When they first stopped football over the pandemic I was, in a way, actually rather glad. Watching Crystal Palace — low scoring and fighting for very little, beyond the start of the season — wasn’t as good as it had been.
It went wider than this, though. I’d used to like watching games as a neutral, but now would be indifferent. Or, at least, I’d feel indifferent; I still very regularly watched matches.
Anyway, that all went after it came back, after three months. I was hooked. I watched basically anything. I have been starved. The matches were often the best part of a dry day (of course, the days’ dryness was also, I suspect, a key part of the explanation here).
A big part of this changed relationship to football relates to what I think might be a different appreciation of football.
There are three ways to enjoy sport, for me.
The first is on the emotional, thought-less, visceral level — a last minute goal, your team has twenty minutes to find an equaliser or they’re out the World Cup, two behemoths going head to head in the Champions League, that sort of thing (what you might call plot-driven).
Secondly, aesthetically; in terms of beauty (which is how an England fan can enjoy Maradona’s first goal in the 1986 World Cup Final).
And, thirdly, the cerebral — the analysis of tactics, primarily, and the observation of them in play. Football is a great game for this third one — it’s so ridiculously simple at its core (get a ball to a place) that it opens up a vast amount of possibilities: there is an almost infinite amount of different ways to get that ball to that place, and to stop the opposition getting the ball to the place they want to get it to, and so infinite tactics. Before lockdown, I’d never really engaged in the third way of enjoying football. My brain, during the moments where the plot wasn’t really going anywhere and nothing beautiful was happening, would be thinking about other stuff.
But that changed. I think that might primarily be due to Tifo Football’s wonderful Youtube channel, full of knowledge that I wantonly (and, undoubtedly, badly) pass off as my own in casual conversation.
Something that I’ve thought is that the above makes a pretty good claim for sport being inherently greater than narrative art (films, books, plays; stories) if — if — all of the above facets of sport are both present and appreciated (not to mention if a given audience member appreciates them in the first place).
I’ve thought that — the initial thought about sport and narrative art there — because in art, whilst we can have and appreciate both the plot stuff and the aesthetic stuff, at least for me the cerebral stuff seems to get in the way of enjoyment of art, and enjoyment of those things particularly. Thoughts in my head ruin my experience of narrative art, because it disrupts the flow of senses into my head. Sport — for me — would be subject to the exact same problem if it were not for the fact that sport is a problem, like a maths problem; it’s a problem to be solved. Although plot-driven art shares this, in plot-driven art (save for, perhaps, the very youngest of children) there is no genuine suspense over what could happen, there is no infinite scope of possibilities. What will happen will happen. It was predetermined (could we have exceptions here for improvised stuff viewed live?). In viewing sport, the problems we are solving feel more real. Of course, for the viewer they stand no chance of influencing the solution deployed for this problem; only the football players and staff can. In that sense, the experience is similar to narrative art. But the fact that others can change this, whereas they can’t in art, means that it nonetheless feels more real: a vicarious sense of infinite-possibility, cerebral, problem-solving beauty flows into us.
But, of course, there’s a key problem with the above: it isn’t really true. When following narrative art, I do find myself finding meaning, both of the plot and the aesthetics, and that usually involves some sort of conscious thought process in my head — so enjoyable cerebral stuff is there, it’s just different from sport. That’s not to say that the above is completely untrue, however. This does disrupt the flow of senses. But I couldn’t say, as a rule, if this is more good than simply allowing the flow of senses to continue. Is it, perhaps, true that even if we do enjoy the cerebral stuff we’d enjoy an internal-narrative-free, pure sensory experience more? Given how I experience narrative art when I’m under the influence of something — and the self-doubting, anxious parts of my self is quieter — which, for me at least, involves a heightened awareness of all three of those parts of enjoyment I’ve described, cerebral included, I’m tempted to say that what is closest to the most enjoyment is some combination of all three.
Additionally, there’s something that narrative art, at first glance, has, and football doesn’t, which is deliberately created meaning outside of itself. Jonathan Franzen describes creating a story — or, a novel, at least — as (deliberately) creating meaning, or at least it is when done well. There is perhaps no easier way to understand this than to look at football and narrative art. In a football match, in terms of intention, a goal is just a goal. A tackle is just a tackle. Even a beautiful piece of play is just that. It will only ever be meant as such. An action’s only intentionally created meaning is entirely self-referential, bounded within the terms of the game. Whereas, in narrative art, a shot or a written image can have deliberately created meaning outside of itself — think the indigenous Amazonian standing unsurely in a cold, modern hospital, which happened in a film I saw recently — as can plot. Okay, so in theory there could be people out there deliberately illustrating, say, the transience of life through, say, beautiful play, as is theoretically possible, but if they are they are likely an extreme minority — sport is about winning, and this type of activity would surely detract from the pursuit of that task.
(This sort of discussion raises the question of what about the life lived around the outside of the actual playing of football — e.g., Gazza’s tears . This could be thought of — to use paraphrase, and also to truly cross the rubicon in terms of pretence — as life as art (if, again, almost certainly unintentional art); clearly, it’s not part of the match, but it’s also not clearly what we might traditionally think of as art.
Of course, art itself could have this peripheral life as art (the psychodrama around a film set, the tragicomedies marking many famous artists private lives, etc.) (as can all areas of life). But what makes sport’s instance of this different is that the life as art is so close to the events themselves, because it is real. We see players’ emotions before, during and after games.)
But but but. Football, and sport more widely, can have meaning for us beyond simply a goal being a goal, for example. Think the conquering of everything as displayed by Usain Bolt running 9.58 across 100 metres, of England scaling insurmountable odds to beat Australia at Headingley in 1981, of a new feeling of togetherness created in a Brexit-ravaged country by England’s World Cup in 2018.
Sport’s meaning is, all at once, more real and less real than the meaning we get from narrative art. It’s less real in the sense that it is not deliberately created (but, actually, does this matter? Surely, if a given meaning is created, it doesn’t matter if it was meant to be by the creator or not).
But it’s more real in the sense that these are real actions happening. There is no lie in a footballer scoring a goal, whereas there is always a lie of some scale in acting or fictional writing. Even ‘real’ narrative art — autobiographies and documentaries — suffers from this, because they are edited: created. (So, in a way, the most true art ever created was Big Brother) (I’m aware that I have just reached the peak of the self-parody mountain that I’ve been climbing for much of this). Perhaps football on television, as a separate entity, a programme, suffers from this in a very small way. But the match itself doesn’t, and won’t.
