UPDATE: I mean the non-mobile site, phone readers! Alternately, look at this: Run of Play in Exile.

Many consider Anelka to be a mercenary. That’s what happens when you play for every English club, twice, and make a stop off in Turkey in between—all before you’re 30. In the sense that we can only try to characterize a soccer player’s career decisions with nothing more than a cursory knowledge of his decision-making process, it’s probably a fair label. But that’s not why his move to China isn’t surprising. Not-quite-past-their-prime players are moving to these money-rich, soccer-poor outposts more and more frequently with each passing transfer window. (Hi, Asamoah Gyan!) After all, this is a career—a fleetingly short one.

When I heard the news of Anelka’s move to Shanghai Shenua, I wasn’t surprised—but again, not because of his past moves. I wasn’t surprised because Nicolas Anelka has never seemed to me like someone who actually cared about the sport he plays for a living. And going to a low-level league that pays a ton of money fits that narrative I’ve built up in my head. Is this unfair? Yes. Do I care? Nope.

I’ve never liked Nicolas Anelka. I really don’t know much about him, personally … because I’m a 23-year-old living in Brooklyn, and he’s not. Nicolas Anelka could go play soccer on the moon, and I’d be happy. The further away he is from my life, the better.

Anelka has scored a lot of goals in his career, and he’s played for a lot of great clubs. In many ways, he’s had a very successful career, but he is the last player I’d ever want to have to root for.

He plays the game with the emotion of a once-petulant dead robot. There are some guys—namely, Mario Balotelli—who make it a point to show no emotion, turning that into a kind of emotionless emotion. For Anelka, though, the lack of emotion is exactly that: a lack of emotion. Is he really dead inside, wandering the field with nothing more than a desire for the clock to stop running? I have no idea, but that won’t stop me from believing it.

In a general sense, we can divide every soccer player ever into two categories: those who have to try really hard to succeed, and those who don’t. We love the first group because we see ourselves in them. Somehow, Lionel Messi falls into this group. (And that’s why we all love him. Yes, you love him, too.) For the second group, we’re amazed at how easily they pull off supposedly impossible things. Xabi Alonso does such things routinely.

Anelka fits into this second group. He glides around the field, cuts past defenders easily, and strikes the ball harder than his approach should ever allow. But that effortlessness disappears when an opponent closes him down. He’ll run at a defender and the ball will pop out to a teammate at the last second. When Carlo Ancelloti tried playing Anelka as the playmaker in a four-man midfield, he had to make quick decisions and play without much space, and it was hard to watch. The moments where he struggled became the norm.

Watching Anelka at full stride, cutting in from the sideline—that’s something I can appreciate, because it’s sort of breathtaking, but when it comes to anything more than that, his game is frustrating, an internal stumbling that’s just hard to look at, whether or not it actually succeeds. It’s effortlessness held for a second too long that makes you scream at your television.

Nicolas Anelka has never brought joy to my life. (And yes, the “LeSulk”-ness and his hijinks in South Africa don’t help.) For all I know, outside of soccer, he’s just a really great dude who’d want to be my best friend in some alternate universe. Maybe he really does care about the game, too.

But I don’t think that actually matters. I know Anelka as a soccer player, not as a brother, son, father, or whatever else he does when he’s not pissing me off. The personality I create for him—and we all do this when we watch sports—is realer, to me, than whatever his real personality is.

Good riddance, my nemesis.

Ryan O’Hanlon is the sports and managing editor for the Good Men Project. He used to go to college and play soccer. He’s still trying to get over it.

In the world of football, it’s easy to think that no one has small problems. No one has a light switch that doesn’t work or a leaky faucet. Everyone has a house that just burned to the ground (probably due to fireworks in the bathroom). But despite the obsession with full-scale revolution, football clubs can still have small problems. Sometimes subtle-but-significant changes can be the difference between Thursday night football in Larnaca and competing for the Premier League title. For proof, look no further than Tottenham Hotspur.

When Spurs supporters—and, I’ll admit it up front, I’m one of them—remember April 14, 2010 they remember it as the “Danny Rose Game,” the match in which emergency-starter and 18-year-old Spurs debutant Danny Rose hit a miracle volley to beat Arsenal keeper Manuel Almunia in the 10th minute. Spurs went on to win the match 2-1 and rode the momentum of their first league victory over Arsenal in 11 years all the way to 4th place in the Premiership and a berth in the Champions League.

But it’s possible that the most significant goal of the day wasn’t Rose’s wonder strike, but the second that came at the beginning of the second half. Rose wasn’t the only new starter at wing for Spurs that day. The other was a young Welshman named Gareth Bale. Early in the second half, Jermain Defoe picked out an uncharacteristically well-placed pass to hit Bale in stride, cutting behind the Gunners defense. Bale slotted home coolly to give Spurs a 2-0 lead which Brazilian keeper Gomes made stand in his finest hour in a Spurs shirt.

Only a few months before this match, Bale had been an afterthought for Spurs. On opening day, he wasn’t even in the squad as Luka Modric started on the left wing while Tom Huddlestone and Wilson Palacios patrolled midfield. He was a 90th minute sub in a 3-0 home victory over Manchester City that December. He didn’t start until January in a disappointing 0-0 home draw with Hull. The conventional wisdom in England at the time was that Bale was too much of a defensive liability to play left back. In most cases, Bale’s story would end there. If he were a Chelsea or Manchester City player, he would’ve been branded a failure, loaned out and straggled along in footballing purgatory for several seasons and perhaps never recovered.

Thankfully for Bale, Harry Redknapp saw more than an over-ambitious left back with defensive weaknesses that made him a liability. He saw a wideman with searing pace and a fantastic left foot. Late in the season, he shifted Bale to left wing. Spurs rode the shift to the aforementioned 2-1 win over Arsenal followed by massive away victories against Chelsea and Manchester City. To the question, “how did Spurs go from perennial-underachievers to Champions League quarter-finalists and now a contender for the Premiership title?” one of the answers must surely be Bale’s move. Spurs had a problem: they lacked pace on the left to complement Aaron Lennon’s on the right. But where other clubs would splash out big money on an expensive transfer, Spurs shifted Gareth Bale forward.

