Towards a New Theory of Football

I have by chance hit upon an exciting new way of looking at football, which will revolutionise our understanding of the game. After outlining my approach, I will apply it to a concrete situation, viz. the recently concluded Euro 2004 champoinship, and will show that, had England beaten Portugal (a matter after all of a mere penalty shoot-out), we would have gone on to defeat Greece in the final. Bear with me, for we have some choppy theoretical waters to navigate.

Sports are usually ranged along a line between the purely physical and the purely tactical. At one extreme we have athletics - sprinting, say - where it's all down to the physical. I include individual technique as physical. So in sprinting, those with the best technique, those who are strongest and fittest, those who take the most steroids, are the winners. No tactics: the gun's fired and you go flat out for the finishing line.

At the other extreme, exemplified by chess, we have games of pure tactics. No physicality involved, though perhaps a certain level of fitness is a minimal requirement so you don't get mentally exhausted too quickly.

The conventional thinking, then, has sports ranged along this physical-tactical line, with football providing a typical mixture of the two. Clearly your side needs to be fit and strong, with good ball-control skills, and clearly also you need to have a tactical understanding of the game to harness those skills. So you'd think a football team could approach some sort of optimum, with the fittest players with the best techniques joined with the smartest manager with the best understanding of the game. That's the approach taken by all the big clubs, and it's okay as far as it goes, but there's something missing. Somehow it never quite works out. You think you've got it all covered and you're beaten by some supposedly useless team of no-hopers. The standard answer is that there's an element of unpredictability - "it's a funny old game" - but that has never been for me a satisfying answer. It is, to be frank, a cop-out, an admission of failure. Well now I am able to fill in that gap in our understanding: to provide a new and vital theoretical tool to enable us to understand the enigma that is football.

We need to add a third dimension, alongside the two I've already outlined. A third sporting archetype, if you will, alongside athletics and chess. This third dimension is - and herein, I believe, lies the genius - scissors, paper, stone.

Let that sink in for a moment. The implication is that there can never be a perfect or optimum team, because, for every style of play there is always another which can beat it. A team can beat you even though they have been beaten by a team which in turn were beaten by you.

Right, we now have the theoretical tools: let's apply them to Euro 2004. We can identify three styles of play. Firstly - scissors - there's the open fluent attacking game exemplified here by Portugal. Individual players are out to shine, and impress with their skills. A second style of play - stone - exemplified here by Greece but usually associated with Italy, concentrates on highly organised defence, putting nearly everyone behind the ball and hoping for a single winning goal from a break or set-piece. Stone blunts scissors: Greece beats Portugal.

A third style is exemplified by England - paper - the long-ball game, punting the ball upfield in the, usually vain, hope of finding an England forward. Scissors cut paper. Portugal's open style defeats England's long-ball game. But - and I think by now you may be able to see where this is going - paper wraps stone. England would have beaten Greece because the long-ball game, though useless against Portugal, would have been effective against the closed highly organised Greek defence.

So there you have it: a small but I believe seminal addition to football theory. Only a start of course: I expect others to develop my insight so that we can eventually arrive at a fully formed and sophisticated explanatory tool.

Comments

[rightpersonrighttimerightplace]

there are an infinite amount of sides(styles) at any given time because of:

A)Players (number)
B)Positioning (physical location)
C)Skill level (...immeasurable, because of aggressiveness of play relating to 1. team ability 2. player ability 3. time constraints)

=players make plays, not playbooks.

[sangam]

i agree with you.i am thinking about it. so see or hear you again,sangam

[seraf kumsuz]

your a nut..today football has become very sterotyped thanks to certain coaching beliefs ie English FA,players are not taught to think .Bascially the team (players) that can keep possesion of the ball under pressure for longer periods in the game , are teams that generally succeed ie argentina, brasil, spain germany 1974 etc.not sciccors ,paper,rock..

[omonia re]

I believe you are on to something good