Double Movement: World Football and the Metaphysics of Collective Care

I. The Beautiful Game

It started offscreen as it always does. Well, maybe it didn’t start offscreen. It’s hard to know when this stuff starts really, that’s kind of one of my points. There’s definitely a moment before all this happened where key elements were offscreen.

In the 29th minute of Brazil’s round of 16 matchup with South Korea in the 2022 Men’s World Cup, Brazil led 2-0, and they were just getting started. Central midfielder Casemiro had the ball at his feet just inside the final third of the field. In front of him were 10 of the 11 South Korean players, defending in two banks of four with an anchored defensive midfielder between them. Off the ball, running at the last bank were 3 Brazilians, and Casemiro picked out the most central of them, a defender Marquinhos (you’d think maybe he’d be closer to his own goal defending a 2-0 lead in a knockout round game, but Brazil was kind of feeling the vibes right about now). Casemiro lobbed the ball into the box towards Marquinhos who was sprinting into the space behind the last row of the defense yet in front of the keeper. This lobbed pass was dealt with just fine, cleared by a scrambling South Korean defender back out into the space between the two rows of defenders, and as it slowly fell back to earth, a Brazilian Richarlison (the team’s nominal striker) and South Korean midfielder Hwang In-beom challenged to win the ball.

Often, these types of moments would see the ball headed again into the sky by either player, and perhaps after 1 or 2 more aerial challenges, it would fall again sort of harmlessly into space for the attacking team to gain control again but safely far from goal, or perhaps it would land out of play. This time though, as the ball floated down to earth, Richarlison kind of nestled it down with the crown of his head and juggled the ball 3-4 times, balancing it on his skull until it fell perfectly to his right foot at which point he .. while beginning to move left, cushioned the ball forward and to the right, around a South Korean defender to that same Brazilian defender (lol) Marquinos now standing in a pocket of space just outside South Korea’s box. Marquinhos took one touch to control the pass, and as Richarlison sprinted goalward, still outside the box, Marquinhos “no-look” cut it back to him, except he didn’t. What Richarlison could sense was that Marquinos hit that pass kind of hard for how close the two were to each other, and so he let the ball roll through his feet and past him slightly further back to Thiago Silva (uh.. another Brazilian defender, who was apparently also feeling invincible and standing just outside the opponent’s box). Silva who had also drifted into a pocket of space, a different pocket of space between all of the South Korean players could easily see the run Richarlison was making and without taking a single touch to control the ball from Marquinhos, he “one-timed” it forward through the space between the remaining South Korean players into the box and into the path of Richarlison who rolled it nonchalantly past the goalkeeper with his weaker left foot without breaking stride. Richarlison stoically peeled off to celebrate by the corner flag as if what had just happened was easy or somehow common instead of breathtaking before his teammates joined him. Then the full group danced together in rhythm for about 10 seconds. When they were satisfied, Richarlison jogged over to the bench and repeated this dance with 61 year old manager, Tite as the game clock ticked on. As the Brazilians danced, the clock continued to tick. By the time the game resumed, over ninety seconds had ticked on since the goal was scored. No one was particularly bothered by the delay.

In the next game in the quarterfinals, Brazil were leading 1-0 in “Extra Time” (overtime) after a similarly scintillating goal when in the last few minutes to go until Brazil’s victory, Croatia launched a counter attack on the left against a still-attacking Brazil. With many Brazilians caught too far upfield, Burno Petkovic found the ball at the top of the box and his shot attempt was blocked by a sliding Marquinos (remember him?) who had raced back to defend the counter. The ball caromed off Marquinos’ leg goalward, wrong-footing Brazilian goalkeeper Alison Becker and it looped aimlessly into the net. All you could do was watch it.

The way most of us watch soccer is we follow the ball around the screen with our eyes, tracing its encounters with the players, one touch at a time, taking our cues from the camera’s gaze. We delight whenever a player is able to do something exciting with the ball, like Richarlison. We groan when the ball does something ugly, like bounce off a defender and into his own net. Is our focus too narrow?

Space, Time, and Motion

As Petkovic’s shot looped over the goal line, only 7 of the 22 players participating in the match were visible in frame on the television broadcast. This isn’t so unusual. Soccer has a more expansive perspective of space and time than any other popular sport. Its physical space is vast, nebulous, and heterogenous. It is so vast, that when broadcast on television, it is virtually impossible to see the whole field in one shot and exceedingly rare to find all 22 players on the screen at one time. Its space is nebulous because there are very few markings on the field, and even fewer that are used by anyone with any frequency. The absolute boundaries of a soccer field are also heterogenous and vary from stadium to stadium — the Laws of the Game allow for home teams to decide the precise dimensions for themselves within an acceptable range, and this flexibility extends to the nature of the surface of the field itself, the type of grass, how short it is cut etc. In contrast with other sports, the boundary markers on the field are also fundamentally “in bounds” as the round and unpredictable ball is considered to be in play until it has wholly passed over the goal line or touch line. You can stand with your foot on the line. You can stand on the other side of the line even while keeping the ball in play. Further, if any one boundary on the field matters more than another, it isn’t any of the visible markings at all, but the two “offside” lines which are invisible, abstract horizons in constant flux, moving whenever the deepest lying outfield player on each team takes so much as a half step forward or backward until they reach the halfway line. These abstract lines are of course at their core relational, and they have law (and history) breathed into them, governing the permissible movement (in time) and the permissible engagement with the ball by the opposite team’s furthest forward players, these permissions contracting and expanding fluidly as play dictates. For Richarlison’s goal, it’s the first ball over the top that pushes South Korea’s offside line back as they retreat to deal with the threat and allows the three Brazilian players each to find enough space between the ranks of their opponents. There is no pretense that the offside line represents something “natural.” Instead, it is and has always been a contestable policy, a creature of design, of law and governance, a policy variable adjusted toward some shared objective.

In soccer, players occupy this vast and varying space not within rigid positions or outposts but in abstract patterns in relation to themselves, their teammates, opponents, and the ball, all of which are constantly in motion.

