I write this a tired but extremely happy Australian football fan. For those unfamiliar, last night at the World Cup in Qatar (hard flag problematic, but this piece isn’t about that) Australia’s football team defeated Denmark.
On the back of their victory over Tunisia last weekend, this puts the Socceroos through to the last 16 of the tournament. I do the concept of understatement a gross disservice when I say that these results were not expected.
Within this 1-0 result however, football’s most vanilla scoreline, is contained by far and away the best thing about football, which is that scoring is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY hard.
Moving a ball towards a goal using your feet and the feet of ten friends, whilst eleven bodies try to collapse the wave function is an endlessly elusive endeavour. To use less flowery language, it’s fucking impossible.
There’s nothing more misleading than people making something very hard look easy. If you’ve never actually played soccer, and you watch professionals you might watch them tiki-taka-ing the ball around and think
Answer: VERY hard. I’ve often thought that before professional sporting events, they should have a Sunday league pub team play for ten minutes as a curtain raiser. It’s only when you see something done poorly that you truly appreciate exactly what you are seeing when you watch it done expertly. That’s why we print black text on white paper.
Football is hard. Scoring a goal is even harder. But that’s also why average teams can grind out results over vastly superior opponents. This is why football is the only sport with cup competitions involving all teams in the top six leagues playing each other. Because in any other sport, this would be a bloodbath.
Over a full match, even the worst AFL team would DEMOLISH a country team, and an NBA team would spend 48 minutes inventing countless new ways to dominate against club hoopers. And to be fair, that’s the way it mostly goes in football too. But not always.
Every now and then some team in the fifth division will pull out an incomprehensible upset against a team in the top division, inking that team into club folklore and giving a clutch of kids a story to tell until their dying day about the time they knocked Man United out of the cup. But why is this possible?
The answer I have come up with is that the goal of football is so difficult, that when you watch 90 minutes of it, for 88 minutes you watch nothing but unmitigated failure.
This is quite a shocking realisation, but it’s true. What is every team trying to do? Score a goal. What is a common scoreline for a football match? 1–1? 2–1? Sometimes 0–0! A 3-0 or 4-0 victory? These are considered absolute dominations, which is to say that both teams only failed about 96% of the time.
The best basketballers hit 30-40% of their three pointers, half of their field goals, and 70-90% of their free throws. An average football match involves highly trained professionals, wealthy beyond measure, trying hundreds of times to score a goal and succeeding perhaps 1-2% of the time? Sometimes neither team succeeds. And these can be good games. I’ve watched them be good games.
A goal is the culmination of a sequence of high-wire actions, at each point of which, the whole thing is prone to and probably will come crashing down to Earth to be restarted anew.
A pass doesn’t quite come off.
The cross goes too far.
The cross doesn’t go far enough.
A through ball doesn’t quite get through.
A shot goes wide.
All are met by supporters with a passionate ‘Oooooh!’ Football, on average, contains more ‘Oooooohs’ than any other sport. Small ones. Big ones. Watching a football match, and supporting a football team is signing yourself up for 100 minute sessions laden with frustration, failure and misadventure.
And yet, it is the most popular sport on Earth. Why? I would venture that it is the fact that football is steeped in failure which makes it so popular. Let’s examine why.
Each failure makes future success sweeter.
Consider a basketball game. Do hoops crowd react to every basket the same way that football crowds react to goals? Of course not. They see fifty a night! Sure there are oooohs at particularly deft pieces of play. But they’re still only worth three points. They still only march you 2% of the way to victory.
Antithetically, the sheer release of energy when a football team score a goal is a palpable, physical thing. This photo, taken last night, looks like a cross between a warzone and the rapture.
Consider a penalty kick. The crackle of anticipation, the visceral tension and anxiety; biting of nails, fans bouncing on the balls of their feet. This is directly proportional to the reward available. A penalty, as a moment, is far more potent than most which occur in all but the climactic moments of other sports. There is, potentially, 100% of what you need to win, right here, right now. A free throw can’t compare.
