roughly the centre line. The Dutch resume play with a kick back towards the Spanish goal that almost bounces past Casillas, whose fingertip tip over the bar keeps the score nil-nil. A final flurry in added time sees a rare Dutch attack in numbers but when van Persie is blown offside (despite not interfering with a long cross to Kuyt), the half comes to an unsatisfying if captivating end. There can be no rationale for halftime intermission beyond its dramaturgical efficacy. Without citing the diverse results reported in adult attention span studies, the concentration of an audience has comparable limits and needs whether or not the event is classified sporting or theatrical. Stanley Lover notes that the seventh of the seventeen Laws of the Game “is framed to provide: 1) equality in sharing the allotted time in the direction of play; 2) safety, by providing an interval to regain strength; 3) enjoyment to its theoretical maximum by playing two periods” (34). But halftime needn’t be an intermission, so the first concern can be addressed within seconds for teams to switch sides (in earlier codes teams did so after each goal scored). The restoration of fitness levels serves a dramatic purpose as the duration could be instead unified, shortened if need be, to accommodate players’ fitness. No, the only reason the modern game is Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 85 played with two halves of forty-five minutes is dramaturgy, the lawmakers surely conditioned by the conventions of Western theatre. When Spain kickoffed the second half, they did so with two forward passes to the right wing. Though quickly repelled, it reveals a sharp contrast of ambitions in relation to the Dutch kickoff. The first great scoring opportunity of the match comes just past the hour mark, when Robben breaks free up the middle but his shot is deflected by the edge of Casillas’s boot, inches left of the post. Good chances are traded as opportunities emerge despite the continued roughhousing, leading up to arguably the most controversial play of the match: in the eighty-third minute, a De Jong clearance headed further upfield by van Persie springs Robben–the ball splits Capedavilla and Puyol while Robben runs past Puyol to collect the ball behind them, Puyol struggling to drag him down as the Dutchman flies towards the penalty area, avoiding Capedavilla’s slide only for Casillas to rob the ball from his feet, sending Robben tumbling to no foul called. Racing down the field after referee Webb, in protest, earns Robben a smirk and a yellow for dissent. The whistle blows on regulation time without further clear scoring opportunity and just a bit more hard contact. Some plays conclude in ambiguity without resolution. The demand for denouement in sport—that a winner must be determined—is dramaturgical, responding to either an innate or perhaps a culturally conditioned desire for decision. The opening whistle and kickoff, the halftime whistle and kickoff, the final whistle comply with Aristotle’s demand that a story have a beginning, middle, and end. A draw is a story left without all plot lines resolved and may or may not bring some sense of closure in terms of justice served or denied, a “fair result.” Would nil-nil have been a fair result, had the game not been played on 11 July 2010? The setting demanded denouement. Extra time makes the game a three act play. It takes one-hundred-ten minutes of play for the moment of peripeteia to arrive as Ineiesta is pulled down by the shoulder at the penalty arc by Heitinga, earning a second yellow and dismissal, though this might have been the least violent of the day’s transgressions. The loss of a player seems to strike a clear shift of fortune in the Spaniard’s favor, but it is the Dutch who have the next best chance five minutes later as a Sneijder freekick from thirty yards or more from the goal is just deflected left of the target by the torso of Fabregas. Inexplicably, a goal kick is awarded. Still, just a minute later, substitute Elia is sandwiched by Fabregas and Villa at the right edge of the Spanish penalty area, but no foul, much less a penalty is given as Webb waves play on, Jesus Navas dribbling from his area to well into the Dutch half, over to Iniesta, to Fabregas (who has sprinted the length of the pitch) then Torres, whose cross into the box goes to Van der Vaart. But the Dutch sub doesn’t clear and the ball drops to Fabregas, who distributes on a diagonal over to Iniesta who takes it on the half-volley to blast past Stekelenburg and into legend. The incensed 86 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010

Dutch berate Webb not that Iniesta was offside (he was on) but that Elia had earned them a penalty a mere moment before. Mathieson takes yellow for dissent as Iniesta takes yellow for excessive celebration. This moment of revelation, the deadlock broken, serves as a moment of anagnorisis, the drama unfolding with a late climax more Elizabethan than Attic, the victor identified as calamity is endured by the vanquished, the plot fully unraveled and resolved in a simultaneous unleashing of emotions of bliss and anguish among those identifying with winners or losers. One could apply Gustav Freytag’s pyramid, a five part dramatic arc with exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement, but the application of Aristotle’s conception of plot allows us to recognize in the modern sporting event a classical dramaturgy—a story unfolding with a beginning middle and end, moments of reversal and recognition leading ultimately to communal —all this is clear upon examination of the sequence of events in this summer’s FIFA World Cup Final. Ethos or character is revealed as heroes and villains emerge as the match reaches its conclusion. Their physical and technical prowess makes them “better than the average” (Aristotle 52), therefore worthy of our consideration, but the emergence of character is only in service of the plot and due to the actions that occur and for those actions to occur. Robben’s dribbling speed might have eclipsed his petulance, especially if just once had he converted his opportunities, which might in turn have made the ugly violence of his teammates appear with historical perspective to be the right of the strong had taken a chance to make them champions. De Jong and Van Bommel both play the role of pantomime villains with their persistant infringement of the laws and spirit of the game. Instead, Iniesta emerges the hero. That Howard Webb is such a well defined character, calling twenty- eight fouls on the Dutch and nineteen on the Spanish, his sixth caution card issued to the Dutch might well have tipped the balance to the Spanish, who with five cautions themselves took less than seven minutes to convert the man advantage into the game’s only goal, with just four left before spot kicks would have settled the score and determined denouement. Dianoia is understood as thought or theme and the conflict “between beauty and cynicism” (Wilson 4), the two extremes that defined the Final leads to an aesthetic concern as ethical crisis. “The history of tactics,” Jonathan Wilson tells us, “is the history of [these] two interlinked tensions: aesthetics versus results on the one side and technique versus physique on the other” (6). The Spanish, after all, beat the Dutch at their own game, justice being served as the Dutch failed in their Faustian bargain for glory, forsaking the legacy of Cruyff, Michels, Van Basten and Bergkamp and their ideology of totaalvoetbal, ironically playing at preventing the Spanish from playing total football. Ironically and perhaps poetically, the Dutch were unable to stop the Spanish from playing Dutch football. Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 87