Speaking of motion, perhaps soccer’s most defining aesthetic characteristic is its constant movement. Unlike other sports which require by law that players be still at regular intervals, resetting between “plays” or phases of action, soccer players move constantly at varying speeds without halting from first whistle until the end (there is a 20-minute halftime break). There are no discrete plays or timeouts, and virtually no discrete 1v1 duels between players like you might see between a pitcher and a batter in baseball. Instead, you have two sets of constantly morphing and improvising choreographies. This constant movement (soccer players run on average between 7-10 miles in a game) is neither robotic nor random (Brazil’s two central defenders find themselves in great attacking positions to aid in Richarlison’s goal). Instead these fluid shapes are the result of a constant interlocking of improvisation and coordination of individuals within nested and overlapping relationships (abstract/invisible lines, triangles, concentric circles, partnerships, units, teams) finding ways to provision for their collective common goals while in conflict with those of their opponents in continuous time.

Speaking of time, most (but not all) sports are bound explicitly by time in an austere manner. In other sports there would be no appetite for players dancing together for minutes at a time while the game clock ticks on. In other sports, time is measured by a clock that starts at a discrete fixed number that is always the same (e.g. 15 minute quarters), and then counts downward only, disintegrating towards zero, with the referee regularly freezing this countdown via their whistle when stoppages of the game occur. The audience anxiously checks the clock for these stoppages as time approaches zero. And these stoppages create discrete time series across which conflicts and contestations emerge and are resolved, equilibria form and then reset. Because of these discrete plays and stoppages, for many other sports the direct causal impact of any given action or event on future actions resets or expires quickly, while its impact (or lack thereof) on the score line is often permanently resolved each play.

Conversely, in soccer, without these resets, time is measured by a clock that begins instead at zero and counts continuously upward with the actions on the field taking place within chains of events of varying lengths. Time builds upward toward a number that is not known by anyone with specificity at the beginning of the match nor at any other point in the match by anyone other than the referee. The match is finished only when the referee blows the whistle at “full time,” he who has full discretion to determine when enough game has been played (based on his judgment of how much time should be “added on” to the nominal 90-minute program for injuries, time-wasting, and other stoppages of play - like the exuberant joy of choreographed team dances after scoring transcendent goals). Further, referees in soccer are typically hesitant to end a match (regardless of what the clock reads or the amount of judgmental stoppage time they had allotted previously) when either team has possession of the ball in the attacking third, building toward a chance to score. In the moment, this creates the sensory experience of a game that could in theory last forever if only this last possession sequence might persist.

Time in soccer is in this abstract sense infinite (or yearning for infinity), but it is also continuous and immovable. The clock continues to march onward and upward, no matter what disruptions in play are occurring on the field. In one of my favorite soccer videos, the game clock continues to count upward for 2.5 minutes as a black cat wanders onto the pitch and evades everyone while the crowd serenades their furry guest with spontaneous song.

Even if there is a practical limit to the length of a match (mercifully, with no breakages in play or ad breaks*, you can always count on these things to end after a couple hours of real-life time), soccer’s specific aesthetic of continuous, accretive time is not trivial. If for most sports time is portrayed as exceedingly scarce and dwindling towards its inevitable death, in soccer as time builds rather than vanishes, it is instead a resource with which a team can combine its other readily available resources in the current moment: player abilities, the ball, tactics, decisions, movements, feats of athleticism and creativity along with other “investments” of energy to build or create something in the future. Typically this something is “space” or the capacity to continue to build space for the purpose of scoring: a team is provisioning for itself to score in the future, or to prevent the other team from scoring in the future. Its current prospects of scoring and conceding in any given moment are in part the result of past investment decisions (in the sporting sense). Just because an opportunity does not exist right now, does not mean our actions cannot build towards what is needed for it to exist in the future. In soccer, most actions do not resolve with a permanent change to the score, but their impacts do persist on the actions and opportunities that follow.

To put a finer point on it, in most sports there inevitably comes a moment in the game when the next change to one of the team’s scores is significantly less important than the time remaining in the game (think of an NFL team leading in the second half who calls more running plays, willing to not score and instead give the ball back to their opponent in order to bleed out the game clock. Or in the opposite case, a basketball team trailing late who resorts to sending their opponent to the foul line, literally willing to trade points to their opponents in order to gain time on the clock, or halt its march). In soccer, because goals are so scarce (more on this below), and so vitally affirming, game-changing, and critical to the outcome of a match or a season, the point at which the time remaining in a match begins to become more critical than the question of which team will score next, or whether there will be a goal scored at all, occurs much later or occurs so late as to be terminal and inseparable from the final whistle (ask Brazil). Said another way, because “who scores next” remains so vitally important in nearly all matches until the final whistle, time is more of a resource to combine with soccer ideas and actions to create the critical next goal than it is a perishable commodity of precious scarce standalone value ever diminishing. The leading team can (and does) do everything they can to waste time, but the referee is fully empowered to continuously add time back to the clock to account for this “shit-housing.” Goals are so scarce that the time remaining is hardly a determinative factor.

The Austerity of Chance

Speaking of goals being scarce. For all the yearnings for the infinite and for a boundlessness described above, and for the abundant aesthetics of collective care palpable in soccer’s designed challenge of combining resources now together with a more capacious sense of time and space which I tried to outline above, the physics of soccer are nevertheless fundamentally austere. Or maybe not the physics, but the thoughtfully designed limitations built into the laws of the game. The players (save the goalkeeper) cannot by law use their hands – this is the most immediately defining functional attribute of the sport. Because of this, despite how nonchalantly Brazil occasionally makes it look, soccer is difficult by design. And this manifests itself most concretely in goals being hard to score. Because goals are hard to score and because you have to shoot the ball to score (on average, 1 in 9 shots goes in), soccer is largely about trying to find ways to (collectively) maneuver the ball into good shooting situations, and then to create as many shots as you can (shots you will probably miss), and then in turn prevent your opponent from doing the same (because sometimes late in a match they shoot it off your shin and steal your victory). There’s a ton of failure in soccer, which means chance and uncertainty play a heavy hand. The interdependence of all of the various players also increases the already high inherent level of luck in the sport. There is an unanswerability to this feature of uncertainty that is perplexing even to lifelong fans; however, it is important to place it in the proper context, which is that this chance stems in part from the roundness of the quixotic ball itself, and this very intentionally defines “playing.” Carlin Wing says:

All ball sports are aleatoric structures organized, to greater or lesser degrees, around bounce. Aleatoric structures—structures of planned chance—produce a reliable kind of uncertainty. We don’t know who will win and who will lose, but we know that at the end of the day, there will be a winner and a loser. A ball introduces a second, more uncertain, kind of uncertainty into the fray. Its bounce dances along the edge of our predictive capacity, always almost but never fully under control. At least in the Anglophone world, this second kind of chance—the chance of the ball—seems to be especially important to our contemporary understanding of play. While other kinds of contests are raced, run, rowed, and swum; wrestled, fenced, fought, and boxed; timed, weighed, measured, and judged; ball games are played. And only an athlete who contends with balls (or pucks, or shuttlecocks, or other third objects) earns the title “player.”

