“I understand sports really well, really well.”
Nope.
Everything you’re about to read could well be utter nonsense. What do I know about being right, let alone about being wrong? It’s not like the world has conferred on me the dubious distinction of being President of the United States of Advertising, yet here I am acting all righteous on the Internet about the top dog fouling up my lawn.
Just know I know I’m wrong, and he’s wrong, and the only questions are how wrong.
Most people, either because it was what stood out to them from the full eight-minute episode or because it was what the algo fed them in eight-second installments with rapid-fire subtitles in bubble font, got caught up on the flagrant corruption. To seasoned soccerball observers, that was old hat, because flagrant corruption is the global game’s middle name. You can choose to be mad about that or you can choose popcorn, but it’s no good acting like you’ve never seen Casablanca.1
As for UEFA’s whiter-than-white contention that the integrity of the game and the credibility of a competition depend on the certainty of rules, goodness gracious, the gall of it, given their own capricious knee-bending for the sportswashing class. More fundamentally, though, you don’t need to theorize a conspiracy to understand that the rules of the game are determined on a case-by-case basis by referees at the mercy of what they had for breakfast. It’s hopeless holding out for consistency in a world where similar is not a synonym for the same. “Seen ‘em given” is properly understood as a sardonic acknowledgement that close calls can and will go either way, not that 52/48 Scenario A and 48/52 Scenario B are indistinguishable.
Which brings us to the rub. None of us, not even the top dog himself, can reliably tell 52 units of foul from 52 units of not-foul in real time, or in super slow-mo, or with the help of a man in a van. Importantly for the employment prospects of human referees, there’s no world in which my editor will be able to solve this either. Technologies old and new can help make objective calls more accurate, your offsides and suchlike, but they can’t see inside the matrix, so they can’t precisely weigh each of the very many foul and not-foul factors. Even if they could, they still can’t eliminate the need for subjective judgement about where the line is between yellow and red. We’re stuck with the choice between codifying absolutely everything to the nth degree and you know it when you see it.
Given how much everybody fucking hated their experience living in the experiment with handball being codified as the ball hitting a hand, I don’t fancy our chances with that literalism for absolutely everything. Trusting ourselves and each other to know it when we see it is often our best shot, despite the unfortunate reality that we don’t really know what we’re seeing.
Out there (probably) is a world containing fouls and photons, and sometimes some of the photons bounce off a foul and onto a camera lens, where they’re converted by science or magic into signals that traverse the globe either by undersea cable or via space, get converted again into photons by the electric screen machine before bouncing through the bullseye onto a retina. From there, it’s electric signals again, first firing the optic nerve and co, then triggering more inside the visual cortex among other regions, and at the last a highly complex configuration of coincident firings gets converted (somehow) into ideas about what a foul is and whether one has occurred in the land of the free and the home of the brave advertisers.2
There is a world (probably) in which there are fouls (hard to imagine a world without them), and there are our models of them. These might be similar, but they are assuredly not the same. For all the elaboration of our many and varied cortexes, our brains are very small and very simple compared to the unfathomably vast complexity of the universe. I pride myself more than I ought on being an 8.5 on the scale of sporting understanding, and I’m absolutely all for trying hard to get to 9, but the key thing to keep in mind is that none of us know how high the scale goes, only that it goes an awful lot higher than 10. If it goes up to 1001, say, then the difference between 8.5 and 9, or 8.5 and zero, doesn’t matter as much as it might seem from up close.
It’s perilously easy to lose sight of what we don’t know, to in one sentence candidly admit we don’t know what the hell a red card means, and in the next proclaim that we understand sports really well, really well. To candidly admit we don’t know what the hell Thomas Tuchel is doing or why, and proclaim that he should be doing it differently.
Tommy Tooks blindsided me with the concede-possession-and-counter-quickly approach to playing at Azteca altitude, and I struggled to tell whether it was working until it very obviously worked twice in two minutes. I’m willing to bet though that next time out, back down at sea level against an opponent freakishly well equipped to wield uncontested possession dangerously, he’ll revert to his preferred press-and-possess. This is his tried-and-tested way of showing the rest of us we don’t know what we’re looking at, because what we see as extended periods of aimlessly passing side to side failing to make anything good happen, he sees as the successful implementation of his plan to prevent anything bad happening. Tommy never forgets that everything’s a tradeoff.3
When you watch the England game this weekend, or when you watch a game somewhere other than the pub at a time other than 10pm on Saturday, try noticing. Notice what you understand about what a particular player is doing at a particular moment and why he might be doing it, the benefits and the costs. And then notice that there are 21 other players, and that it’s very hard to hold each of them in mind simultaneously, let alone confidently claim what any of them ought to do next given that it depends on what each of the others might do next, and that’s even before you factor in the referee and the man in a van and the ambiguous set of rules. Notice that you probably don’t understand football really well after all.
That’s ok. Good, even. Lord knows, we can stand to learn lessons in humility. For all the vagaries of its rulebook, football at least has a well-specified goal and caps the moving parts at 22 and change. We might not know exactly how to score more while conceding less, but we can make out the contours of the map and where we want to aim.
When you’re done noticing that football defies our comprehension, notice that football is very small and very simple compared to the rest of life.
Training data
🎵Mr. November (2005). “The English are waiting and I don't know what to do / In my best clothes / I'm the new blue blood / I'm the great white hope.”4
📣A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs (2019). If Tommy Tooks can’t unmoor you from your preconceived ideas, let Higgsy have a crack.
📝Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways (2026). The scientific method and modern medicine seem to have missed an entire circulatory system for centuries despite countless learned cultures having been tapping into it for millennia. Stay humble out there.
Next play
Everything is a tradeoff
It’s not just that football is like a short blanket, as the goatee-toting manager Rafa Benitez was famous for saying, always forcing hard tradeoffs between covering space in attack and defence like a sad camper choosing between a cold head and cold feet. “Real life” is this way too.
Same playlist, ever growing
Second most self-aware line from the episode, about the arbitrary power wielded by referees: “Wow, that’s a lot of power, that’s terrible.”
I don’t think my editor has or ever will directly experience the world. I don’t think I have or ever will either. We both are stuck working with a limited set of signals that add up to a better or worse representation of the world. There isn’t some moat around me and my experience which my editor could never cross.
Press-and-possess is not to be confused with counterpressing. Both start with moving up the pitch to put pressure on the opposition when they gain possession to shut down their counter-attacks before they begin, and then they diverge. (Concede-possession-and-counter doesn’t involve pressing to begin with.) Counterpressing uses turnovers won by the press to launch counter-attacks of one’s own, counter begetting counter and creating the disorienting experience Jurgen Klopp characterised as heavy metal football. Everybody agrees this is fun and brave. Press-and-possess uses turnovers as a chance to reset, get everybody into position, and studiously explore the possibility of attacking in a way that doesn’t expose you to the counter by allowing too many men to get ahead of themselves or ahead of the ball. Everybody agrees this is boring and cowardly.
“…I won’t fuck us over.”