The Perfect Storm

Football, famously, has no end. A match is gone in an instant, a season soon forgotten and even an era fades. For its followers the lack of ultimate victory is its beauty, for its detractors its futility. No team will ever win, no match will lead to any final conclusion. In the absence of such closure, it is only natural that we point to the game itself: maybe football can never be won, but perhaps it can be perfected. So from Cruyff’s total football to Barcelona’s tiki-taka, via the catenaccio of Italy's extraordinary era, we search for greatness. We search for a sign that a team can play the game, and win, in a way that seems unstoppably, unrelentingly perfect. The ideal game of chess, the mathematical formula that guarantees domination. Yet whenever a team seems to verge on it, they are derided. When perfection appears attainable we yearn for the excitement and beauty of imperfection. The irony is that when a team nears the ideal, they immediately distance themselves from how we really want football to be: fundamentally and magnificently chaotic.

It was an idea that first occurred to me when watching the great Barcelona side of Pep Guardiola. They were not the first beautiful side I had ever seen, nor the first utterly dominant one. But watching them beat my beloved Manchester United in 2011, it dawned on me that they were the first side that weren’t really playing football; or at least anything I recognised as football. Received wisdom about strong centre back, fast wingers and complete midfielders went out of the window; here was a team focussed utterly on monopolising possession above all else, strangling lesser men in their jaws. It felt like a paradigm shift, like Galileo or Newton or Einstein ripping up scientific truth and presenting a new world. And it was beautiful.

Yet even before that great team had begun to fade, they started to be derided. They were labelled, almost laughably, as boring. And while I utterly disagreed, I think I understood. Where is the fun in football if someone gets the ball at the beginning and doesn’t give it up until the end? It felt like they were cheating, or at least had discovered some loophole that needed to be closed. The best analogy I can give is when people say the eagles should have just flown the fucking ring to Mordor and skipped out the 12 hours in between. Well, yes, they could have, but that’s not really the point. Film, like football, needs risk, and Barcelona drained it out of the game.

Enter Jose Mourinho. In some ways Mourinho is the anti-Pep, but in some ways he is exactly the same. It’s like how the further left you go on the political spectrum you eventually stumble across the far-right. For they both, in their own radically different ways, approach football as a game to be perfected. Guardiola with the utter monopolisation of the ball, Mourinho with his complete disregard for it. One fundamentally proactive, the other unapologetically reactive. The result, however, is the same; their sides play a game unrecognisable, and unappealing, to the rest of us. They are two kids who have found the glitch in Mortal Kombat, and sit and spam the same button while their opponent tries ever more elaborate combos out in vain. Of course, neither Pep’s Bayern or Mourinho’s Chelsea are truly perfect yet, Chelsea in particular. They are perhaps the only two sides in Europe, however, who are even verging on it. And God does that make us hate them.

It makes us hate them, I believe, because we all really love imperfection. It is why we wanted Garry Kasparov to beat the chess computer Deep Blue. We want the flawed, emotional human to triumph over the relentlessly robotic. It’s even the plot to Rocky IV: the American with his heart on his sleeve against the giant, emotionless Soviet in Ivan Drago. Football is the very same: win, by all means, but win in a way which suggests you can be beaten. We love to watch Athletic Bilbao, Borussia Dortmund and Swansea precisely because they attempt beautiful football but with a weak underbelly. It’s why I so admire Arsenal. Wenger is a perfectionist, but his perfection is not unstoppable success, but simply aesthetics. Watching Arsenal attempt to build their house of cards in the wind is glorious because you know it can topple at any moment. Watching Pep’s teams at the peak of their power frustrating for exactly the opposite reason; you know they will always manage to place the final cards on top.

For all the arguments of the heart, it is important to return to my original point. In the absence of ultimate victory, there is a certain beauty in trying to perfect football. It may be boring, but it is commendable. And sometimes it is simply a privilege to watch. I smiled as Barcelona tore my team apart in much the same way I would wonder at Roger Federer as he dismantled Andy Murray time and again. In the absence of any chance of victory, all you can do in the face of relentless perfection is laugh. And the time will come when a perfect Mourinho side faces against a Guardiola side again. When, like Barcelona against Inter Milan in 2010, an unstoppable force careers into an immovable object and we can marvel at the results.

Yet secretly, and illogically, I will long for their downfall. Because isn’t it great when football descends to madness; goal-mouth scrambles, keepers up for the corner and the blood and fury of a desperate counter attack. Because yes, there is a certain beautiful simplicity to the eagles flying the ring to Mordor, and I don’t mind that people have found the loophole. But for all that, I would much rather watch the flawed, irritating and often useless Frodo stumble his way across 13 hours of classical music and crescendo dialogue only to fucking nearly fuck it up right at the death. The Arsenal of hobbits. My head may love the idea of perfect football, but it’s the myriad imperfections that really make it work.