Steeped in Paradoxes

Football resolves nothing. It just makes contradictions visible. Simple rules generate baroque complexity. A collective game demands solitary obsession. Random errors feel like systematic injustice. These tensions don’t resolve—they are the game. Football works not by solving its paradoxes but by making them communally legible, week after week, match after match.

“They’re just chasing a ball and kicking it with their feet.” It’s the simplicity, stupid! The rules of football are simple. Yet it generates intricacies. First of them: formations. Teams have lined up in different shapes through the ages but there has been a convergence towards three lines: defenders, midfielders, and attackers. Each has its duties: strength, intelligence, opportunism. Things used to be compartmentalized. Today we’re seeing something akin to Total Football. Now every player has to be smart. Even the goalkeeper! Things are more fluid. Fuck the industrial line! Kids on the street do not think of themselves as attackers or defenders, they just play: keep the ball, move to space. Formations are a lie. A team is a lung: it expands in possession, and contracts out of possession. The irony in all of this: to achieve simplicity, the coaching has to be excessively detailed. Hours of repetition are needed. From classical music to jazz music. But this emergent complexity hides another paradox: football’s collective nature depends on individual fixation.

You only need one rich sucker: the owner of the ball. Usually, he doesn’t hold it very long during the actual playtime. Footballers very rarely come from the higher classes of society. It’s not a sport that transmits their values: individuality, elegance, performativity. There’s a natural filter that makes the higher classes more prevalent in sports that require expensive equipment. To be an elite player, you only need to live with the ball. You need to play with it against a wall on your own. You need to dribble furniture. You need to shoot at trees. But once you’ve mastered the ball in solitude, football demands you give it away. It wasn’t always the case that players gifted the ball to their teammates. Football used to be like rugby: only backward passes were allowed. When the rules change, the game changes. Teams started adopting passes more and more. I enjoy the passing game thanks to Guardiola’s Juego de Posición. The speed of the ball creates opportunities; the collective nature brings something greater than individual brilliance; the conservation of energy allows for sustained pressure; and the spatial awareness turns football into a kind of geometric puzzle. That does not mean that I don’t appreciate the directness of a counter-attack. A counter is not the opposite of positional play; it’s positional play when time collapses.

The individual’s obsession, the collective’s ritual—both depend on the same illusion: that the chaos on the pitch can be made to mean something. Enter the referee. The referee exists in a fascinating space: they must be authoritative yet unnoticed, consistent yet contextual, human yet superhuman in judgment. Their decisions shape the story yet they’re expected to have no story of their own. Most post-game discussions revolve around refereeing decisions. It’s not just about hating the person holding the authority: society is hung up on the concept that the system is rigged. This pushes leagues to invest in transparency and technology to ensure fairness, like the VAR. Yet people find a way to complain even after these efforts have been made. Worse, they complain that these tools are ruining the game. One can see the point about the pedantry of drawing offside lines: determining the exact frame when the ball leaves a player’s foot is a difficult task which has downstream consequences on the position of his teammates. The VAR hides the intricacies of these decisions. Cheating becomes harder; the standard, in theory, applies equally. Mistakes will be made but they will be random—meaning: normally distributed. VAR is pedantic and can disrupt flow, but it has largely eliminated systematic bias in favor of randomized error. Fairness relies on the elimination of systematic bias. Entertainment relies on tension, flow, and emotion. The deeper conflict isn’t referee versus fan. It’s justice versus ritual. Football used to fake fairness to protect ritual. VAR fakes ritual to protect fairness. Once bias is removed, the complaint has nowhere legitimate to stand. If errors are random, outrage becomes grief masquerading as critique. There’s no system to fight; it’s just that reality didn’t break your way. That’s much harder to metabolize than conspiracy.

This is the pattern: football doesn’t resolve its contradictions. It stages them. Football doesn’t solve the tension between simplicity and complexity, between individual and collective, between chaos and order. It performs these tensions in real time, on the grass, in front of thousands who’ve also chosen (or been chosen by) their tribe. The contradictions aren’t what’s broken. They’re what holds it together. We don’t watch to see them resolved. We watch to see them unfold.