Physics and uncertainty as we understand them are real, but they do not prevent the game itself from existing and succeeding atop them. They cannot ultimately stop the players from organizing, investing, and provisioning for their own success through abstract mediation and coordination. In fact, this uncertainty is baked into the sport by decision, by design, through its laws. And while goals, the ultimate marker of success, are scarce, soccer matches differ from most sports in that they do not by definition require a winner. At the final whistle, nearly all soccer matches can be won, lost, or drawn, resisting the more common winner-takes-all zero-sum aesthetic in sports.

The individual and the Collective

While it’s true that Richarlison’s goal involves individual brilliance, it’s not just his outrageous talent on display that gives us chills . There’s the other part – where the three (or more players) sense something special and then all somehow get on the same page and combine to find a collective solution by supporting each other in just the right way to turn the moment into a dizzyingly beautiful goal scoring chance. Team sports vary greatly in the extent to which they require collaboration and the extent to which they allow individuals to express themselves freely. “America’s pastime,” baseball, by example has elements of collaboration, but its primary mechanic is a duel between the hitter and the pitcher (working closely with the catcher). These players are broadly given full agency to express themselves within these very contracted confines (a batter’s box, a pitcher’s mound, stillness followed by the pitch and a swing). American football (e.g. NFL) by modest contrast is full of collaboration between players, and while the confines of their performance are somewhat more expansive (they can line up anywhere behind a defined line of scrimmage within some rules, and they can move mostly anywhere after the ball is snapped although their starting point often limits this freedom by law), their agency is still narrowed to a strict adherence to matriculate, designed (perhaps over-produced) plays drawn up with X’s, O’s and arrows by the coaches. The image of soldiers following orders comes to mind. Before every snap they stand at attention, still, and then upon a signal rush into action executing a (mostly) univocal play that has been mediated from a box high above in the stadium by their leader(s). In these plays, often everyone is assigned a man to block or run past. Each of these individual duels will play a part in the success or failure of the play, but it’s hardly collaborative in any creative sense. When the whistle is blown they start all over again, agreeing to a new set of orders coming from on high. Team success in American football appears to be a function both of the execution of the players in accordance with the coaching staff’s will (the winning of individual player duels), and a tactical duel or chess match between one play-caller and another. There is a clear hierarchy between labor and management as well as some clear one-to-one conflicts or exchanges – immanent encounters. Duels of conflicting sovereignty that are written into the sport based on the rules.

The global game carves out its own space in contrast to both of these sports as it relates to individualism. Again, the space within which the 22 players operate is expansive and unrestricting, and collaboration between players is required in order to achieve their collective goals, and the freedom and creativity afforded to each and every player is nearly without limits. There is a head coach pacing the sideline, but his voice is often drowned out by a stadium of singing spectators. Even if the players can hear him, there are no breaks in action with which he can draw up new orders, nor does he have a good vantage point from which to even see the field or the game take shape. A soccer team expecting to simply execute instructions on the field will surely be lost as soon as the whistle is blown when they are slow to improvise to the situation at hand. The players have a level of individual agency not found in most other sports. And yet, these players will accomplish nothing individually on their own without one another. They need each other. Modern legendary soccer thinker and manager Marcelo Bielsa says:

Totally mechanized teams are useless, because they get lost when they lose their script. But I don’t like either ones that live only on the inspiration of their soloists, because when God doesn’t turn them on, they are left totally at the mercy of their opponents (Wilson 391).

Each player on the field has a relationship with every other player on the field and as this relationship is affirmed and strained in continuous motion in every moment of the match, the team shares an interdependence. This interdependence can sometimes be seen when players intuit each others’ intentions or positioning without even making eye contact, or when they move into the space vacated by their teammates who have pulled the opponent’s shape apart (as was the case with Richarlison and Marquinhos). We can also observe it when players coordinate their collective shape and positions so well in relation to space that they thwart a more talented team’s attempts to attack.

Metaphysics of Soccer: Building Capacity

One thing that’s beautiful about soccer is that while the fans of professional teams really do care about winning, in their hearts they care more about (again not in a totalizing way) how the soccer looks. Because goals are so scarce, the score line is quite frequently an unjust measure for performance, but when the soccer is good, you don’t need to look at a scoreboard, you can just kind of tell. Why else would your two central defenders be so far forward as to combine with your strike to create the goal of the tournament when you’re leading 2-0 and only need to win to advance? Why else would you push numbers forward up 1-0 in the final minutes of the next match and risk conceding on a (fluky shot off of a) counter attack. The soccer must look good. And, it’s worth talking at length about what good soccer looks like in the modern era because it looks like collective care.

If the point of the game is to put the ball in the other team’s goal without using your hands (and to prevent the opposite), if this is the charge so to speak, then the problem needing solving is “how?” Modern soccer tactics has a concept called “the buildup” in which a team is trying to move the ball, while maintaining control of it, through the first two thirds of the field to enter the final third in order to try to score. Upon picking up the ball in their own half, they might presently lack the available “resources” or capacity to realistically shoot on their opponent’s goal in the present, but they can try to do something about that. They can invest. They can try to build up capacity and provision themselves towards their team goals. Critical to achieving this is a team’s abstract conception of “space” operating within the macro spatial dimensions of the field. John Muller once wrote in what is now an archived soccer newsletter Space, Space, Space:

One of the main problems soccer teams in possession have to solve is that they’re facing the wrong way. Sure, the guy on the ball is pointed toward goal, and maybe a few guys alongside or behind him are too, but to get to goal you generally have to pass it forward to players who are facing backward. Those players need time to receive the ball, turn, and face goal so they can make the next play. They need space.

The defense’s job is to deny them that space, and one of their advantages is that they’re all aimed the right way, toward both the ball and the goal they’d eventually like to score on. Defenders can see the field. They can see—most of the time—who they’re supposed to mark or screen or close down when the press is triggered. What the attack really wants to do is rearrange the defense so that they’re moving and looking the wrong way as the ball is passed forward to a player in space.