As an essentially non-linguistic phenomenon, though we often hear of the “universal language” of soccer, speech acts aren’t an essential aspect of the game, so one might reasonably conclude that the constituent element lexis is inapplicable. Still, poetic versus prosaic tactics suggest that perhaps one can think of tactics as language. Lexis is not broadly logos, but Heidegger’s thoughts on language beg relation to the comprehension or decoding of the action as coordinated movements through space in time. [W]hen does language speak itself as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touches us with its essential being. (59) We can think of the patterns of play instilled by any tactical system as lexical items. Indeed, a tactical lexicography is implied or simply an ambition when we say the Spanish are playing the 4-3-3 and the Dutch are playing a 4-5-1. Tactics and psychological motivation are the twin and sole aims of all communication on the pitch. Tactics establish a code of play and playing among teammates who play a different tactical game is like being caught in a conversation spoken in an unfamiliar tongue. Whether or not this is merely an apt analogy requires further consideration of how language beckons us as we think through and communicate playing methodologies, establishing systems of play as modes of diction, be they crude or eloquent. The Dutch opted for prose but the Spaniards were rewarded for their commitment to poetic ideals of play. Melos or sound might, just as language, seem initially to be applied at best as metaphor. One often refers to melodic or symphonic displays of individual or collaborative technique, but to speak of a choral or orchestral Spain in contrast with the heavy metal bang and clatter of the Dutch play. Beyond this, is melody applicable to the critical analysis of a soccer match? The incessant buzz of the vuvuzuela is the sonic legacy of this summer’s World Cup. As Arsene Wenger decried this summer, their sound “kills one of the charms of football the songs. The vocal support disappears. […] I find it uncomfortable […] an absolute nightmare” (qtd. Clarke). It wasn’t until the 63rd minute, when Robben missed his breakaway opportunity, that their sound seemed dimmed by the roar of the crowd. The thud of the ball and the shouted interactions between players and officials were barely discernable but present nonetheless, begging a new sporting aesthetic of sound. The telecast narrative interferes with the sonic aura offered by the live event, the payoff to the punter’s pilgrimage. An aesthetic of sport informed by the Aristotelian dramaturgy provokes a call for the quasi-epic narrative representation provided by the live commentators. We don’t need someone to think and explain for us, providing commentary throughout the course of a play at the theatre, and we don’t have that when we spectate at the live 88 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 sporting event, so why must we either listen to commentary or turn off the volume when watching a telecast? Let it be an option for us to hear the sounds of the game as if we are there live. Spectacle or opsis is, according to Aristotle, the least significant of the constituent elements. And while the clash of the orange against the navy blue and the patterns of the players moving across the pitch in harmony with the ball (or indeed the cacophony of violent contact) provided optic pleasure, this summer’s World Cup Final was shy on the spectacular, the overly aggressive play seeking to stifle creativity. But this corresponds with Aristotle’s notion that the plot should inspire emotions in one simply listening to the events as they unfold, and this game certainly did so. Pundits were swift to deplore the display and to demonize the Dutch for their anti-aesthetic sins. But I was struck the day after by a voice message left by my children’s baby-sitter, telling me she loved watching her first soccer game, finding it thrilling and wondering which side I had been cheering. Her tactical illiteracy didn’t keep her from an appreciation of the drama due to the strength of the plot, the compelling display of character and the splendor of the spectacle. The thought that some kind of moral vindication was achieved despite the repression of technique didn’t factor into her valuation of whether or not this was a well-played-game. And this is precisely how the Aristotelian application of a dramaturgical critical methodology can enhance the sporting experience, as we identify what constituent elements are in crisis at any given game or play. This takes us back to the etymological roots of drama and allows us to see sport as art in an essential manner. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries, we also see not only Aristotle’s dramaturgy more clearly defined, we find his view of telos undermined, as the Beautiful Game teaches us that the most spectacular moments are not contingent upon product but reveal themselves as process—an unconcealment of truth as beauty, revealed as the truth of sport.

Notes . 1 Drama scholarship is here understood broadly as coming from the disciplines of literary, theatre, cultural and performance studies.

2. Abiding by the convention of dramatic scholarship, the action will be represented in the present tense.

3. Here we touch on the unique ontology of soccer as exceptional moments trigger interruptions or pauses in play while nonetheless maintaining a spatial continuum, with the exceptions of kickoffs for goals and the halftime intermission. The infrequency and brevity of interruption is one of the game’s many virtues.

4. David Winner’s observation that “[t]he harsher, less lovable new spirit in football seems to fit quite well with the harsher, less lovable new spirit in the Netherlands” has proven Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 89

prophetic as a resolution to a debate in Dutch football he characterizes as “almost theological in nature” (264).

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Giulianotti, Richard. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999. Print.

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