The Neurotic Genius of Football

“The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty.” – Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow.

The opening line from Eduardo Galeano’s masterpiece of football history, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, could be my entire review of David Winner’s celebrated “Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer”. It’s a book in which Dutch football starts out with a revolution wrapped in art, architecture, and culture and ends up with the Dutch national football team kicking lumps out of its past.

There’s an unspoken tension at the heart of football. We love football for moments of chaos and great beauty while at the same time demanding order and duty. These are two seemingly opposite forces which often cancel each other out: it’s difficult to fully enjoy an FA Cup final goal scored by Aaron Ramsey if you are too busy thinking about how he abandoned his midfield space and left Arsenal open to the counter attack. We both want a creative attacking player and curse him when his chaotic creativity loses possession. We love players who have their own style off the field, but they aren’t allowed to be too outspoken because they have a duty to the game and the club.

Galeano laid the blame for this on the industrialization of football, “When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.” But from a fan perspective, this impulse to professionalize the sport comes from a desire to avoid the agony of defeat. We want players to track back, stay in position, not get caught out, play the right pass first time, move the ball exactly where we see the opening at the moment that we see it – not out of a desire to maximize profits at the expense of joy (though I suppose there is some currency exchanged in “joy bucks”) but to control that which we have no control over. To limit our exposure to pain.

But where Galeano also gets it wrong is that there is a space between beauty and duty: order can be beautiful if it’s done right. Though, one should be careful not to slip too far in either direction.

I have to put a caveat on this book review: I am not a student of Dutch football. I know Dennis Bergkamp, I know that Robben likes to cut in on his left foot, that Robin van Persie will stab the holy father in the back (“guys”), and I know that Howard Webb should have sent off Nigel de Jong for his kung-fu kick on Alonso. I am vaguely aware of the mythology of the Dutch national team, I know the concept of Total Football (probably not as well as I should), and I think there are a few more things I have forgotten but the point is to say that I’m no expert on the Netherlands.

Reading Brilliant Orange was the deepest dive I’ve done into the halcyon waters of Dutch football. David Winner does a fantastic job of weaving a portrait of the country and how their culture informs the way that they play and, most importantly, played football.

At times Brilliant Orange reads like an academic work. Like an anthropological study of Dutch football. Like a Stephen Jay Gould book, Winner uses art and architecture to describe how the Dutch have been see-sawing between functionalism and rebellion. Hoping to create more playful and flexible structures – both real buildings and in the case of the Dutch teams of the 70’s their football – but also needing to be practical, for after all the Netherlands is built on a system of dikes and levees.

The late 60s and early 70s were a time of youth rebellion and in Holland that rebellion centered around Amsterdam. Where in the USA we had the hippies, Amsterdam had Provos. A group of young anarchists and anti-consumerists who used play to challenge the squares. And it’s Amsterdam where the Dutch football rebellion took place as well, specifically at Ajax.

Ajax was where Total Football erupted. A style and philosophy of football which challenged rigid interpretations and valued fun, beauty and art over all: even – and maybe especially – over winning.

Ajax was a revolution. Out went strict positional discipline and in came more fluid and dynamic football – when the fullback ran forward he knew he would be covered by a teammate. But it wasn’t just position switching, there was also a high press employed. And a totally new way of talking about football in terms of space – occupying space, collapsing space to be more efficient, opening up spaces, thinking about space as three dimensional, and even recognizing space and time work together to create opportunities.

There’s an entire chapter dedicated to the question of “who created Total Football” and the answer is like a lot of things: not 100% clear, probably unfair to credit one or even two people, and obviously a result of what was brewing in society at the time.

Johan Cruyff is sometimes credited with creating the playing style but his teammates reject that notion. In fact it’s a bit frustrating that every time David Winner gives you a clue to the riddle he steals it away: Rinus Michels (coach of Ajax at the time) claims that he invented position switching (or encouraged it) and Sjaak Swart (a winger on that Ajax side) claims it happened naturally – when one player went forward, another would go back to cover for him. And Barry Hulshoff (another Ajacied) points out that while there was some position switching it wasn’t always the best plan because “the quality of the attack is not so good when the attackers are defenders… And the attackers are not such good defenders.”

What I don’t want to do is get into an argument about who created Total Football. Rinus Michels and most of the other folks interviewed in the book consider it a collaborative project. And from what I gather it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the system arose out of the culture of the time as much as it was the brainchild of any one or two people. You could say “Cruyff created Total Football” and I would say “yes, but what created Cruyff?” That is not to diminish the impact Cruyff had on football, but rather to point out that even genius has an origin in something bigger.

It was a system which placed heavy emphasis on economic use of space and this is a fundamentally Dutch way of looking at the world! The Netherlands is a country which literally crafts ground where there was water and the Dutch people have a special collaborative relationship because of the need to work together to keep water at bay. Cruyff didn’t create that culture, but he did create the language needed to communicate those ideas from something inherent and unspoken to something which could be taught and passed on.