In a memorable 4-part series of essays and videos, John dissects the various ways that modern soccer teams attempt this, using movement and collective action to create this space, including rotation (double movement), pass-and-move combinations, switches of the ball from one flank to the other, and circulation. [1] Invariably, the key feature to all of this is an internalization of necessary interdependence, which is not simply a collection of one-for-one individual relationships but a collective dependence between all of the players of the pitch and with all of the space on the pitch, and with time. The mediation and coordination of the ideas between teammates and across the full distance of play is difficult and often breaks down in soccer, given its aleatoric essence. In fact, at tournaments like the World Cup, things break down even more often because the players who are called up to represent their nations have relatively limited time to train together, to internalize shared tactical ideas, and it’s often more practical (and easier) to onboard shared defensive ideas than creative attacking concepts. This is one thing that makes Richarlison’s goal so breathtaking.

Still, at the professional club level, the best teams in the world are the ones who can identify, articulate, and harness the riddles of interdependence to their advantage. They solve difficult material problems with abstraction and collective effort and the results can be stunning. Importantly, soccer at all levels has room for individual brilliance, virtuosity, and genius, but for whatever individual brilliance is on display (and often this is what the camera tracks, what our gazes are captured by), it is nearly universal that if the soccer is to be described as “good” or “beautiful” it necessarily involves interplay and coordination between the players on the team. The mutual understanding of shape and space comes first, then the ball. The conventional way that we watch soccer is backwards.

The Interdependent Nature of Money

The conventional way to think about money is similar to how we watch soccer: we allow our eyes to follow the ball and observe its encounters with players. The liberal/orthodox imagination of money, its mainstream understood origin story is one of a private, scarce, neutral technology arising via some “natural” market (and prior to government) to facilitate the bartering of goods and services. This “money story” sits atop a sort of Enlightenment-influenced “state of nature” conceptual bedrock, that imagines human existence in its most pure, untainted form to be that of sovereign individuals operating outside of government, law or society (i.e. “nature”) in accordance with their own reason. It goes that they happen on each other via encounter and either exchange via barter what they have individually produced, or they take it from each other, and this continues until there’s one dominant commodity that everyone wants (say a grain of rice) that comes to take the form of a universal exchange equivalent for all the other commodities. Then maybe they want something more durable, like a piece of metal, and when everything else can be traded for this metal at varying rates, it becomes money. And then at some point later these individuals take it upon themselves to enter into a social contract, giving up some of their sovereignty to an intervening government, who steps in to protect property, ensure peace, regulate markets, etc. Or, someone powerful establishes authority over everyone else and becomes government. In either imagination, we are to understand that money is something natural or representative of the natural, and that it arises out of barter, exists before government, and that a government needs to encounter and acquire money from individuals (either through force or through market transactions) in order to buy the public services it needs to provision for what has become… some form of a society. It has to tax (or borrow) money before it can spend it on the stuff government needs (or the stuff society needs).

But there’s more to soccer than what happens when the ball encounters a player or a player encounters another player, and in the same way, there’s more to the “money story” than the representation of natural exchange encounters between individuals and the fruits of their self-reliant labors.

By contrast to the liberal imagination of money, various heterodox schools of political economics (mostly certain modern followers of John Maynard Keynes) known as Post-Keynesians imagine money to be as Scott Ferguson puts it a “centralized political architecture that is public, limitless and, above all, answerable to social needs and contestation.” If the classic liberal money form is like watching soccer by following the ball around the field, the alternative rejects this original fiction, instead affirming the base layer of human existence as collective interdependence (what’s happening on the ball is nested within and/or layered upon what’s happening off the ball, or even off screen and only ever in relation to all of the players on the field). We live in a society because we need one another because we cannot exist fully alone without reference and relation to one another, full stop. Our relation to one another extends beyond what happens when we bump into each other. In order for the ball to move around the field, first there must be space, layers of relationships, design and mediation, in time. In Declarations of Dependence, (not a soccer book, but I like to joke that it is) Ferguson connects this underlying metaphysics of interdependence with what he calls the mystery of “collective care”:

“composing the mystery of collective interdependence and the riddling locus toward which every member of a society variably leans…. It derives from the structure of our dependence, rending and incurving the social field around the mysterious center upon which everyone depends…. Care’s center ontologically precedes the money relation, but money becomes the dominant means for politically organizing the riddle of social dependence during the modern period.”(78-79).

From this radically different starting point, like focusing on the space and the continuous fluid relationships of the players on the field as necessary conditions for the ball to do anything, by focusing on interdependence and care (and thus governance) as existing prior to markets, Post-Keynesians affirm a different money origin story: something closer to a state or constitutional theory of money, where money arises directly from society’s center as a public utility with which our interdependent whole (“society”) allocates resources, invests in its future, and cares for everyone.

The heuristic story here is less individuals encountering each other in nature and then aha! trade, exchange, then money, then government! and more… society works together to survive, every member of a tribe or town contributes something to the overall protection, maintenance, and flourishing of the community. Over time this community finds government (either through democratic means or force, or both). And government in order to provision resources for itself and allocate them amongst the community decides to creates a money unit of account ex nihilo then demands payment in this money form from all its citizens. In order for its citizens to acquire the money they need to pay this tax to the government, they have to produce goods, provide services to the government and the community. Having made these real contributions of time and resources, they are rewarded by the government with money it creates. Over time, this money is more than exchanged for tax relief. It is recycled into the economy, with private savings exchangeable not only with the government in payment of the tax, but within regulated markets. In this story, the government doesn’t need to acquire money in order to operate. That’s backwards. It doesn’t need to tax in order to spend. It needs to spend first in order for society to have any money to pay in taxes.

Money is a circuit and a creature of societal relationships (often a creature of law). Society (via governance) can provision itself and care for everyone via its management of money, a tool it creates to allocate shared resources and guide social reproduction. Government does not need to acquire money to operate. Money comes from within.