A similar move can be credited for Luka Modrić’s equally meteoric rise. At the beginning of his Spurs career, Modrić was deployed on the left with Huddlestone playing the role of distributor in the middle and Palacios in the destroyer role. But when a drop in form caused Palacios to lose his spot, Redknapp shifted Modrić into the center, which was actually Modrić’s preferred position. He had made his name playing in the center at Dinamo Zagreb. When he moved to the Premier League, he’d been moved out wide in order to avoid the bruising tacklers that filled many Premiership midfields. But as with Bale, the shifting of Modrić proved more effective than the size of the change would suggest. Using his good sense of balance, fantastic body control and deceptive strength, Modric coped effectively with the best destroyers English football could throw at him. And with his ability to play the ball and natural touch, he quickly developed into the best deep-lying playmaker this side of Andrea Pirlo.

The combined price Spurs paid for these two players? 23 million pounds. A fee also known as “what Liverpool paid for Charlie Adam and Jordan Henderson,” 12 million less than what they spent on Andy Carroll, and not even half of what Chelsea paid for an out-of-form Spanish striker.

Subtle but significant changes are the foundation of Spurs’ entire philosophy. Many have commented on the club’s form over the past few months. Yet for all their dominance, the side is extremely similar to the one that struggled for goals last year and dropped four points to West Brom, five to West Ham, five to Blackpool, and five to Wigan.

What changed? Part of it is simply luck and the natural maturation of footballers: Ledley King is healthy and Kyle Walker has taken hold at right back. But the biggest changes came via the transfer market. Anyone who watched Spurs last year knew that the team needed two things for sure and possibly a third: a steady keeper, a target man, and maybe a bit more steel in midfield. If Sheikh Mansour, Abramovich or anyone at Real Madrid or Barca faced those problems you’d know what’s coming: a 30 to 40 million pound striker, a 12 million pound destroyer and a six to eight million pound keeper. And that’s a baseline. Realistically, they’d probably spend more than that. And on top of the transfer fees, you’d have the striker on close to £200k a week and the other new arrivals on something between £80 and £120k a week. That’s the MARIO BALOTELLI!! approach to building a football team and it’s all the rage in today’s game.

But sometimes teams have minor problems. That point may be lost on Roman Abramovich, but Daniel Levy gets it. So his Spurs favor more modest moves: A loan deal for an out-of-favor striker at Man City (which includes City paying a fair part of his absurd wage), a free transfer for an aging but sturdy American keeper and, perhaps most importantly, a small, five million pound signing of a footballer whose talent and heart were never in doubt but whose age scared off other suitors. True, changing a quarter of your first XI probably pushes the definition of a “small but subtle changes,” but the point is that in both man-management and the transfer market, Tottenham prefer a more modest approach that complements existing parts. In the West Brom game recently, the transfer-fee costs of the entire Spurs first XI were around 50 million pounds—the same price as one Fernando Torres.

Clearly, revolution garners headlines. And sometimes it creates thrilling football, as we’ve seen with this year’s Man City and the current edition of the Galácticos. But more often than not, a team’s problems are smaller than their supporters or ownership might first expect. Oftentimes, it often turns out that a team is only one or two small moves away from glory. It’s a refreshing truth to keep in mind when so many believe that trophies can be bought and sold at the price of a barrel of oil.

Jake Meador is a writer and editor who lives in Lincoln NE where he often feels like the lone soccer fan drowning in a sea of football-obsessed red. He blogs on sports, culture, politics, economics and theology at Notes from a Small Place.

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About eighteen hours later, I saw quite another tactic employed: in the last half-hour of their match with Sunderland, Blackburn made no attempt to possess the ball. At all. Steve Kean just backed his players against their goal and let Sunderland hammer away, rope-a-dope like. But unfortunately for the Rovers, Sunderland didn’t punch themselves out. They got two goals in the last ten minutes and handed Martin O’Neill his first win with the team.

Kean may have cost his team the game by foregoing possession so completely, but it’s perfectly reasonable tactics to eschew a possession-based game: you can’t keep the ball just by wanting to — there are people on the pitch trying to take it away from you — so if you’re going to hang on to it, you need players who (a) have excellent on-ball skills, (b) have good positional awareness, including awareness of the likely locations of teammates and opponents alike, (c) trust that their teammates will do the right thing when the ball comes to them, and (d) aren’t easily excitable. And above all you need to have players with these virtues all over the pitch. The Barça style works only because the back four are as comfortable with the ball at their feet as other teams’ attacking midfielders. (The problem with defending against Barça is that their other players are even better with the ball, so a high-pressing game is probably the opponents’ best option, if their forwards have the stamina to keep it up for any length of time, which is very rare, so basically when you play Barça you’re screwed . . . but we all know that already. So anyway.)

The beauty of Barcelona’s style has everyone starry-eyed these days: Martin O’Neill says he wants Sunderland to play that way. Sounds great, Martin: all you have to do is to set up a world-class football academy, sign promising players when they’re about eight years old, fend off all attempts to steal them away from Wearside, and when they’re fully mature promote them to the first team. By the time you’re 75 it’ll all be in place! All you’ll need then is to play every match against sides managed by Steve Kean.

I’ve written about some of these matters before, but I think I’m getting a clearer picture of what the game of soccer needs. Not more managers who want to play like Barcelona, but a new generation of tacticians who put seriously creative thought into creating an opportunistic, counter-attacking, possession-indifferent style that can be taught to players who haven’t spent fifteen years together and who may not have the skills necessary to play keep-away for ninety minutes. Players in such a system would need, above all, the persistent alertness to look for opportunities to disrupt possession, the patience to wait for those moments without becoming distracted or over-aggressive, and the boldness to take immediate advantage of any lapse. Rare enough virtues, I suppose; but they can be taught, and can be taught to players who lack intimate understanding of their teammates — as will usually be the case in the ever-shifting world of modern professional sports.

