In his monumental work, the "Critique of Pure Reason," Immanuel Kant gives a new life to philosophy which was stuck between rationalism and empiricism. Until his detailed account of a priori knowledge, all we knew was either explained in a purely conceptual realm by rationalists or as a pack of habits that we experience over and over again by empiricists. Kant has offered a new way, by explaining how a priori intuitions, space and time, and classificatory categories, quality, quantity, modality and relation are central to regulate the sensations that are derived from experience.

Only through his method we can escape the dogmatism of rationalists and the skepticism of empiricists, and constitute knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings. Now you may ask, what does this have to do with football or with any type of sports at all? Then I must remind you that our knowledge about football was also stuck between two sides, pure strategists and utter chaos, and then Pep Guardiola came with his alternative, just like Kant, and revolutionized football forever. The alternative was the flexibility of pure strategies and tactics according to the context in which they are instantiated.

Guardiola, like all philosophers, aims at achieving the best strategy possible conceptually, but also like all good philosophers, he knows that without giving a cognitive reference to that strategy, namely instantiating it in the spatiotemporal realm, it did not have any value. Thus, regardless of how much you keep theorizing the best game possible in your head, it will not have any value without you testing it one day, and whenever you test it you put it into a certain empirical context which will affect the game. This means that you need to always consider the specifics of the certain empirical context in which you are going to instantiate your game and devise it accordingly.

However, does this mean that we can skip philosophizing about our game and just adapt to the specifics of each and every context, as utter chaos claims? If yes, how can you derive knowledge out of each and every experience if you do not have a conceptual, regulative notion of your game? You cannot assess the game you play let alone make judgments about it. All you can say is: In this specific occasion, it happened like this, but since all parameters will change next time, we cannot know how it will be in another game. As soon as you say this, you leave football into total skepticism and chaos, in which there can be no development or consistency.

Then, the alternative that Guardiola offers make perfect sense, you cannot stick to the same, purely conceptual game since it is only a concept, not a real occasion. On the other hand, you cannot know anything about football or develop ideas about it if you cannot interpret each and every occasion on the basis of the concept of a game. Thus, Guardiola's football, flexibility of pure strategies and tactics according to the context in which they are instantiated, just like Kant's philosophy, is a revolution in football which allows us to make judgments about how we should play football.