Tom's Notes—Football Philosophy

During the World Cup, rivers of ink - Guardian ink particularly - were spilled gushing over the Spanish "ticki-tacka" or "ticky-tacky" or whatever you like to call their style of relentlessly tapping the ball about between each other. The couscous-salad-and-Helvetica crowd love ticki-tacka. They say it's the future of football. "Football 2.0."

Continentals tend to have "a system" like this. And know-it-alls are always saying we should adopt one of them.

[The systems, not the smarty-pantses or Continentals—I presume.]

The Italians have their Catenaccio. The Brazilians Samba; the Germans icy aggression—I'll call it Terminator style. The Dutch have Total Football, and the Argentinians, well, the Argentinians have Lio Messi...

Save the Dutch, all these nations have won a World Cup (and the Dutch have come bloody close, twice). So, there's something to be said about their systems.

I say: they're all dead ends.

I liken it to philosophy. The European nations had great philosophers, and those great philosophers (mostly) were in the tradition of "system builders." They'd think up one fundamental thought from which everything else flowed. Leibniz and Monads; Kant and Noumena; Descartes and his Cogito; and so on. Like a pyramid turned on its head, the body of knowledge, according to them, stood on one principle or rule or axiom. The problem there is obvious—take that one brick away and the whole thing falls down.

It's the same with football philosophy. Predicate everything you do on one principle or rule or axiom - in other words, have "a system" - and you're destined to fail, monumentally. When it goes, the whole shabang goes.

Back to philosophy, what did-in the European thinkers? British Empiricism did. It was the opposite of Continental philosophy: the artifice of human knowledge (who knows if it's a pyramid or not!) was to be built brick by brick, by something akin to "fill in the blanks." Rather than tearing down the whole lot and trying to work bottom up from one thing, the empiricists left everything in place and just went from "well, what works and what doesn't." Find something that seems like it works, keep it; find something that seems like it doesn't work, ditch it; and sod the implications of both. Simple as that. Empiricism, as a result, turned out to be a very mixed bag, but that mixed bag - and the way we got it - laid the foundations for the scientific method and the only continuing form of philosophy—Analytic.

When you think about it, mixed bags tend to work out for the best: Hitler was forced to admit, at his end, that the mixed-race Slavs were the master race (we're all mixed race to some degree though Adolf!); an average car with an average radio is more useful in daily life than a supercar with no radio or a top-of-the-range home audio system and no car; minestrone soup is better than tomato soup.

So being Empirical about our football is better than being dogmatic about it. It's the tradition of no tradition. And it's ours.

We should stick to it.