This intervention into the money story is vitally important for many reasons I won’t cover here, but one is that it expands the horizon of money’s political and economic possibilities in ways that are inclusive to everyone. This view sits firmly in contrast with the the more “ball-watching” scarcity politics of the traditional mainstream right (where “others” are explicitly excluded or worse, scapegoated and accused of stealing what little there is to go around at the expense of “everyone else”), but also the liberal left/center (who despite comprising a more diverse coalition still trusts the market to divvy up the assuredly zero-sum pie in a just manner), and lastly the more traditional Marxist Left, where zero-sum politics are baked into the cake but where a doomed capitalism is projected to ultimately fall to a united “working class” via violent struggle, with little concern for social issues or the rights of oppressed minorities on the other side of that timeline. The stakes couldn’t be higher then. Having the right money story means the difference between a magnanimous radically progressive New York mayor who promises a new paradigm but who ultimately sacrifices public libraries to the budget gods in a zero sum balancing effort across his agenda, and one who forces the issue and lives up to his promises, knowing money is a political structure, and he and his exhilarating movement necessarily have the political buy-in to achieve that which his constituency already supports.

On my read, one reason modern soccer can be called “the beautiful game” is because more than any other popular sport, its aesthetics, perhaps its metaphysics mirror those of a more expansive and progressive imagination of what money is, where it comes from, and what we can do with it if society has the political will. For those that will listen, soccer is telling us about the power of abstraction, design, interdependence, mediation and collective care while other popular sports continue to perform some of the more contracted, immanent transactional metaphysics propped up by the orthodox liberal money story.

Curiously, it was not always this way.

II. Dual Histories: From Just So Thisness to Abstract Coordination and Mediation at a Distance

The gambit of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (if you’ll allow me) is to illuminate societal interdependence and the public and boundless attributes of money, to affirm money as integral to public caretaking in an interdependent world and to reject the widespread and counter-posed zero-sum logics of private money at every turn. Excavating and repairing the mainstream history of money as a “boundless public center” has been a core part of this, and Scott Ferguson describes the challenging status quo thusly:

“The history of modern money is the history of the center’s ongoing repression.”

Fascinatingly and I hope encouragingly, the aesthetic history of soccer and how the game is played (or how it looks) runs in the opposite direction. The broad form of soccer we might recognize today originates in a somewhat primordial transitional form in the private boarding schools of Victorian England in the mid 1800s where it was played (and in time obsessed over) by students from elite families, each school cherishing and defending their own particular set of rules. While football was a team sport nominally, this proto-modern version was imagined to be firstly a series of individual contests between persons attempting to dribble with strength and dexterity through a scrum of defenders against all odds, with teammates there to pick up the ball and re-attempt as soon as the previous ball carrier failed (i.e. “backing up”). It was a game of contracted, proximate, immanent encounters between “brave” English youths personifying “Muscular Christianity,” expressly encouraged by their schoolmasters as a way to distract them and prevent them from brawling with locals and/or the faculty members themselves (Goldblatt). Despite the large playing fields, the players grouped up in mobs chasing the ball and kicking one another. There was little sense of abstraction, tactics, or teamwork to speak of, and the idea of passing the ball to a teammate was considered cowardly, womanly, and variously illegal (Wilson). The game looked more like rugby than modern soccer – some schools allowed for carrying the ball with your hands around this time, and in fact all other football games (American/Canadian football, rugby, Aussie rules, etc) descend from this primordial form of football in one way or another. To play soccer in these early days was either to have the ball, to challenge it directly, or to wait your turn to do one of those two things, no sense of a more abstract collective charge to support the progression of the ball through space. It was individual pursuits of profit.

Jonathan Wilson put it bluntly in Inverting the Pyramid: “Head-down charging, certainly was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general.”

I suspect it’s no coincidence that this early form of soccer was born into an English society that had within the last couple of generations reconfigured the public sentiment toward how the world worked, namely the nature of money and its relation to social provisioning: a story Christine Desan brings to life in her book Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism.

Desan writes of the history of money, charting it from medieval Europe to the modern day. In a critical period during this arc, when in the 1600s the English government reworked the way it supplied money to the economy. After centuries of setting and attempting to manage not only the unit of account of money, but its price, quantity and specie via coinage at mints, it took the radical and remarkable step of “borrowing” money from banks, as the Bank of England was created. The English government issued paper banknotes to private banks, promising repayment in coin with interest recuperated from tax revenue (i.e. fully backed/guaranteed by the government). The government also allowed private banks to lend out other private banknotes to individuals, backed by the government banknotes they held, and the government accepted these banknotes back in return in order to settle tax liabilities owed to the government. This full circuit operating together is a defining characteristic of “money” so the paper banknotes began to replace minted coinage as money in society; however, this mechanism of “borrowing” from private actors obscured money’s true public nature. Money and the responsibility to organize social reproduction with it, once transparently created by and under the purview of the government now appeared to spring forth from private individuals, rational capitalists who had accumulated said money in successful pursuit of profit via individual encounter and exchange (we might even imagine.. in nature). Desan writes:

The modern approach to money thus made it unnecessary to attend to the way it was made and maintained in law, politics, and the categories of knowledge that knit society together. The old paradigm of money–a medium charged to individuals by the government but claimed as a public resource–had disappeared. A new amalgam–money publicly financed at a profit to individuals but analyzed as an opaque phenomenon–came to animate the modern political economy. The combination wrote a peculiar theory of value into place, while universalizing it as the way money operated, without more. In that circumstance, money and the market it helped create would appear the inevitable product of human interest, social convention, and exchange. The new order thus gained a remarkable power to perpetuate itself (21).

Within that paradigm, economics came of age as a discipline. In its world, money appeared to be made by the economic exchange of individuals, acting each for their own interest (20).

Soccer arises out of the boarding schools in the mid to late 19th century into a world fully reoriented with regards to its perceptions of money, care, and social provisioning. Similarly, success on the soccer pitch was imagined to be contingent not on the shape nor abstract planning of the team as a whole, but instead on the outcomes of these individual duels: literal physical encounters between the sport’s strong, brave, honest young men pursuing individual fortunes and glory.

Despite the imaginations of those who wished to keep the game private within their respective schooling institutions, or more broadly within the network of distinguished private schools in upper class Britain, the pull of global interdependence could not be resisted for long. As “The Laws of the Game” (variously contested) migrated first between classes of British society and then around the world during the industrial revolution and beyond, mediating at great distances a basic rules framework for the sport first within the dominion of Great Britain and then elsewhere, England taught the world about this early contracted form of football.

But the history of the game—while contested and never linear—among many things is a history of the world teaching this immanent, contracted football about abstraction and interdependence, and on my read transforming it for the better.

