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If we look philosophically at football, it seems appropriate to focus on the phenomenon that comes to meet us when we participate in a football experience. This method, phenomenology, is explicitly employed by Simon Critchley in his excellent essay What We Think About When We Think About Football (Sexto Piso), which we will discuss on other occasions. From the range of nuances that the phenomena of high-level sports competition have, I propose to focus on those that belong to aesthetics.
Football then appears as an activity to which we can attribute properties traditionally associated with art, such as beauty, the sublime, or ugliness. We contemplate a match in a meditative way, hoping for the moments of moments, says Critchley, in which a collective shudder occurs around a unique identity. This collective expression is usually associated with the goal, as if the primary purpose of the teams was to win at all costs. On the contrary, an aesthetic that avoids this goal-centrism should be cultivated, an aesthetic al di là del risultato. It is a tantric football experience, so to speak, that does not desperately pursue orgasm. The meditative concentration of the spectator is not directed at the satisfaction of a desire for victory, but at the hope of participating in an extraordinary event.
In the 21st century, the club's achievements have modified the disposition of the culés, who no longer show hope, but rather go to the stadium to witness the regular repetition of the miracle.For example, in the 80s and 90s, the hope of the Barça fans was to see epic phenomena (Tenerife), great comebacks (Gothenburg), saving goals (Kaiserslautern). A hope that is consumed in an instant and savored for the rest of one's life. In the 21st century, the club's achievements have modified the disposition of the culés, who no longer show hope, but rather go to the stadium to witness the regular repetition of the miracle. It goes without saying that this will also end, and that then it will be necessary to nourish hope again, in this case for the return of the messiah.
The moment of moments that the spectator hopes to experience is eminently aesthetic. It is about witnessing the consummation of a successful athletic performance. What do we celebrate in these moments? The German philosopher Martin Seel argues, in a 1993 article, that in these peak moments of sports competition, an incapacity is celebrated. Specifically, the incapacity to do what one tries to do and what one sometimes manages to do. Seel writes that to succeed in competition, that is, to participate successfully in a top-level sporting event, in decisive moments athletes must transcend what they can do, surrendering to the movement of their body. It is therefore a capacity that is not controlled, but rather depends on an involuntary bodily response.
It can also be defined as a form of intelligence, as Daniel Dennett commented on his recent visit to Barcelona, citing Piaget and Claxton, which consists of knowing what to do when one does not know what one has to do.
The danger and, therefore, the trigger of the moment of moments, lies in the limit. Breaking an offside, pushing the end line, dribbling just before receiving the kick, caressing the crossbar. Whoever best lives on the edge, and knows how to overcome it in their favor, emerges victorious.To talk about football today, from Barcelona, is to talk about Lionel Messi. His greatness lies precisely in the regular manifestation of a successful challenge to impossibility. What is celebrated, then, is a form of intelligence that is not only athletic performance, but also adaptation to the conditions of the terrain and the laws governing the interaction between agents. His constant challenge to human physics is possible thanks to the perfect understanding of the circumstances and unforeseen events of the sporting event. The green rectangle is the optimal biotope for his deployment in the game. From the moment he enters, a symbiosis with the sport is manifested that cannot only be caused by tenacity and talent, but requires an immutable faith that, if he surrenders, destiny will favor him.
The danger and, therefore, the trigger of the moment of moments, lies in the limit. Breaking an offside, pushing the end line, dribbling just before receiving the kick, caressing the crossbar. Whoever best lives on the edge, and knows how to cross it in their favor, emerges victorious, but not because they always win (this is impossible and undesirable), but because they will have created the conditions for fans to participate in something bigger than the game, an experience of collective aesthetic happiness, ephemeral and yet tenacious.
Athletes who repeatedly manage to create situations in which they end up doing things they don't fully control are not artists. They are rather the work of art itself. Jaime Gil de Biedma used to say that he had spent his life wanting to be a poet, until he realized that what he really wanted was to be a poem. The athlete who facilitates in fans the repeated celebration of the involuntary overcoming of their incapacities becomes this global work of art, daughter of massively commercialized athletic beauty.