“The wait is finally over,” announced Martin Tyler — legendary English football commentator — in 2016, for the then-newly released video game FIFA 16. “The world’s most captivating sport returns for another year of drama, intrigue, beauty and suspense. Football is back.”
And now all the major football leagues are back in real life. The Champions League draws have been made, nicely coinciding with students settling into their school-year schedules. Football slots in neatly in our daily routines; it is common to see Premier League or Champions League matches watched in dining halls, libraries and dorms — before, during and after classroom hours. For many on campus, watching football is as integral to the day as brushing your teeth, studying and going to the gym. Billions more around the world share these habits, and we are all the audience fueling this trillion-dollar sports economy (yes, with a “T”).
Such enthusiasm for the world’s game seems rarer in the humanities. We have notable literary football fans such as Albert Camus and Gabriel García Márquez, but it is more common to encounter the stereotype of the contrarian curmudgeon sneering at “sportsball” fans. Few writers embodied this stereotype more completely than the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He loathed football. He called it “aesthetically ugly” and detested the tribalism associated with watching games and what he saw as its commercialized, prepackaged spectacle. (“Esse Est Percipi,” a short story he co-wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares, features fake football matches staged by actors. Perfectly summarizes his view of football’s competitiveness.) His hatred for the sport was not all talk. Borges once scheduled a public lecture in Buenos Aires to conflict with Argentina’s opening game in the 1978 World Cup against Hungary. “Soccer is one of England’s biggest crimes,” he said. And in a masterclass in snobbery, he added: “Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.”
I am not here to convince the Borgesian skeptics to abandon their distaste, or that they ought to tune in every day to see Lamine Yamal or Kylian Mbappé play. Many of the criticisms of football and sports in general identify real problems, including tribalism, mass commercialization, political corruption, FIFA’s moral bankruptcy, etc. I instead want to emphatically push back against the claim that football has no aesthetic value. Fans are highly attuned to differences of style, and we invest time in distinguishing between the beautiful and the ugly. Football is not always beautiful. Like art, however, it has developed its own aesthetic vocabulary and its own standards of beauty and ugliness.
Fans habitually speak about football in aesthetic terms, down to the very vocabulary fans employ. “A picture-perfect strike,” “a delightful touch,” “a sumptuous pass” are common expressions of praise given to excellent performances. Watch highlights of Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and you may find commentators describe these players as “pure magicians,” able to “dance through a sea of defenders” and pick out the top corner for a “sublime finish.” Aesthetics is etched into its very identity, down to its most famous nickname, popularised by Pelé: “the beautiful game.”
Just like an art form, football has its own subjective hierarchies of taste, what counts as ‘low’ and ‘high’ form. At one pole is the style celebrated as "futebol-arte" or “halalball”; it is that pure, fluid, attack-minded play, the kind which inspires adoration in millions. This purer style can be achieved with many different footballing tactics, but several features recur across them: methodical, perfectly sequenced, intended to create smooth patterns of passing, dribbling and scoring. Think of Jack Wilshere’s goal for Arsenal against Norwich in 2013. Wilshere starts by intercepting and dribbling past a player before giving a simple pass to his left. The midfielder Santi Cazorla dribbles the ball near the penalty box before starting an incredible sequence of one-touch passes between Wilshere, Cazorla and striker Olivier Giroud, each Norwich defender arrives at places the ball had just ceased to be, ending with a clean finish from Wilshere. Movement, timing, precision, finesse, wrapped in a single goal. And the viewer experiences the similar shiver of delight we feel when encountering great art.
Let’s move on to describing the ‘low’ form, only employed by true villains of the game. It goes by many derisive and loaded terms: “haramball,” “anti-football,” “football terrorism,” etc. Masters of the dark arts include managers like Diego Simeone, José Bordalás, Massimiliano Allegri and many more dastardly figures. Haramball represents defensive, risk-averse and boring play, a team trading excitement and fluidity for making sure all team members are behind the ball, killing any attacking play before they develop. For fans of a particular club, haramball may be a necessary evil in some cases, a last resort for securing victory, especially useful against stronger opposition. Yet for the managers mentioned above, it is a total system, the first resort, a way of life. The most miscreant managers would even forgo any pretense of fair play and encourage any form of time-wasting and unsportsmanlike conduct to stifle play with the ball. Many a football fan scorns this stylistically hideous form in the same way art critics castigate works that are kitsch.
Distinctions of style are not solely in the realm of managerial tactics. Footballing style depends as much on the players’ intelligence and creativity as on the manager’s system. Gorgeous, smooth, entertaining play strongly correlates with greatness; almost acting as a prerequisite in GOAT debates. Frank Lampard may have surpassed Zinedine Zidane statistically, but Zidane was the more brilliant artist. That is (partially) why he has more individual accolades. We remember moments when Messi or Ronaldo do something that knocks us off our chairs, eyes widening at how they made the defender look silly. Statistics may tell us who is better, but beauty is why we keep watching.
Indeed, there is plenty within football’s institutions and culture that is ugly: its tribalism, corruption and commercialization, and we ought to be critical of those elements. But none of that negates football’s aesthetic dimension. And at its best, football truly contains the inventiveness, joy and creativity that rivals art.
Basil Bob is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at bbob@cornellsun.com.