In terms of how the game itself is played and thought about, various communities and cultures added coordination, mediation at a distance, and an understanding of space as well as more expansive and sensory forms of individual expression. First, the Scots introduced the idea of “the pass,” the most basic form of abstraction and coordination in the game, mainly by contesting the frontier of possibility memorialized in the games’ early rules—they interpreted and then ratified amendments to the offside laws to permit forward passing between teammates. Argentina, Uruguay, and then Brazil added tremendous individual “touch” and skill on the ball and a focus on retaining the ball, keeping it from one’s opponents rather than indiscriminately launching attacks direct on goal. The story goes that as the game began to be played in tight urban spaces in Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, and Montevideo street corners, players in these South American city centers developed a craving for keeping the ball as an end unto itself, which required intense levels of individual skill (and flair). On the one hand, this feels like it was perhaps a transposed form of haecceity, turned away from the brutish stoicism of “head-down” English bravery and towards another form of zero-sum scarcity logic in extreme manifestations of self-reliance, which Wilson suggests may well have been born out of a distrust for institutions in the wake of imperialist economic mismanagement in these regions. But keeping the ball from the opponent did require abstract connections between teammates and improvised patterns of movement. David Goldblatt in The Ball is Round writes, “It is during [the 1920’s] that musical metaphors – teams as orchestras, playmakers as conductors, wingers as soloists – were first used and the recognition of, indeed the demand for, football as art was loudly proclaimed.”

Meanwhile, Wilson describes the migration of the game across Europe during the interwar period:

“For the importance of tactics fully to be realized, the game had to be taken up by a social class that instinctively theorized and deconstructed, that was as comfortable with planning in the abstract as it was with reacting on the field, and crucially, that suffered none of the distrust of intellectualism that was to be found in Britain. That happened in central Europe between the wars. What was demonstrated by the Uraguayans and Argentinians was explained by a -largely Jewish- section of the Austrian and Hungarian bourgeoisie. The modern way of understanding and discussing the game was invented in the coffeehouses of Vienna”(75).

If the Scots added the abstraction of the pass, and the South Americans added individual flair and a focus on keeping the ball with short passing, then in Vienna, the story goes that Hugo Meisl’s Austrian Wunderteam added a certain organized fluidity to the movement and rotation of its players within their lines, a further abstract contribution to the game that became known as the “Danubian Whirl.” In the coffee houses during this period, where journalists, fans, coaches and players alike might rub shoulders with some of the preeminent thinkers and artists in Europe, you would have heard soccer being compared to chess for the first time.

In Russia in the late ‘30s and early ‘’40s, the shift toward interchanging positions intensified as Dinamo Moscow gave full freedom to their attacking players to roam laterally between channels freely creating headaches for their opposition. Talk of Russian players sacrificing their individuality for the collective good was of course common in the mainstream discourse as politics have never been separate from the sport. In the 1950s, Hungary’s addition of the roaming “withdrawn forward” to an already fluid attacking conception made them so dominant as to alter mainstream tactics across the world. Wilson writes of Hungarian manager Gusztáv Sebes adamant suggestion that his team’s victories were “so obviously rooted in the interplay of the team as opposed to the dissociated individuality of England… a victory for socialism.”

In Kiev in the 1960s Viktor Maslov disrupted the previous consensus of “man-marking” on defense, where every player had previously followed one individual on the opposition to deny their advance or access to the ball. His introduction of “zonal marking” meant that now when a team was without the ball their defensive organization was abstractly mediated across the pitch via a common understanding and dynamic awareness of space rather than via 1v1 encounters, which allowed them to “over man every part of the pitch” (phrasing which yearns to explode zero sum logics). Maslov also cemented the importance in the modern game of defenders constantly moving to aggressively close down space via an organized and coordinated “press.” If the first century or so of the history of football had been the steady incremental advancement of abstract concepts to the attacking phase of play, Maslov started a chain reaction that would see the next 60 years of innovations implement abstraction within the team’s defense (Rangnick, Klopp, etc), a seeming inevitability in a game whose reality is ultimately one of interdependence and continuous collaboration across multiple scales.

Perhaps, a tipping point of soccer’s progression away from contracted thisness and towards abstract provisioning occurred in the Netherlands in the ‘60s and’ 70s under Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff, so called “Total Football.” Michels, managing famed Amsterdam side Ajax, added free longitudinal player rotation to an existing imagination of lateral player rotation in possession (see Dinamo Moscow), and attached to this total rotational possibility the concept of an “offside trap” in defense whereby the deepest defenders would rush forward in unison to catch multiple attackers offside (using the aforementioned invisible and dynamic offside line), eliminating them as legal passing options, and then continue forward with this momentum to launch a full coordinated team pressure on the ball and their opponents’ passing options. In this way vertical and lateral rotations were occurring not only in attack but also in defense, on the ball and off, a totality or whole. The Dutch even involved the goalkeeper as a key player in buildup play, previously an isolated, discrete afterthought. David Winner in Brilliant Orange goes to great length to position these “totaal” abstract footballing concepts buzzing around Holland in this period within the context of larger intellectual patterns of the time, which Jonathan Wilson borrows further in Inverting the Pyramid:

Architect, J.B. Bakema, who wrote for the influential Forum magazine, spoke of “Total Urbanisation,” “Total Environment,” and “Total Energy.” “To understand things,” he said in a lecture given in 1974, “you have to understand the relationship between things…. Once the highest image of interrelationship in society was indicated by the word ‘God’ and man was allowed to use earth and universal space under condition that he should care for what he used. But we have to actualize this kind of care and respect since man came by his awareness nearer the phenomenon of interrelationship called the relation of atoms. Man became aware of his being part of a total energy system.’ As in architecture, as across a range of disciplines at the time—the literary theory and semiology of Roland Barthes, the anthropological theory of Claude Levi-Strauss, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan—so in soccer. Within the Ajax model, players derived their meaning, their significance, from their interrelationship with other players (Wilson 249)

“In this period of Total use of earth and space, balance between use and care can only be given by Total Architecture.’ (Winter 30).

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Arrigo Sacchi’s A.C. Milan teams took up this blueprint and used it to dominate Europe emphasizing the use of an offside trap alongside a “high line” whereby his team’s deepest defenders were no more than 25 yards back from his furthest forward attackers, fluid positional interchanges and collective pressure: “In the defensive phase, all of our players always had four reference points: the ball, the space, the opponent and his teammates. Every movement had to be a function of those for reference points. Each player had to decide which of the four reference points should determine his movement. Pressing is not about running and it’s not about working hard. It’s about controlling space… always collective…. The spirit guides the hand.” (Wilson).