We still don’t know whether the Barcelona model will be sustainable in the long run even by Barcelona — though for at least the medium run the future looks pretty damned bright, considering the way the kiddies played against BATE in their recent Champions League match. Barça’s opponents have to hope that the team has more financial troubles than its bosses have been willing to admit. But in any case, it would be foolish to think that this model can be implemented anywhere else; owners and managers should simply put the thought from their minds, and along with it a tactical approach based fundamentally on possessing the ball. In this one case tactics are tied closely to a system that can’t be replicated. It’s time for everyone else to think different — to coin a phrase — and that means, above all, to think about how to play well, how to be dangerous, when you don’t have the ball all the time.

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He was the anti-Bartleby: Melville’s scrivener went through life saying, “I would prefer not to.” Sócrates went through life saying, “I prefer to.” I prefer to drink; I prefer to smoke; I prefer to back-heel the ball; I prefer to take penalties without a silly run-up. I even prefer to get a degree in medicine, to be Doctor Sócrates. Though occasionally, it must be said, he did prefer not to: for instance, when playing for Corinthians he took no interest in celebrating goals, to the annoyance of the team’s fans, who expected more enthusiasm. Encouraged by the team’s coaches and owner to be more demonstrative, he complied by enacting absurdly over-the-top parodies of joy.

Brian Glanville once wrote of Sócrates that he seemed to be “strolling about the field in samba rhythm – never hurried, always inventive, occasionally breaking into a brisk trot.” The metaphor is too easy and therefore wrong. The samba is rhythmical and collective; Sócrates was fundamentally arrhythmic and idiosyncratic, both on and off the pitch. With his vision, passing precision, and imposing stature, he could control a game when he wanted to; he just didn’t always want to. He understood well his own unpredictability, saying of himself, “I am an anti-athlete. I cannot deny myself certain lapses from the strict regimen of a sportsman. You have to take me as I am.”

It might seem strange that so idiosyncratic a character would have been named the captain of Brazil’s national team, but perhaps because whatever he did or said welled up from some inscrutable interiority, he was believed to be incorruptible, un-shaped by external forces. Such a personality will be either a powerful leader or a completely marginal figure; Sócrates was sometimes one, sometimes the other. When he convinced his Corinthians teammates to rebel against the tyranny of their team’s organizational structure, to insist on Democracia — they wore this legend on their shirts — and they went on to win the state championship in São Paulo, he said that that was “perhaps the most perfect moment I ever lived.”

That’s something an artist might say, not a political leader — which is perhaps why he never ran for President of Brazil, though Muammar Qaddafi encouraged him to. Though he deeply admired Ché, he could never have been Ché, thank God: he lacked the ruthlessness, the libido dominandi. Preference was always more important to him than power. Oscar Wilde famously said that he had put only his talent into his work: it was his life that displayed genius. Surely Sócrates would have said the same for himself, or would have wanted to.

So perhaps he had a demon after all, in the sense that his namesake did: the Greek philosopher famously said that when faced with difficult decisions he took counsel from his daimon, his inner voice that told him what to do. Things always worked out well, he said, when he followed the instructions of that voice. The daimon of the Brazilian Sócrates, though, lacked the consistency and ethical earnestness of the one that drove the philosopher. It might at any moment tell him anything — anything except “Take care,” or “Would that be prudent?”

So as we think of Sócrates, perhaps it is best to think of the last time he was on the soccer pitch in any sort of official capacity: in October of 2004, playing briefly, at the age of 50, for Garforth Town Football Club in the Northern Counties East Division One league. Why did he do it? Because the team’s owner, Simon Clifford, asked him to manage, and he thought it would be worthwhile to teach, and perhaps fun to play as well. So off he went to West Yorkshire, a world away from Brazil but only a few miles from Leeds, trotting about on the pitch in front of a few hundred people. He had obeyed his unpredictable daimon once more, and why not? “It was much faster than the type of football I’m used to. It was a lot more competitive and keenly fought but I really enjoyed it and it was an interesting experience.”

After a few weeks he preferred to return to Brazil, where he smoked, and drank, and talked with wit and intelligence, and then died. Day by day, the daimon offered him the hemlock. So he took it.

The notion of taking Grand Ranking a little more seriously surfaced, as good ideas always do, after reading work by writers better than ourselves. Firstly, The Football Pantheon has provided a well-furnished playground for the schematics of schematics. Secondly, we’ve been thinking about France, largely as a result of the second issue of the soon-to-be-mandatory Blizzard, which featured no fewer than four pieces on French football and its seemingly interminable identity crises; from Philippe Auclair’s justified anger at foreign news reports of the ‘race quota’ (non-)scandal, to James Horncastle’s account of the European exploits of the national team that never was, Saint-Etienne in the 1970s. The French do seem to suffer these footballing identity crises with heightened alacrity and regularity, mopping their brows and wringing their hands like the hoodwinked patriarch of yet another dreadful Molière play. The notion emerged: what could a Grand Ranking of the Greatest Ever French Players tell us about the short circuits France has experienced in the football team-nation synecdoche? What makes one player a Greater French player than another? How distinct is being the greatest French player from being the greatest French player? Ranking needs to become a more rigorously historical endeavour.

France is kind to the footballing geneticist, in that it is relatively simple to isolate three peaks of talent, neatly spaced a generation or so from one another. The 1950s: Stades Reims in the inaugural European Cup Final, and France in the World Cup semi-final against Brazil. The 1980s: le carré magique, Euro triumph, and two more semis. The late 1990s: the rainbow nation finally steps from the shadows of history. It is also quite painless symbolically to concentrate each of these national uprisings into one individual: Raymond Kopa, Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidane. So, as an embryonic essay: who is the greatest French player of all time? Who is the most complete synecdoche?

1. Raymond KOPA (1931 – ). At first, the working class was conspicuous by its absence. In place of the trade-port city-urban working class matrix that brought football to Bilbao or Odessa, in its primordial days in l’hexagone, football was the preserve of an urban social elite intent on imitating the dying wildebeest of British amateurism; a welter of different ‘national’ federations resembling country estates. Despite the first ‘national’ league bubbling to the surface in 1894, roughly thirty years passed before the game’s thorough dissemination amongst the proletariat, taken up by factory workforces as an alternative to group gymnastics that seemed grotesquely militaristic after the First World War. The scent of amateurism hung over French football for years after the faltering introduction of professionalism by an avowedly uneasy FFF: players were allowed to pursue other careers, which created teams of mixed class backgrounds; of players trying to be footballers and players trying earn enough to become something else.

