The Beautiful Game

"Football is the most beautiful of all the arts. Because it is art. Art is about spontaneity. The quest for spontaneity is fundamental in art and football expresses it best."
Eric Cantona

I suspect the reason I write at monotonous and pained length about why football is more than a game is because of a chip on my shoulder. While my friends discuss art, theatre and music I only really have the ability to talk about the nuances of the late 1990s Leicester City team. Maybe my desire to elevate football is because of my own inadequacy, my lack of ability to comprehend why van Gogh is lauded as a master while van Persie is disparaged as just another sportsman. Maybe I write about ideas because they don’t require any research. Or maybe, just maybe, I, like Eric before me, think football really is an art. Or at least that it gives me the same wonder and pleasure as more established arts give my more learned friends. It is, after all, the beautiful game; a semi-improvised theatre that captivates billions week after week after week. So, to borrow my favourite thing to say when lagging behind in galleries: It is magnificent, but is it art?

It doesn’t seem that odd a question to ask on reflection; the language of art suffuses that of the game. Lionel Messi, as any blogger in search of an acclamation will tell you, is an artist. Tomas Rosicky is The Little Mozart, while Tony Pulis is a master of the dark arts. Players act, they are on song, they dance through defences like poetry in motion until the fat lady sings. My own team play the beautiful game not at a stadium, but at The Theatre of Dreams. And we live in a breathtaking tactical age. From Barcelona to Munich, via Highbury and Islington, there exists splendour on an unprecedented scale in the game; football that at times seems to produce beauty simply for beauty’s sake. As Arsene Wenger himself said:

“I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art. And football is like that.”

If any team do transform the mundane into the beautiful it is Wenger’s Arsenal; a maelstrom of passing and movement that makes me, despite my allegiance to a fierce rival, will them on. I’m not entirely joking when I say that this goal by Jack Wilshere is among the most perfect, staggering and seemingly artistic things I have ever seen; the very epitome of the spontaneity Cantona demands. Arsenal needn’t play like this, indeed many of their supporters beg them not to as they eke out yet another passing triangle when the dying game cries out for a lofted ball into the box. Yet they do, chasing the higher ideal Wenger desires at the cost of efficiency and, more often than not in recent years, ultimate victory.

Arsenal are far from alone. The Dutch team of the 1970s embodied the concept of total football; a free flowing exchange of players and positions that hypnotised spectators and opposition alike. Eric Hobsbawm, the great historian, said that anyone who had seen the Brazil side of the 1970 World Cup, arguably the greatest team ever fielded, would be in no doubt that football was art. More recently the rise of tika-taka in Catalonia brought beauty back to football. After decades of defensive solidity, suddenly dancing attacks were back like an avant garde explosion after years of censorship. Here was football that was worth watching not simply for goals or victory, but rather for the pursuit itself. As any football hipster will tell you, goals are overrated.

This is nothing new. Football is called the beautiful game for a reason; that it can be romantic and aesthetically pleasing is far from revelatory. It’s magnificent, but is it art? Well, as someone at a party flirting with my housemate once said, ‘what even is art?’. I am neither knowledgeable nor intelligent enough to answer this question, but Google’s top hit, ‘works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’, will suffice. This is perhaps where the problem lies. Football is incidentally beautiful; an occasional glimpse of wonder in a wider pursuit of victory. Arsenal, Holland, Brazil and Barcelona have all produced artistic football, but they have used it not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to dominate.

I am tempted to say that this doesn’t matter; architecture is art with function, where beauty comes alongside a pragmatic purpose. But here form is distinct from function; Heathrow Terminal 5 is no more beautiful because it operates well, its structure can be viewed as art quite aside from how many passengers it successfully accommodates. Football is not quite the same; we cannot extricate beauty from success. Arsenal’s passage of play is elevated because it is capped with a goal. Messi is an artist because his pirouettes invariably lead Barcelona to victory, total football so stunning because its beauty led to utter dominance. Many teams play superb passing games, but their artistic merit rises with their conventional success. It is impossible to separate beautiful football from its ultimate function; victory. If the primary goal of art is beauty, the goal of football, however seemingly artistic, remains goals. As Thierry Henry, lead actor in Wenger’s greatest side, mused: “sometimes in football you have to score goals”.

As someone far more intelligent explained to me, function cannot be the primary aim of art. Football, at least over 90 minutes games in front of baying crowds demanding trophies, perhaps never can fulfil this criteria. So slope off back to the pub I will, unable to trump chat about Raphael with chat about Rafael. In reality though, it doesn’t really matter how we define the game. Even looking at it as an art is helpful; we should appreciate that sometimes beauty should be prized above success, and that we are privileged to live in an age where madmen like Wenger and Cantona can strive, even unsuccessfully, for a higher ideal. The beautiful game is just a game. But it’s a a lot more interesting than the fucking Culture Show.