A collective dance | Soccer | Sports

Let’s imagine for a moment that there is no ball, that we are in the stands watching a soccer game, and the ball is invisible. What would we see? Twenty-two people (twenty-five, actually, when you count the refereeing team) running from one side to the other, jumping, colliding with each other, throwing themselves to the ground, sometimes grabbing each other’s shirts, fighting to occupy space, getting closer and farther away from each other of the others in a logic that is foreign to those who do not participate. Sometimes it would be with more dizzying movements, other times more slow; At some moments the participants would concentrate on specific places on the grass, such as the areas, and at others they would distance themselves, spreading out on the mat showing the drawings with which their choreographers arranged them on the field, drawings that can be expressed in numbers: four- four-two, five-three-two, four-three-three. We would see, in short, a dance, a collective dance, a series of movements that cannot be understood without each other, the first without the second, and so on. This aesthetic aspect of football as dance has been widely shown in the arts. Suddenly (what a beautiful expression), four works come to mind, although there are many more: the flamenco work Zarra from the company of Adriana Bilbao, granddaughter of the legendary Athletic forward; the audiovisual piece in which Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno followed Zidane’s movements during an entire match; the performance DiscoFoot from the Center Chorégraphique National-Ballet de Lorraine at the Center Pompidou in 2018 and some unforgettable scenes from the wonderful film The referee (2013), by Paolo Zucca.

But beyond the aesthetic question (or more here, if we look from the perspective of the world of sports), we will agree that in reality the job of every coach is precisely to try to control the group choreography of his team in relation to that proposed by the other. equipment. And there the movements are almost infinite. That is why those who think about the tactical part of football have to pay attention to where there is no ball in dispute. They are concerned with the movements that each player makes without possession, those that define spaces and will determine the play that will happen later. Because football is, ultimately, a group sport.

Betis footballer Héctor Bellerín has dedicated an article in the English magazine Mundial titled ‘Arsene Wenger and the art of football’ to what happens in a match beyond the ball. In it he vindicates the collectivity of the game embodied in the movements that go unnoticed in the statistics, those that a player makes for the good of his teammates and that sometimes the eyes of the fans do not see. He illustrates this with his former Arsenal teammate Alexandre Lacazette, wondering how to put into numbers everything that the French striker contributed to his team: his movements without the ball, the generation of spaces, the physical wear and tear to which he subjected the rival defense so that later another teammate put the icing on the cake of his work by converting a goal. Bellerín says (the translation is mine): “There are no numbers or Artificial Intelligence to even guess the work and impact of a truly good footballer (…)” and adds that he writes the article at three in the morning one night after of a match that ended with victory for his team and in which he felt like “(…) if a thread connected you with the rest of your teammates. Where the next move of the guy in front of you is something you knew was going to happen.” The Betis player concludes: “it is incredibly beautiful when it happens.”

Héctor Bellerín claims football as an art, a way of expressing oneself in a collective exercise. Reading it I thought about the dance, about the pieces of art mentioned and I remembered one more reason to always watch football in the stadium, where you have the complete perspective, that of the twenty-two people. Well, what is shown on television is only a part, a part filtered through the eye of the councilor, an eye that, like the statistics, is often blind to what is collective about this sport, this group art, this dance sometimes. wonderful.