Raymond Kopaszewski became a footballer because he wanted to be an electrician. Born in 1931 into a Polish immigrant community in industrial Nœux-les-Mines, his priority was to avoid the mines that had defined both his people and his town. Never too crazy for football, he would say, ‘but there was the mine…’ The ellipse speaks volumes. The old assurances of working class solidarity and dependable labour must have seemed emblematic of a dead age; one whose ideological vividness had led to two world wars. Football, in its French incarnation as a transitional, oddly classless profession, held a pragmatic appeal.

That symbolic stepping into the light from the pits, the wiping of coal dust from his face, suggests something else. Kopa walked away from the mines, and also from himself, from Kopaszewski. He represents the universalising effect of French working class politics, an effect reinforced by the grim divisions of the wars. The République as an entity has always entailed a particular attitude towards labour movements; emancipation is realised through access to a more universal culture, the effacing of scars as a guarantee of solidarity. Francifying his surname, dropping his maternal language, and stepping out of the mines that had supported and restricted his family, Kopa made the transition from community to society.

Kopa is post-war France; harried by a sense of what to avoid, the dwindling gravity of industrial labour, and conscious of a new culture that would resolve cultural difference into something moderate and prosperous.

2. Michel PLATINI (1955 – ). French exceptionalism has manifested itself most persistently in a commitment to the ideals of public service, expressed through the bureaucratic hum of administration at all levels. There has always been a resistance in the system to professionalism, business, financialisation (in that chronological order). Their hand forced by Jean-Pierre Peugeot’s purchase of Sochaux in 1932, the FFF permitted professional players, in return for a guarantee that clubs themselves would not become marketable businesses, and would remain under the auspices of the Federation; an early Third Way compromise. In many ways, French football was professionalised in order to make regulation easier.

In a country whose industrialisation produced middling, single-product towns over sprawling urban conurbations, municipal identity is pronounced, and even today, many clubs rent their stadia from local government. (in Saint-Etienne’s Stade Geoffroy-Guichard, called ‘the green cauldron’, one stand is closed for refurbishment: a banner across the base reads, ‘a brand new cauldron: Loire Métropole is building it for you!’) Small-town regionalism was once at the heart of French football, the lingering scent of Catholic masses, or the bark of a dog on a paved Mediterranean street.

As the Second World War faded into sepia, the practicability of the provinces stagnated. Urbanisation crept along apace. In 1971, Paris Saint-Germain was founded, and the capital finally had a team with the financial clout to persist as a championship threat. Marseille, that anachronistic, acrid expanse of port, dominated the 1980s. Michel Platini seems haunted by the twentieth century that was dwindling even as he was born. He strained at the limits of French football, promoting Lorraine stalwarts Nancy to Ligue 1, losing two cup finals with Saint-Etienne – the only provincial team in France ever to have a sustained history of quality – and, of course, falling in consecutive World Cup semi-finals with easily the most talented side the nation has ever had.

Platini’s French achievements are hedged, worn at the edges by a sense of proportion that the game was leaving behind (perhaps best exemplified by the ill-advised victory lap at Heysel after his 1985 European Cup-winning exploits with Juventus). He embodied a sense of exceptional wit and luxury yielding to the inevitable: ‘the Astérix complex’, a denial of the continuing relevance of the French model by the forces of the market, the metropolis, and the brutally omnipresent German Mannschaft. It is fitting that he won the Euros, but not the World Cup. He had to forsake his sentimental education and move to the bear-pit of Serie A to realise his potential. And since retiring, he has strived to reassert some of that administrative order, that sense of public duty that he couldn’t recreate on the pitch. National team manager; responsible for bringing the World Cup to France; UEFA president, with FIFA in his sights like a gaping Portuguese goalmouth; perhaps above all, Financial Fair Play regulations. The sense that he is clutching at straws, straining at history, is both his private tragedy and the dull mess of his people.

3. Zinedine ZIDANE (1972 – ). With Zidane we reach an endgame, of sorts. The founding of PSG was a portent; even in France, money was going to make itself heard. With the financialisation of economies, l’hexagone began to lose its old voice, the rhyme and reason of public duty and statism stuck in the throat. The grand old Administrators – the ghosts of Baron de Coubertin and Jules Rimet – began to seem more anti-modern than particularist. The banlieues stacked around the increasingly precarious centre of Paris become symbolic of gashes to Kopa’s ‘universal’ culture, a quaint notion in a world where identity is both as restrictive and as liquid as cash.

Honed in these conditions – raised in an area of Marseille where unemployment among the immigrant population languished at around 40% – Zidane has always exuded the air of a man devoid of attachments. That hawkish gaze, inscrutable tendency to apparently arbitrary violence, the penchant for the unrealistically sublime over the rambunctiously gifted. He witnesses and plays with a granite logic, one of dominance rather than wit. Platini seemed always to be darting from the trenches; Zidane to be sitting back, assured in his superiority, practically unable to lose the ball or to concede ground. This is a man who openly stated that he hopes all matches between France – for whom he won a bleedin’ World Cup – and Algeria end in a draw so he is not forced to side with either his heritage or his present circumstance. A man who will likely declare his son legally Spanish. Who supported the Qatari bid for the World Cup. And who headbutted Marco Materazzi in his last ever professional match. Zidane is the illogically logical force of the market. He is peak oil.

Of course, the terrifying fact is that this is precisely the kind of player that France needed to obtain if the nation was ever to win the World Cup. Zidane weighs more heavily on the consciousness of the French that Platini or Kopa, for the very simple reason that he won; he overcame that hoary old ‘Astérix complex’. He allowed France to realise itself, by voiding it of its own heritage (the defensively stacked team of Aimé Jacquet, who actually fielded Stéphane Guivarc’h in a World Cup final, bore no real resemblance to the futile grace and luxury that had been Les Bleus’ trademarks of yore). This is why the discourse surrounding Zidane is so massive and so torturous. He needs to be explained away with what, for him, seem rather cheap labels of greatness. He doesn’t need this as much as he doesn’t deserve it. His elevation to the rank of France’s greatest ever is a defence mechanism against the inconvenient truth that he is not particularly French.

