Dear Billy (modernism, football)
Rather a Few Mistakes than Fucking Boredom
‘Soccer is popular,’ Jorge Luis Borges observed, ‘because stupidity is popular.’
This was the 60s, the era of Pelé — along with the nationalist Brazilian military dictatorship that claimed him as a national hero while it rounded up political dissidents.
Yet nationalism was only part of the trouble for Borges. ‘Football is aesthetically ugly,’ he said. ‘Eleven players against eleven others running after a ball are not particularly beautiful.’
I know you, and a lot of fans, would disagree. I love that Danny Blanchflower quote you told me ages ago! ‘The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.’ Remember I told you about that Tom Raworth poem called ‘Rather a Few Mistakes than Fucking Boredom’? The closest i’ve ever come to a mantra.
Thanks so much for recommending Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid — aesthetics pop up a surprising amount for a book on the history of football tactics. When Arsenal won the league in 1931 and 1933, football journalist Brian Glanville wrote of them ‘approaching the precision of a machine’. Wilson:
in their rapid transition from defence to attack, the unfussy functionalism of their style, there was a sensibility in keeping with the art deco surrounds of Highbury. The ‘machine’ analogy is telling, recalling as it does Le Corbusier’s reference to a house a ‘machine for living in’; this was modernist football.
Wilson continues:
William Carlos Williams, similarly, in a phrase that would become almost a slogan for his version of modernism, described a poem as ‘a machine made of words.. there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.’
Do you know his work, Bill? His 1934 poem ‘This is Just to Say’ (icebox, plums) turned into a meme a few years ago.
I thought there was a reference to it in Bojack too, but now I look it up I’m not so sure lol.
Anyway, parking William and his plums for now, if the 1930s was the era of Modernist football, what might today’s football say about the wider culture?
For Jonathan Wilson, Argentinian football manager Marcelo Bielsa is a Byronic hero. ‘Near misses and beautiful failure have become his narrative so that there is something of the alchemist about Bielsa, for ever questing vainly after the absolute.’
He’s a Mr. Ramsay type, concerned with beauty and failure — or perhaps a Lily Briscoe, in his acceptance of the two as a bundle. ‘Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again.’
If Bielsa is painted Woolfishly in Inverting the Pyramid, Wilson really lets loose when describing Pep Guardiola. Towards the end of his time at Barcelona, Pep was ‘in the grip of a fatalistic idealism’ and his ‘determination to play with fewer and fewer defenders became a form of martyrdom’:
As Samuel Weber, in his re-reading of Freud, asked, what better way for the ego, when facing its own dissolution, to assert mastery than to dissolve itself by following to the ultimate the philosophy to which it derived meaning? Rather than let his Barça fade away, rather than face the prospect of their philosophy being overcome, rather than risk the intervention of random events, Guardiola sought to stave off the entropic imperative by exaggerating what had made Barça great.
‘It was failure,’ Wilson writes, ‘but at least it was failure on his terms’.
Bielsa announces a shift in our modernist machine metaphor. ‘Totally mechanised teams are useless,’ he said, ‘because they get lost when they lose their script. I also don't like ones that only rely on the inspiration of their soloists, because when God doesn't turn them on, they are left totally at the mercy of their opponents.’
The question, then, is how ‘artistry is to be incorporated into a system, without becoming systematised to the point of predictability’. Arguably, Guardiola has solved this equation with the consistency of his Man City team — but you’d expect him to have cracked it with the sheer sums of money involved.
In 1934, the year of William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just To Say’, footballers’ wages rose to approximately double the average industrial wage at around £8 per week — something like £500 today. When Wilson first published Inverting the Pyramid in 2008, average weekly wages were at £30k — a figure that’s doubled over the past ten years.
Billy, it’s here that I get a bit stumped because I can’t actually comprehend what that kind of money feels like. What happens to beauty or to failure when you’re being paid the £385,000 per week that Pep does? If Lily Briscoe earned the same would she still worry her paintings were headed to the attic?
What does a plum taste like to the uber rich, ‘so sweet / and so cold’? Does he leave a note of apology?
I dunno, Bill. It’s one to continue in the pub. Beers could be £9 soon, can’t wait!
So sweet.
So cold
Who’s getting the first round in?
See you soon
S x