It is with some creative license and in the interest of what remains of brevity that I move to Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, widely understood to be the crowning achievement of the beautiful game in the modern era. Johan Cruyff, the global superstar of those Ajax and Holland teams from the ‘70s would go on to play, manage, and then oversee various aspects of F.C. Barcelona, along the way instilling the principles of “total football” into the organization’s youth academies, first teams, and infrastructure from top to bottom. The result, years later, was a globally dominant team comprising players and coaches that had grown up within the La Masia academy largely founded by Cruyff. From 2008 to 2012 under Guardiola’s tutelage, Barcelona won everything there was to win using the philosophy of juego de posicion, combining elements from “total football,” Sacchi’s Milan, and transition/pressure moments from Marcelo Bielsa into a stunning display of fluidity and interchange based upon detailed, obsessive drilling of the team around the geometry and organization of their positioning as a whole—their training pitches were marked up zonally in accordance with the guiding principles of the system. By every player knowing what individual actions they might take to repair or complete the team position as a whole in any moment, Barcelona was able to form abstract diamond shapes from front to back to ensure the capacity to keep possession of the ball no matter the obstacle. On the rare occasion that they did lose the ball, the “infrastructure” they had formed in attack was well positioned to launch an immersive counter-press and either win the ball back immediately in a dangerous area or at the very least pause any transition opportunities for their opponents.

The above summary of the history of footballing tactics (largely paraphrasing Jonathan Wilson) sits nested within the history of soccer’s development, professionalization, and politicization (by good and bad actors); its interaction with and dependence on various institutions and governing bodies throughout the industrial revolution, wars, literal political revolutions, and the rest of its rich history cannot be told without telling the history of the world more broadly. Football’s reach, its governance, its investment in communities (and its corruption) is nested within but also transcends beyond the borders of nation states. Suffice it to say, football cannot be separated from the rest of society, from money, governments, culture, and social movements. For a more robust reading of this more overlapping interaction, I’d recommend David Goldblatt’s “The Ball Is Round.”

III. Nothing Given / Form is Temporary

Meditating on why soccer is beautiful is a worthwhile exercise in its own right, but on my read, it is important that this sport, more globally influenced and globally beloved then all the others, has the triumphant arc of beginning in a place (geographically and conceptually) of immanent haecceity and growing ever more abstract and expansive as it traverses the globe while other popular but perhaps isolated sports have not. If the history of money is one that begins in a proto-aesthetic of abstraction and collective care and is then obscured throughout modern history by politics of individuated self-interest and liberalism, I find it hopeful to observe traces of the opposite arc in the history of soccer. What was originally born into an elite British society for which societal interdependence and money’s capacity for collective care was obscured has grown over time (and was taught) to understand, to articulate, or simply to yearn for an abstract mode of collective care.

But nothing is constant. Just as today we can see cracks in the orthodox money paradigm beginning to form under the weight of heterodox insights and recent global events, the abstract beauty that has blossomed in soccer in its modern form may yet give way to more austere, immanent aesthetics. It might also be instructive then to explore some of the areas where I see this particular beauty of soccer under threat today.

Broken TV Broadcast Metaphysics

sometimes soccer broadcasts suffer from ball watching. Here only 6 of the 22 players are visible in the shot, and we can’t see all of the exciting stuff that must be developing ahead of the play that the player on the ball can see as he measures a pass forward toward something that’s being designed and arranged off screen. This possession will result in a couple of big chances for Brazil but we can’t really see it this part of the process because it’s occurring just off screen.

While modern soccer’s beauty stems from its interdependence, and the beauty of 11 players on each side orchestrating abstract patterns via off-ball movement and decision making on and off the ball, soccer is primarily mediated to fans via television broadcast with a nearly singular focus on the ball itself. The camera follows the ball, and while this is best done with a wider angle to try to show the viewer a glimpse of what is happening on the rest of the pitch, the express purpose of the wider view (when we are blessed with it) seems to be to paint a more descriptive context for what the ball is doing (not to highlight the abstract coordination constantly being performed all over the pitch). Further, cinematic norms mean the broadcast is constantly cutting to close-up shots of players on the ball sometimes from dramatic cinematic angles, and the result is that the abstract mediation of ideas through off-ball team movement is often lost in the shuffle. Specifically, the viewer tends to imagine the game as primarily a series of decisions facing the player with the ball, obstacles he has to overcome, and opportunities he is presented with. The player on the ball is framed visually as the protagonist, and the viewing experience in many ways consists of constantly hoping the player on the ball might do something great and then either resolving this happily when he completes a pass or dribble, converts a shot, or disappointingly when he inevitably turns the ball over. As the ball shifts from player to player, the camera moves, and we’re presented with a new protagonist, one decision or event or snapshot of context at a time, always evaluating their abilities to solve the puzzle that is in front of them, a puzzle which appears to be there “just because.” Man finding himself in nature. On my read, this is a mistake. The other players aren’t just a puzzle he’s trying to solve; they are themselves protagonists with individual and collective agency at multiple scales.

Video Games & the Protagonist Problem

The same probably arises with soccer video games, which are popular worldwide, even beyond the reaches of actual soccer fandom. As an example, the primary game mode in EA Sports’ FIFA franchise (taking its name after the sport’s globally governing body) features a camera lens that mirrors the widest possible lenses you might see as a main television broadcast angle. The user is nominally controlling a team against the computer or against another user online, but in reality his inputs control one player at a time, whoever is presently in control of the ball (or in defense, most often whichever player is closest to the ball). While he might have limited ability to influence the movement of the off-ball players, largely speaking playing a soccer video game means constantly navigating the obstacles and opportunities facing the player currently with the ball (again, the protagonist). The programmers have written automation which orchestrates the other 21 players on the field in ways that mimic broad soccer tactics, but the player’s experience is primarily one of deciding which teammates to pass to or when to dribble into space, when to shoot, etc, constantly solving a new puzzle from the perspective of the player with the ball. When a pass is completed, just as our eyes might follow the ball on the television broadcast, the user’s agency follows the ball warping forward to the receiving player a new protagonist, the previous one becoming a simulated zombie player once again. This is of course, plenty fun. But calling it out and thinking through alternatives is important because soccer video games mediate the experience of soccer to millions of users worldwide (FIFA 20 had 10 million players and the franchise has sold over 325 million copies in its storied history). Further, if a glance through professional soccer players’ social media accounts is any indication, the players themselves frequently play these video games in their free time. By focusing singularly on what is occurring on the ball at all times and away from the patterns, movements and decisions by the other 21 players off the ball, there is a creeping thisness that undermines the abstract beauty of the collective game to the wider world, and might even shape how the sport is imagined by those that play it.