For what it’s worth, all things considered, Platini was the Greatest Ever French Player. Unlike Kopa, who became French, Platini was French. He nurtured the dying embers of the age that had birthed him, and he fought against what was to come even as he created it. Fittingly, Zidane stands apart: the Greatest Ever Zidane, if anything; he refused to be identified with a nation to which he was not contractually bound. Alternatively: it was very French indeed of Michel Platini to lose two consecutive World Cup semi-finals to Germany; but it was very Zidane of Zinedine Zidane to headbutt Marco Materazzi in the chest, and then to walk off down the tunnel into the beckoning twenty-first century.

James and Samuel mop up after each other at Football in the GULag and @The_GULag.

The first one was just outside the area. Maradona runs up as if to take the shot himself, only to back-heel the ball into the path of Gabriel Batistuta, who drives it low and to the right of the goalkeeper, who spills it at Canigga’s eager feet. The second was on the left-wing channel in Nigeria’s half, seemingly a safe distance from goal. Maradona plays an early pass to an unmarked Canigga who cuts into the box diagonally from the left, opens his body, and curls the ball in the upper right hand corner of the net. Less than a half hour had gone by but the game was effectively over. Argentina were on cruise control for most of the remainder of the match.

Make no mistake, it was Maradona’s savvy on both occasions that in an immediate sense undid Nigeria that afternoon. But I go back to the grainy VHS recording not to pay homage to Maradona but to remember the first time I saw Fernando Redondo play football. I was only 13 at the time but I intuitively understood that it was Argentina’s number five, and not Maradona, who undid Nigeria in a more general sense, by blunting a match which in its initial stages was fevered and disjointed—traits that favored the counter-attacking Nigerian side. The beautiful chaos spun by Maradona, Canigga, and Batistuta in the offensive third was complemented by the centralizing order rendered by Redondo’s tackling, distribution, and ball retention. In tactile terms, Redondo polished the game’s jagged edges.

Nigeria couldn’t get near Redondo that afternoon. His first touch (a skill ever so soccer-specific) moved the ball into nooks and vistas on the field where his opponents couldn’t find it—something antiseptically referred to by coaches as “touch direction.” When Redondo possessed the ball it became a game of hide and seek. He had an inimitable ability to hold off defenders and simultaneously run towards goal in a way that the term “riding challenges” doesn’t really describe. At any rate, Nigeria were spent and befuddled.

For those unlucky not to witness Redondo play, allow me a homily: His presence on the pitch can be best characterized by an unlikely adjective for any physical activity—glib. He appeared to play with indifference but he always had the ball, which he received like a stray pill of mercury returning to its base. He didn’t run so much as he sauntered and ghosted past defenders the way you might expect a rakish dandy to push past his scrubbier competition in a cocktail lounge. Elegant to the point of haughty, after being chopped down by defenders he would rise as if he had been knighted. Alex Ferguson (a real knight) bemusedly asked if Redondo had magnets in his boots after the Argentine flummoxed Manchester United’s midfield at Old Trafford.

A handful of blog articles (now a small chorus) exist which wax romantic about how unsung Redondo’s genius is in an age of football that places a premium on pace and power. The speedy smack-down that is the Premier League has put the “Prince” in tintype: the perfect midfielder for yesteryear. Not, “box-to-box” enough, etc. In truth, the supposed hegemony of the Premier League is and has been over-hyped and somewhat repudiated by the successes of continental teams in the past few years. One very astute Guardian football columnist recently argued that it is the Steven Gerrards of this world who are out of step with the times, while precision-based midfielders rule the roost. The rise and rise of Silva and the auspicious start to Mata’s career at Chelsea has made the Spanish number ten an object of recent fetishism. Every world-class team has to have one.

Phil Ball’s recent article about the Spanish interpretation of the creative “false nine” (media punta) is a lively account of what makes players like Silva, Mata, Cesc Fabregas, and even the Mikel Arteta so deadly in today’s game. Namely, they provoke panic and disorder in opposing teams because they artfully dart between the lines of defense and midfield, confusing defenders who have to step out of position to pursue their movement, leaving space behind their vacated areas for attackers to exploit. Theirs is a postmodern art of deconstruction and liminality.

Redondo was no media punta though. His was a modernist art of sleek order and functionality. He wasn’t a Makelele-type holding midfielder, either. In spite of his lithe elegance he was warhorse not a show pony. And yet, he didn’t simply destroy opposition attacks but rather coaxed them to irrelevance by channelling them into less dangerous areas because of his positioning.

Spain, spoilt for choice, also has their Redondo in Javi Martinez, whose performances for the U-21s in the European Championship this summer provided me more than a morsel of nostalgia. Despite starting with a chorus line of media puntas—Thiago Alcantara, Mata, Ander Herrara, and Iker Muniain—Martinez, to my eye, set the pace for the eventual champions. Spain was able to play with so many forward-minded midfielders precisely because Martinez could ably marshal the space behind them, in some cases dropping between the centerbacks to cover the full-backs’ forays up field as Busquets does for Barcelona. Martinez is more mobile than Busquets though, and like Redondo he is more comfortable carrying the ball forward. (Busquets seems slightly embarrassed whenever he dribbles for more than a touch or two.) Martinez is more laterally mobile than Busquests as well. He often bullies opposing players into moving sideways and backwards by bird-dogging them aggressively over the length and breadth of the pitch, which he did to devastating effect in the Euro final with Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri, and more recently with the excellent Javier Pastore in Bilbao’s recent Europa League victory over Paris St. Germain. Yet, when order is restored and possession won, he bounds forward breezily and passes smartly. If Redondo was pure tango, Martinez is a waltz.