Football is life. The philosophy of Dani Rojas
More philosophically, I think Dani Rojas from Ted Lasso had it right. People love football because football in a way, reflects life.
In life, as in football sometimes the odds are stacked against you but, through dogged persistence and teamwork, or perhaps one singular moment of brilliance, we can triumph over adversity. This enfranchisement of the underdog is endemic in a sport where one goal can win, not so much where you need forty to fifty baskets.
The near-impossibility of scoring a goal, the fact that it’s only slightly less impossible for the best team in the world than an average team, this levels the contest. Because soccer is mostly failure, if you can succeed just a LITTLE bit more than the other team, you can win.
An even contest lends hope. Hope that means when you stay up expecting Australia (ranked 41) to be beaten by Denmark (ranked 10) you can fall asleep two hours later with an inexplicable smile on your face. The upset was on, because last night, on the scale of the near impossible, Australia fell on the ‘near’ end of the spectrum, and the Danes fell on the ‘impossible’.
People love football because often, we’d like to think that life could be more like that. In a world where vast economic inequalities means the chances of pulling off an upset are essentially zero. I cannot, no matter how smart I am or how hard I try, set up a competitor to Amazon or Google. There is no 1-0 in the Fortune 500.
In this world, a contrived activity into which we pour our love and concern is imbued with meaning because it was contrived in a way that lends hope. And life without hope is forlorn.
I never liked football before I lived in the UK. But watching the Premier League, engaging with fans at pubs, learning their rivalries, and topping it off by attending the World Cup in Germany in 2006 and watching Australia finally regain their place within this community of nations, I realised that football occupies a unique place in world sport.
Through a confluence of factors, some intentional, some accidental, football has become a game which better than any other, universally reflects what it is to be human. To be human is to want, to strive, to desire, to achieve. All of these things risk failure.
A frequent criticism of football is that ‘it’s boring’. I presume this is because of the lack of goals. Some people view this as a lack of success. Of worth. I make it a point never to sleep with these people, as this point of view is tantamount to saying that the only good part of sex is the orgasm. That and my wonderful future wife, but it’s easier to walk the line when you know the alternative is a proscribed, shallow and highly transactional process.
We all have goals in life. How often do we reach them? Very rarely. But it is the infrequency of these moments in life that make them valuable. I have had an incalculable number of good gigs. But I still remember the moment I won the Raw Comedy Victorian State Final in 2001. Why? Because hundreds of people entered. I won.
People follow football for same reason that people watch movies, or read books, or cry at during songs. They do it, because in moments, it reflects something in their own lives. They do it, because scoring a goal is hard, the same way that life is hard. It requires people pulling together to execute their roles. It demands collective discipline and hard work plus perhaps, on the right day, a little bit of luck.
Watch supporters celebrating a goal and see yourself when you manage to save $1000 by cutting down on booze. Feel the tension before a penalty and remember yourself opening your university acceptance letter. When stakes are high, we feel alive.
Mostly, remember times that you cared deeply, and how it was your heart and the lifeline between it and the world which filled those moments in your life with depth. A first timer at the FA-Cup Final sees the same match, but by no means has the same experience as a fan of the winning team.
There is no success without failure. This is why football is the global sport, because it contains within it, something deeply primal: striving blind against the odds, and in doing so finding purpose and meaning.
Ironically, given my earlier comments about basketball, I actually think the point was best made in a basketball context, in a Nike commercial featuring Michael Jordan entitled “Failure.”
This commercial really hit home when I first saw it in 1997. But even though it made sense to me, I’ve only recently learned to better live its lessons.
If you want to achieve anything in life, you need to be able to appreciate a 0-0. Only someone that knows that real victory is hidden within failure can do that.
Joy is victory. Discipline and cooperation are victory. To care enough about something to sacrifice immediate pleasure? That is victory.
The rest? That’s just working out who won.
Go Socceroos.
Yianni Agisilaou (June 2018 and December 2022)