Watching the ball in rows and columns

The extent to which this singular on-ball focused mediation in television (and gaming) actively shapes the reality of the game itself is unclear, but on my read it has directly influenced another area of the sport, which is the growing field of data analytics in football. While data has a long and complex history in soccer, the use of data is much less mature than in other sports (e.g. compared to the “Moneyball” movement in baseball). The modern era of soccer data as we know it today effectively began in the 2000s when a few companies began recording detailed sequential timestamped, positionally located records of every on-ball action taking place in a soccer match, and began providing this information to soccer clubs in major professional leagues and other customers. This manual time-intensive process birthed a so-called data revolution in soccer, from which we are only in the last several years seeing clear fruits in the public sphere. While soccer is a fluid, continuous game with comparatively fewer discrete moments than other sports (i.e. more difficult data to model), the pronounced impact of chance and luck on its outcomes has nonetheless made the sport a prime target for thought-provoking quantitative work. However controversial for so-called purists, this movement has generated major insights into the sport itself and its interaction with chance, and it has challenged and to an extent transformed footballing front offices in their processes and mindsets.

In full disclosure, I am a proponent of, advocate for, and enthusiast on the periphery of said data revolution; however, because the vast majority of data analytics work that has been performed in the public sphere is based on this inherently limited view of events that are only occurring on the ball (“event data”), its insights and models so often share the same contracted, immanent focus of how television and gaming are mediated to the footballing world. Further, one of its most common (and practical) uses is to evaluate the contributions of players singularly based on insights from this event data, to measure and model how players perform when they engage with the ball, which again is but a shadow of football’s full interdependent whole (and I am culpable here). Worryingly, if you analyze enough soccer stats, you’ll run into reified concepts like “duels won/lost” being used to evaluate players interacting with or against the ball, who are in fact operating as part of an interdependent whole. Player evaluation is important and by no means problematic, but what you really want is to evaluate that 95% of the time the players are not interacting with the ball. To the extent that event data and the models it powers drives decision making within the walls of professional football organizations (and it does), in its current form it brings helpful insights while also damaging what I argue is the truer and more beautiful perspective of the game: one of interdependence and abstract coordination.

On this very specific point, there is an encouraging sign as soccer data is becoming richer and more comprehensive by the minute, with the major companies now capturing what’s referred to as detailed “tracking data,” a comprehensive and inclusive sequential dataset of the locations, gazes, and movement vectors of all players on the field (and the ball) 25 times per second. My hope is that as this more inclusive data becomes more widely available, the data-driven insights and models generated by the analytics community come from a place of affirming the sport in its interdependent totality (e.g. measuring the value of off-ball movements and coordinated patterns) rather than a place of seeing more comprehensive data as clarifying the context for what is occurring on the ball (e.g. solely analyzing the decision making of players on the ball). If successful, perhaps insights from the measurement of full tracking-data-powered analytics might transcend the contracted metaphysics of the television broadcast and the agnosticism towards off-ball interdependent abstract coordination of video games to further open up the beautiful game, protecting or caring for its aesthetics of infinity, abundance, and interdependence.

Post Scriptum: 2026 Update

So I originally wrote this in the later throws of the global pandemic, and then worked on it some more during the 2022 World Cup. And then kind of just shelved it. Since then, uh… we’ve had some stuff happen I guess you could say, in the world and to an extent in soccer. The extent that I live and breathe the game today and/or the soccer analytics movement has fallen off precipitously (really just too busy elsewhere), but it’s worth just acknowledging some stuff I guess.

On the soccer side, the vast nebulous space and continuous time, suggesting infinity and collective, boundless care is further under attack by hydration breaks at the 2026 world cup which literally stop the clock halfway through each half. We should not normalize this. We also have a further entrenchment of Video Assistant Review, which after years of experimentation is expanding its reach — now judging corner kicks, and which team should have possession of a ball when it goes out of play, calling back fouls and switching them to the other team after the fact, etc. If not implemented correctly this can create further stoppages in play that undermine soccer’s beauty. At the very least, this world of false celebrations and goals being called back and really dampened some of the spontaneity of joy in the game. The rise of the long throws, set pieces, and the “Meat Wall” further threatens to take a game whos true pleasures are in the flow and abstract buildup, and convert it into a game of faceted set plays, as the scoring conversion rates on these plays are rising 40% due to the tactics of having big guys block the keepers movement out into the center of the box then serving up crosses into that exact area to someone to head home.

On the other side, I don’t know. Someone else should summarize. But 2022 happened, and we’re fighting the dismantling of the public sector, higher level education, and what was left of independent media and journalism… Crypto continues to threaten, and we’re a little further out from the COVID period, when some of these metaphysical truths about money — what it was and wasn’t — were starting to poke through the obfuscation of the past couple hundred years. The global pandemic made it hard to ignore how connected everyone was, how you had to care. There’s work to be done.

And there are some folks doing the work. These guys continue to come up with new ways to work on solving these problems, shifting mindsets, defamiliarizing things.

The Ask

If you made it this far, I think I can count on you for something. I won’t ask you to part with your money, or even your time (if you made it this far, well ..lol). You don’t need to register or sign up to join the ranks of some sort of resistance here. The ask is.. share this with anyone you think it might resonate with and then go one layer past that because the World Cup only happens every 4 years. Share it with someone who seems like they’re kind of getting into soccer. Further, I hope this article is evergreen. The ask is let’s say.. every four years (for you normies), and every week (for you soccer weirdos) try to think about the way soccer’s beauty illuminates the beauty of collective care and the truth about money, and really the truth that we don’t need to beg, borrow, and deal for it to achieve our political goals. Society creates the money it needs to provision for itself, and there’s no outside of society. Political will is the only constraint we need to overcome in order to take care of everyone, and because that is a constraint that is fully malleable and up for grabs, then this noble goal is something that can be accomplished. Do not allow your eyes to follow the ball around, noting its each and every encounter. Zoom out. Watch for the coordination unfolding in the scene. Watch for the build. Consider everyone. This is the fight.