Indeed, while there are more than a few differences between Redondo and the still slightly green Martinez, there is something uncannily similar about the manner in which they impose themselves on a match: almost managerial or authoritarian without being brutal or grotesque in the way of a Nigel De Jong or Roy Keane. There is a kind of death-and-taxes inevitability about their centrality in the proceedings of any given match. By the final game of the Euros every time the hulking Martinez emerged from a midfield scrum with the ball I thought to myself: Of course. Martinez. Who else!? While Spain’s attacking midfielders played with postmodern panache, Martinez was a one-man dictatorial modernizer in the middle of the park, restoring, or better, demanding coherence. He was their Franco. Their Ataturk. Their generalissimo.

Finally, consider this a letter of recommendation of sorts. While I hasten to say that I hope he stays in Bilbao for at least a couple of seasons, not least of all because Marcelo Bielsa’s recent arrival has already yielded some eccentric and sometimes great performances from the Basques, Martinez is the kind of signing Arsenal must make to restore consistency and spatial logic when they don’t have the ball. The rush to sign Arteta to replace Fabregas wasn’t so much impulsive as it was second-order in terms of their requirements, the first of which ought to have been finding a replacement for Patrick Vieira, who by my count, has been gone for half a decade. While teams like Chelsea and Manchester City can afford to look for the “Perfect 10,” Arsenal must first find their “Perfect 5.”

Sam Fayyaz is a PhD student at UMASS, Amherst where he studies political science when he’s not anoraking about soccer.

The above sequence has never happened in an actual soccer match, but it happens too often in EA Sports’s latest approximation of actual soccer, FIFA 12. Which is to say it happens at all.

The glitchy sound design in the most recent installment of FIFA is a nuisance. It’s not broken so much as temperamental. Two or three times per match, the AI that selects lines of commentary misreads a play and provides the wrong cue to the recorded voices of Martin Tyler and Alan Smith. This means, when set up for a corner kick, one might hear Tyler mutter “Not a good corner!” before the kick-taker has even struck the ball. Or a defender will intercept a pass, scuff the ball some four yards upfield, and right as the ball is settling onto an attacker’s foot, the commentators will praise the fullback’s clearance.

These moments are both silly and frustrating—chunks of absurdity spliced into a world that has a Pinocchio-like desire to be real. The game designers at EA Canada, like ambitious cartographers, want to recreate professional soccer down to the flecks of mud that fly up on a slide tackle in the rain. Minutiae, really. Minutiae is sometimes just the yellow hue beneath the rim of a fingernail, but it’s also something with which one becomes concerned when one discovers that realism isn’t composed solely of ball physics and player models. Or weather effects, or referee tendencies, or crowd chants, or any of the other features FIFA has added over the years. Trying to recreate soccer—not something very similar to soccer, but the game itself—is like attempting to photorealistically map an ever-expanding mole colony. As soon as one has ostensibly sketched out every tunnel, eight more have been constructed. This type of cartography is the hobby of self-flagellators.

Designing a sports title might not be a fool’s errand, but it’s impossible to do perfectly. The goal of sports videogames is literally unachievable: they seek to replicate reality. In no other game genre do developers toil to create what already exists. Even games allegedly based on actual events (say, Call of Duty: Black Ops) use fact as a spool around which they weave fictions. I’m sure the developers of Black Ops labored to ensure that the correct bullet-y whizzes and pangs rattle through a gamer’s television speakers as they work their way through a corridor, but the faces and tendencies of one’s fellow soldiers are not the faces and tendencies of Cold War Era special ops agents. Even if they were, practically no one would know, since military conflict is not a spectator sport broadcast to millions the world over.

The EA employees who develop the FIFA series intermittently brush up against the edges of reality. There are moments within matches in which, as with every great videogame, the gamer is pulled through the television screen and walks among the little character models darting around the game world. In FIFA’s case, Old Trafford is subdued as Swansea are holding the scoreline, admirably, at 1-1 in the 81st minute. The ball is being knocked around midfield as Chicharito starts a diagonal run, and, before the Swansea midfield can close down Tom Cleverley, he chips the ball about five yards beyond the speedy Mexican, who catches up to it and slots a low drive into the corner of the net. The gamer, in concert with his team of overmatched footballers, frowns dejectedly.

The feeling of helplessness that frequently accompanies competing against superior talent is palpable in FIFA 12. Fixtures against juggernauts are nerve-racking and often dispiriting, just as they are in real life. Even if some god-hand could control the movements of the Swansea back line, Chicharito would probably still run through it like a child through a cloud of bubbles. FIFA gets a number of other things right, like Nani’s tendency to take on defenders with audacious dribble moves and the way Cristiano Ronaldo huffs like an irritated thoroughbred as he stands over a free kick. Italian referees officiate the game more strictly than English ones, and Barcelona play a possession game full of quick, short passes and perpetual movement.

Earlier this year on RoP, Supriya Nair, while discussing the possibility of understanding Xavi through playing FIFA, sort of whimsically imagined a universe in which sports videogames, like an exponential function finally hitting infinity, become so lifelike that the difference between representation and object becomes superfine. One imagines tawdry Friday SportsCenter segments wherein Cyborg John Buccigross narrates highlights from a Madden showdown between the Steelers and Ravens, the camera intermittently cutting to reaction shots of both teams huddled around a flatscreen, perspiration collecting on their furrowed brows as the polygonal showdown predicts with 94% accuracy who will win the actual game in two days’ time. In this fantastic future, living room footy stars would, in theory, have a firm understanding of what it’s like to be Cyborg Xavi or whomever.

