The nature of the game


The nature of football and gameplay was not a topic discussed until the beginning of the 1970s, when Rinus Michels emerged with the total football theory. Football was seen as an effort by 22 players to somehow put the ball into the net. Tactical depth could not go beyond formations and formational plans like as the number of players on the forward increased, the possibility of scoring more goals also increased. Although this chaotic understanding seems to present an environment in which everything can happen at any moment at first glance, all the players in a game are bound to cooperate each other in order to organize and reach their goals. Therefore, the environment in which everything can happen at any moment can be easily transformed into an atmosphere in which nothing happens at all, which is boring football.

Throughout football's history, this is actually the point that people who despise organizations and strategies as industrial football and claim that the nature of the game is unpredictability, are missing. Although the pace of the game sometimes reaches a point that it cannot be controlled by human capacities, accepting this small drawback as the essence of the game and reducing the game to that moment is to take a position as the center of the game, rather than a chain of positions.

I want to get a little help from theater at this point. Konstantin Stanislavski, one of the most important figures of Russian theater and a 19th century theater theorist, developed a method called the "magic if" to interpret the scene in which an actor is involved in complete integrity with the rest of the play. Taking a scene, or position in football, separately from the play, or strategy, makes it artificial and broken. For this reason, the actor keeps the flow of the play in mind and creates the past of his actions in order not to disturb the reality on stage.

In modern football, especially after the Barcelona revolution, the lack of game structure in which the game is dominated by talented feet rather than talented minds has become more evident. Whenever the majority of teams are made up of players and coaches who always keep the general strategy in mind and act accordingly, football reaches a new level. Then we understand that a team that dances to the same rhythm as a whole is more pleasurable to watch than a player who is dribbling chaotically and desperately.

Almost everything in this game concept comes from the coach. Just as actors shape their own material according to the directives of the director, football players must do the same. Making a rather funny joke in a scene can elicit a lot of laughs in that moment, but when the game is over, it will come to mind how that moment broke the integrity of the play. The real dexterity arises from capturing the audience with the play's completeness.