One of my favorite illustrations of this special relationship to space is by the artist (and football fan) Jeroen Henneman. He describes a pass from Dennis Bergkamp to Nicolas Anelka:

When Bergkamp was playing with Nicolas Anelka, Anelka would be covered, like this, by two men. So Bergkamp would give a very beautiful curved pass forward and a little to the side. Anelka would start to run as the pass was hit and his defenders would go with him. But because the pass was curved, Anelka is closer to the ball. Before the pass, Anelka was out of the game, marked by two defenders. Now he is completely free and heading to the goal where he will score. It’s a miracle. One moment the pitch is crowded and narrow. Suddenly it is huge and wide and Anelka can show his speed and skill. He cannot be touched anymore. A pass like this is not hit very hard, but it must be very precise. In Holland everybody wants to do it like this, not to score the goal. It’s a beautiful thing, a beautiful curved ball, and it is effective. It is also quiet, modest. No one dances and takes their shirt off after a pass like this.

A noob might be tempted to think Bergkamp just booted the ball up to Anelka but Bergkamp wasn’t just lumping a pass, he was playing three dimensional chess.

At the exact time when Dutch football was at its artistic peak, it was also under assault from the traditionalists. From people who wanted to make it more functional, to make it more victorious.

Again, going back to Galeano at the top, this is a

It’s well known that the Dutch lost two World Cups, 74 and 78. Winner tries to explain this as a function of the mentality of those teams – that they wanted to be beautiful more than they wanted to win. Sounding remarkably like Arsene Wenger 30 years later Cruyff backs him up,

“I don’t go through life cursing the fact that I didn’t win a World Cup. I played in a fantastic team that gave millions of people watching a great time. That’s what football is all about. The Dutch team of the 70s was fantastic to watch. People say that to me every day here in France. They talk about us in awe. That is the biggest reward I can have as an ex-player.

There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style. As a coach, my teams might have won more games if we’d played in a less adventurous way… but if people say that Barcelona were playing the nicest football in the world with me as coach, what more can I ask for?

Cruyff changed the world forever with his tenure as coach of Barcelona. Xavi – who is obsessed with DNA – says Cruyff “created Barca’s DNA”. Guardiola likens Cruyff’s tenure at Barcelona to painting the Sistine Chapel and says all subsequent coaches “merely restore or improve it.”

But what’s incredible is that at the heart of this revolution there was a counter-revolution. Almost as soon as the Dutch lost the 1978 World Cup people started demanding a more pragmatic approach. And this too is even rooted in Dutch culture, argues Winner.

For example, keepy-uppies aren’t very Dutch, “what is the function? that’s a very dutch principle. Lots of people think being able to keep the ball in the air by kicking it 3000 times is football. But that is not football. The good player is the player who touches the ball only once. And knows where to run.”

And even the Dutch political system (which seems like a utopia compared to the USA right now) is the antithesis of the Beautiful Game: “The political system is designed to be dull. If anything exciting, interesting, or dramatic ever happens in Dutch politics, it means that something’s gone horribly wrong.”

And so Dutch football went from Total Football to Louis van Gaal football: the 442 was brought in, players were expected to stop dribbling (because they might lose the ball), the emphasis was on strength, running, working hard and not so much on art or flair.

Galeano criticized this in his book “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”

Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not for play but rather to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.

This joy-killing football actually became so much the norm in the Netherlands that the 2010 World Cup was a theater of the absurd. On the one side, you had the Spanish national team, which had adopted many aspects of the Dutch style of football from Cruyff and on the other side you had a brutalist, minimalist, pragmatic Dutch team. At one point, Nigel de Jong challenged Alonso for a ball in midfield and he planted his studs into the Spaniard’s chest. But it wasn’t like he was kicking a man so much as kung-fu kicking his own nation’s history.

The subtitle of this book is “The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer” but I don’t think that this neurosis is peculiarly Dutch. The dichotomy between people who want to see something beautiful and those who don’t care as long as they win is a topic we argue about daily in football blogs, newspaper columns, coffee houses, pubs, literally anywhere that football is discussed. It may even be the fundamental tension in the game itself: a fight between order and chaos, between art and pragmatism. We fans want something beautiful but we also want to win. Or at least, more accurately we don’t want to suffer the pain of defeat and are willing to sacrifice joy at the altar of painlessness.

And since I reject dualisms as fundamentally flawed I think football can be both and is ruined when it goes one way or the other too far. Though, to be fair, going too far toward art and beauty is a lot more enjoyable than whatever it is that Louis van Gaal or Jose Mourinho put out on the field. So, maybe it’s a spectrum and we just need to lean more toward joy.

Qq