Even in the cyborg-less present, playing FIFA, for many of us, offers a clearer insight into what it’s like to be Xavi than participating in an actual soccer match. Like a rat squeezing its body under a car’s hood, FIFA gets into the machinery of Plato’s Theory of Forms and leaves it a smoking mess. When you play FIFA, you’re playing a flawed-but-eerily-accurate representation of association football, one that’s significantly more similar to association soccer than the kind you might play in a park. If we’re operating under the assumption that Xavi’s skill is so immense that he flirts with the metaphysical idea of a central midfielder, then it’s strange that a mere representation of soccer (FIFA) might better help us understand what it’s like to be Xavi than lacing up a pair of cleats and playing midfield in a neighborhood pickup game. But it’s true. Because most of us, when on a soccer pitch, are nothing like Xavi; a game that brushes up against reality as often as FIFA can perhaps teach us what it’s sort of like to be Xavi. At the very least, it endows us with his ability and precise estimations of his teammates and opponents, if not his thought processes or his vision. Maybe if we jog a few miles on the treadmill, place the player lock on the diminutive Catalan, switch the camera angle to field level, turn the sound all the way up, and have a few friends yell obscenities at us in Spanish as we (as Xavi) move around the virtual pitch, we might learn a bit about what it’s like to participate in a Clásico at the Bernabéu.

Though I’m not sure that’s why we’re playing in the first place. FIFA is probably somewhat edifying, but that’s not its main draw. I’ve never thought I better understood why José Antonio Reyes plays the way he does because I’ve scored a few hat tricks using his virtual avatar, nor have any of the hours I’ve spent twirling analog sticks and mashing buttons been an attempt to find out. And realism? It’s important, but not paramount. One doesn’t sink an afternoon or eight into a soccer videogame because it mirrors reality, just as someone doesn’t buy a painting to marvel at the lifelikeness of its subjects. If you wanted to stare at something that looked a lot like a bowl of fruit, you would just go to the supermarket. The realism for which titles like FIFA strive is a window into something nearly all games want to establish: an intimate relationship with the gamer.

Because the purest reality is a knife with innumerable serrated kinks running down its blade. Reality is where Villareal and Valencia sell off their best players each summer due to financial hardship, and if we know what it’s like to be Marcelo or Yaya Touré, we know what it’s like to be racially defamed. Instead, we want a sandbox that feels real. We want agency where we would normally have none. We want the serrations of reality rendered smooth. We want losing 4-0 against a rival to sting, not scar. The ideal sports title provides the gamer with a world that’s deceptively realistic, but then it gives them the privilege of manipulating that world. Being a sports fan is an exercise in anxiousness, because a fan can’t actually do anything to affect what he or she is watching. The ideal title expunges that anxiousness and replaces it, ostensibly, with a sense of responsibility. It asks questions of the gamer. If you had Xavi’s passing ability or Drogba’s aerial prowess, how would you use them? And the gamer discovers that this responsibility is simply a different strain of anxiousness. The game wraps itself around the gamer, and the gamer flexes their elbows a little uncomfortably.

So when Alan Smith praises a striker’s poise after the ball has flown over crossbar, he shouts You’re playing a videogame! at the gamer, which is jarring and irksome when one is ensconced in the pseudo-reality a close FIFA match creates. These infrequent glitches in sound design are emblematic of the futility of the task at hand. No matter how stellar a sports title is, it can never be correct. Portions of the map will always be blurry. The team at EA Canada gathers its instruments each year and sharpens a few of these blurry patches, knowing they will fail to sharpen others. This variety of cartography is for self-flagellators, after all. And meanwhile, bathed in cheers so genuine they sound sarcastic, the gamer is forced to shake the disillusionment from his or her joints. The crowd at the Almost Santiago Bernabéu grows restless.

Colin McGowan is a writer and comedian living in Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @cs_mcgowan.

you have only to watch his mouth:
when a besieging general sees

a city wall breached by his troops,
when a bacteriologist

realizes in a flash what was wrong
with his hypothesis, when,

from a glance at the jury, the prosecutor
knows the defendant will hang,

their lips and the lines around them
relax, assuming an expression

not of simple pleasure at getting
their own sweet way but of satisfaction

at being right, an incarnation
of Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.

— W. H. Auden, from “Sext”

I first came to understand the passions that soccer could arouse when I was about twelve years old, though at the time I had never seen a match. I may have noticed some people kicking a ball around, though I doubt it; I expect that I had been exposed to a few grainy highlights on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. No, I learned about soccer obsessives the way I learned most other things I knew, or believed I knew, when I was twelve: through reading science fiction.

My instructor was Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote a story about a World Cup final held in a South American stadium on a hot sunny day. The 100,000 fans had been given commemorative programs printed on shiny silver paper, and when the match’s referee made a dreadful call against the home team they all tilted the sheets to catch and reflect the sunlight, focused a hundred thousand beams of light on the ref, and flash-fried him to a blackened lump. (Cool, I thought, and Would that work?)

Thesis: No referee lives, or has ever lived, or ever will live, whom someone will not think deserving of Death by the Ray of Archimedes. The standard deviation of fans’ judgments about referees is staggeringly high; opinions about players are comparatively almost unanimous. Nobody thinks Cristiano Ronaldo is a lousy player. Nobody thinks Titus Bramble is the best defender in Europe. Yes, there are fans who think that Gareth Bale was dramatically overrated after just a couple of impressive performances against Inter, but no one — no one at all — is saying that Bale has barely the quality needed to ride the bench for Scunthorpe. Yet there are plenty of people who say, and probably even whole-heartedly believe, that Howard Webb lacks what it takes to ref League Two matches.

My own view of Webb is that he’s the Tony Romo of referees: he goes on for a good while like a champion, a master of his domain — and then suddenly, at a moment of high tension and great consequence, he makes a completely ludicrous decision. And then, another day, he does it again. And then again. Eventually operant conditioning kicks in, and then every time his name is mentioned the thought that springs instantly and unbidden to mind is What the hell was he thinking? Probably not fair, but there it is. Pavlov and Skinner understood these things. But operant conditioning makes rational assessment difficult.

The sine qua non of refereeing excellence is the Hemingwayesque “grace under pressure.” Yes, of course, a ref needs to know the rules, to be in excellent physical condition — you tell ’em, Sir Alex! — , to be divinely impartial, and all that. But the most important gift of all is to have clear sight and a calm mind when all hell is breaking loose on the pitch.

