The football game – 12/30/2023 – Tostão

The football match cannot be seen only as a sporting contest of skill, creativity, technique, strategy, physical strength and chance. It is also a complex, playful, theatrical, pleasurable show with strong emotions. All human feelings and contradictions are present.

The coaches’ strategy, important for a team’s success, goes far beyond tactical schemes, rehearsed plays and player movement. One of the important qualities of a coach is to perceive and observe surprising technical details, both objective and subjective, during the game. It’s the hardest. The coach needs to accept that in a game there are more doubts than certainties.

In the 2018 World Cup, against Belgium, Tite took a while to notice that center forward Lukaku was moving to the right, accompanied by defender Miranda, leaving spaces in the middle where midfielder De Bruyne advanced and scored one of the goals. It wasn’t foreseen. At the 2022 World Cup, there was no way for Tite to correct the quick succession of errors by several Brazilian players that led to a draw against Croatia and then Brazil’s elimination on penalties.

Tactical schemes serve as a reference and repression. They are warnings, messages, that athletes cannot exceed certain limits, do everything they want, place their excessive ambitions above the collective. This is also the case in life. The tactical scheme is critical consciousness, the athletes’ superego. Not everything we want is possible.

On the other hand, if discipline and strategies are too rigid, the spontaneity, joy, relaxation, inventiveness and fantasy of citizens and athletes are lost, and they become more tense. It’s the malaise of civilization, as Freud would say, of a football game.

In many games, imagination becomes more important for executing the fundamentals than technique. Sometimes, the most beautiful and decisive moves were not rehearsed. In a fraction of seconds, great players make lucid, correct and surprising decisions. It is knowledge that precedes thought. Neuroscientists call it kinesthetic intelligence, movement intelligence.

Inventiveness has to do with childhood fantasies. The great players are those who combine technique and discipline with fun. They do in the world’s great football stadiums what they imagined as children, having fun with the ball.

You cannot separate the game that takes place on the pitch from the spectacle of the fans. Football without an audience is another, as we saw during the pandemic. Teams often play better and win more often when they are at home with the support of their fans. Furthermore, fans tend to inhibit visiting players. The biggest teams in the world are the ones that can shine at home and away.

Unfortunately, not everything is a party. Outsiders often infiltrate the fans and provoke violence and prejudiced, racist and homophobic behavior. Worse, many influential fans follow the marginalized. They do not feel responsible for their actions. The group, the crowd, is responsible.

All of us who work in sport, in different areas, need to evolve to improve the quality of the show. Football and the country need to be impartial and less biased.

Next year, I intend to love those I love even more and enjoy more the things I experience and the things I want to experience. Happy New Year to everybody.

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