From beauty to duty

Why modern soccer still has room for dribbly boys

Stuff I’ve written lately:

• Why a virtuoso dribbler might decide who wins the Champions League

• How football works: Diagonals

• Gio Reyna: What kind of player can he become? It’s time to find out

• Barcelona’s thin, injury-plagued squad will not be fixed by Xavi leaving

• Xabi Alonso’s Leverkusen tactics and Liverpool’s squad are not a natural fit

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One thing you hear all the time from old guys is that soccer isn’t fun anymore, not like it was back in the day. My general read on the situation is that nothing is as fun as it used to be; that’s how getting older works; what’s changed isn’t the joy of the game but our capacity to experience beauty and wonder in between replying-all to emails that contain the word “smarketing” and filing taxes.

But sure, what the hell, I’m willing to hear the cranks out on this one. Maybe they’ve got a point.

“The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty,” sighs Eduardo Galeano in the classic Soccer in Sun and Shadow, sounding very much like a dude who’s had a recent run-in with a 1099. “When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.”

He continues:

In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from the crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon, a cat toying with a ball of yarn, a ballet dancer flying through the air with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing without even knowing he’s playing, with no purpose or clock or referee.

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 to facilitate play but 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.

Luckily, on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee, and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.

So yeah, I don’t know, I’m sympathetic to the argument that market pressures are shaping the game but it seems a little counterintuitive to suggest that the economic objective of a spectator sport should be to negate joy at scale and kill the dreams of millions. Like, I’ve never drafted a business plan but I don’t think I’d highlight that part in the PowerPoint deck for investors. Maybe bury it in a footnote of an attachment to an email about smarketing or something.

The real complaint seems to be against soccer itself, which is so profoundly aleatory, its goals so divorced from its gameplay, that streamlining for what the spectators really want — what they think will bring them joy — means trying to squeeze all the little air bubbles of randomness out of a chaotic sport in hopes that flattening it into a more rational shape might somehow make it easier to win.

I think this critique has some air bubbles of its own, to be honest, but at least I can follow the line of thought. It’s true that competition has made soccer more orderly over time. Teams play defense now. It’s a real bummer. For some reason the old guys never write odes to a synchronized high press or clockwork defensive transition, the kind of play whose beauty emerges from carefully rehearsed teamwork, like Super Bowl halftime dancers on roller skates. If they did, they’d have to admit that the game is getting better.

No, what the cranks want is more room for individual genius in this team sport. And that always seems to mean more dribbling.

This isn’t just Galeano’s thing. During the last World Cup, I lobbied for The Athletic to recruit the brilliant, endlessly quotable, quite possibly full of shit Juanma Lillo as a guest columnist, and boy did he deliver the goods.

“The good dribblers are over, my friend,” Lillo wrote in a rambling, old-man-yells-at-cloud column that’s a pure joyride from start to finish. “Where can you find them? I can’t see any.”

Except, wait, hang on, isn’t this that Juanma Lillo? The guy you see on TV sitting beside Pep in the dugout at Manchester City? The same club that signed Jack Grealish, decided he wasn’t quite dribbly enough, and replaced him with fucking Jeremy Doku?

I think I know where to find the good dribblers. They’re playing for Lillo.

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I found when I wrote about the latest tactical trend in the Champions League:

Influenced by Dutch and Spanish positional play, a growing number of teams across Europe are building up slowly in possession and planting a wide attacker on either touchline to stretch the game across the full expanse of the pitch. To prevent counter-attacks, a lot of these teams are holding one or both of their full-backs deeper instead of throwing them forward on the overlap, leaving their wingers isolated against compact defences.

The natural next step is to recruit attackers who specialise in getting around the edges with a solo dribble — not just freestyling through defenders on a fast break, the way wingers always have, but squaring up at the corner of the box after a long possession and deconstructing double-teams from a near-standstill. Most of the Champions League favourites rely on a guy like that, sometimes one on each wing.

Dribbling actions on the wing — a made-up stat defined as receiving a pass out wide of the box in the final third and then completing a successful take-on or progressive carry — are up sharply in the Champions League this season, after steadily rising more than 30% in the Premier League over the last six seasons. Modern soccer turns out to be absolutely crawling with Galeano’s insolent rascals.

One thing I thought was kind of cool, and that even Gaelano would have appreciated, is that this more structured type of dribbling seems to allow for more variety:

The job may be the same — get the ball near the sideline and put the defence on skates — but how these guys interpret it is a highly personalised form of artistic expression, like Instagram emojis or questionable tattoos.

Currently, there’s not even much consensus about which direction wingers should go. Other eras were defined by a dominant dribbling style, such as the wide cross-slinging wingers of the nineties or the cut-and-shoot specialists of the last decade, but right now it’s anyone’s game.

Most of the article is dedicated to exploring the personal styles of the top Champions League dribblers. There are some data vizzes in here that I like, even though they’re based on just six group stage games and are more of a concept sketch than an analysis. Here’s a fun one based on which way players like to move after receiving the ball:

Galeano would have hated this article, of course, for trying to reduce a child playing with a balloon to percentages and lines of code. Can’t argue with him there. Analytical stuff like what I write is part of the long, possibly tragic historical slide toward more efficient soccer.

He’s got a vignette called “The Specialists” making fun of people like me: “When the vibrant day in the concrete colossus ends, the critics have their turn. Already they have interrupted the broadcast several times to tell the players what to do, but the players did not listen because they were too busy making mistakes.”

Some people study how soccer works to coach or scold. Some want to flatten it out and win games and make money. I do it just because I’m curious (and to make money). Whatever’s behind it, I don’t think that a more efficient game has to be less beautiful.

Sure, it’s probably not a great idea, percentages-wise, to try to dribble past a whole team, especially in a decade where defenders don’t come at you one by one like henchmen in a kung fu movie. Personally I find positional build-ups pretty nice to look at, too, though, and I think it’s delightful when they’re decorated with a little filigree of dribbling at the end, just for the old guys.