Or perhaps that’s not right. Perhaps the greatest gift of all is to convince others that one has that unshakeable inner calm. Webb can’t seem to generate that confidence, at least not consistently; and (long before he inadvertently aroused the hatred of some deeply twisted Chelsea supporters) Anders Frisk had the same problem. There was just something about the dramatic way he moved about the pitch, and especially the d’Artagnan-like flourish with which he produced yellow cards, that made players think he was a guy who simply couldn’t be relied on when the chips were down. Which meant that for many fans all of his key calls, or non-calls, were deemed wrong until proven right; and no debatable call is ever proven right.

In my time as a soccer fan, no referee has come closer to achieving this rare and distinct form of charisma than Pierluigi Collina, and I’m writing this post primarily because I’ve been thinking about him lately and missing his presence in big matches. It was actually fun to watch him on the pitch, because he seemed to be always aware of the emotional dynamics among the players; he knew whom to talk to, and when, and how — sometimes holding his hands out, palms towards the grass, gently pressing down the anger, and sometimes lasering threat at an offender with those terrifying protuberant eyes. He seemed to radiate the calmness of assured authority — which of course doesn’t mean that he was always right; but it’s telling that when the Real-Barça rivalry was spiraling out of control last year UEFA called Collina in as an observer. Not that that did much good — but (I wonder) how would he have handled things if he had refereed one of those slugfests? And when I think of the last World Cup final, I always ask myself whether he would have sent off Nigel de Jong for putting his foot through Xabi Alonso’s chest.

These are pointless speculations, but I can’t resist them. And I suspect that for those who don’t despise Collina — those who do despise him will show up in the comments here pretty soon — his reputation will probably be burnished by time. Certainly he remains an imposing figure in Italian soccer, though in ways that are sometimes hard to construe by an outsider like me. What, for instance, to make of the bizarre protest Napoli supporters staged last year, when they expressed disapproval of calls going against their club by holding aloft pictures of Collina? Was this their way of blaming Collina for the unfairness, as the New York Times claimed? Or was it, as I prefer to think, an invocation of a Lost Father, of a deus absconditus, the great and wise one who has departed but — Attenzione, arbitro! — is still watching? Yes, he is watching.

I tend to view questions of race in shades of gray. I am half-white, half-Mexican, and my Dad’s nickname for my Anglo mom was guerita. Guera is a term in Mexican-Spanish for white-skinned folks. It harbors no inherent negative connotation. Rather, because a majority of Mexicans have a darker complexion, it is a useful adjective. I turned out freckled and blue eyed like my mom, so I’ve always been the guerito of the family. My wife, from Nicaragua, calls me chele—the respective Nicaraguan word for white folk. And she is my morenita.

Did you see what just happened there? People referred to one another’s skin tone without any racist prejudice. On a superficial level, it is possible to refer to somebody’s race without it being an insult. Yet, in English, my American mind would never dare to say a similar thing. Why? Well, in large part it’s white guilt, but also because of the stranglehold that Anglo linguistic racial constructions have on our imagination. In almost Pavlovian fashion, we all now mindlessly and mechanically seek to stamp out any and all references to a person’s skin color, at least as uttered by the white majority. In a game between Liverpool and United, Evra complained afterwards about a racist comment from Suarez. What happened? The English FA acted on the Frenchman’s complaint, managers said dumb stuff, and everybody watched TV replays to try and read lips. But, the particulars of the case aside, I’m worried more about the assumptions behind Anglo racial linguistic notions.

Here’s the formula: you made a comment with a racial term in it = you are a vile racist = wrath of God. At least if you’re a member of the white majority. Yet behind this effort to stamp out linguistic traces of race lies a very questionable belief: race can be separated from identity. Within debates on racial identity politics, two strands emerge: (1) People who argue for a post-racial world of equality that is color-blind, and (2) People who argue for a world of equality that accepts differences as inherent and of value. Both strands have their problems—the first is arguably cultural imperialism, while the other assumes a static identity for groups. Yet, Anglo racial linguistic notions paint over this debate and side with the first group. What shocks me is how this assumption flies in the face of reality. I have white skin. If we can’t agree or articulate the basics, then how can we cope with the truly complicated stuff behind race relations? It’s like arguing about a weekly grocery budget with your spouse while a bank forecloses on your house.

I side with the second camp and I’d like to see a multicultural US where we accept differences as a part of identity and of value. In a soccer sense, I think that it’s pretty cool Patrice Evra was a diplomat-brat and born in Senegal. Even though Eddie Murphy has done his damnedest to convince me that all black guys are inherent criminal masterminds waiting to help me and other white guys rob a bank, I know that’s not the case. Was being black a key facet to the brilliant music of John Coltrane or Michael Jackson? It certainly formed a part of their identity and, I will argue at risk to life and limb, influenced their lives and added value. America is a better place for their efforts.

But here’s where we get to the clincher: sincerity.

On a superficial level, in the Spanish language one can use the term “negro” or “guero” or “moreno” with no negative connotation. But all language exists in context. I’d only say those terms to family, friends, or acquaintances. Also, if you say the same term with anger in your eyes and hate in your heart, then its meaning can change 180 degrees. In Spanish, to insult somebody you normally add “de mierda” (of shit) at the end of a noun. Thus, while it’s possible Cesc called Kanoute a “Negredo de mierda” (as in Alvaro Negredo, a Spanish forward and teammate) and Suarez maybe innocuously called Evra a “Negro de Monaco” (black person from Monaco), I have my doubts. Even if they just said “negro,” the TV replays show fire in their eyes. Why did that word pop into their head when they were upset?

While Anglo racial linguistic notions may be too simplistic & dated, nobody can deny that white folks in the past few decades have at least learned that their words have an effect on listeners. Empathy is appreciated. Yet we also can’t simply spill our own complex Anglo racist history onto an immigrant from Uruguay and a Spaniard. I have no doubt that Cesc and Suarez said some nasty things. They may even have made some race-based comments that sound kinda bad in Spanish and would sound really bad in English. However, until we move beyond a black/white notion of “racism” and the term “racist”, I don’t feel comfortable labeling either with the same term as I’d put on George Wallace.

Elliott blogs about soccer at Futfanatico.com. His soccer eBook, An Illustrated Guide to Soccer & Spanish, is available for only $5.99 on the Kindle, Nook, and at Goodreads. Check out a free preview here.