The Paradox of Perfectibility

There is a danger in all sports that players become so good that the drama is diminished. As the World Cup qualifiers are showing, flaws are beneficial to the spectacle.

There is a paradox in some sport, perhaps all sport, that it can reach a level at which it is too accomplished. Its protagonists get so good that much of the drama has gone. The older I get, the more I realise that what I actually demand of sport is less technical competence than mental or psychological struggle.

I drifted away from snooker in the 90s when it hit a spell in which it felt that as soon as a player got going they would inevitably clear up. I admire modern darts enormously, but I wish nine-darters weren’t so common. I’d like golf to regulate equipment so that driving the ball 350 yards weren’t standard and the great old courses could present a challenge without having constantly to be lengthened.

But those are sports in which a player is largely competing against the environment or their own temperament rather than a direct opponent. Perhaps those sports are somehow perfectible; other sports are a more obvious arms race between defence and attack. But cricket for me, certainly in its shorter forms, has lost some of its allure as run rates have increased. Seeing 40 boundaries in a 20-over innings bores me. I wouldn’t profess to understand baseball or basketball but I met the US-based writer Lawrence Donegan the other day and he explained how data has had a deleterious impact on both, making them more efficient but somehow less fun. Baseball has had to change its laws to speed the game up; rugby seems to change laws every year to maintain the balance between defence and attack.

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My history of the World Cup, The Power and the Glory, is out now. Order here. Or, for those who dislike Amazon, here.

Postcards from the Past continues with Episode 15: the life of Malmö Stadion

Episode 16 follows next Wednesday. For the full archive of Postcards from the Past, go here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we consider the remarkable life of Imre Hirschl, the salami salesman who revolutionised Argentinian football then inspired Uruguay to the 1950 World Cup. Listen here.

On Libero, we talk about why the final week of World Cup qualifying is as good as football gets. Listen here.

A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. Episode Seven, about the early growth of women’s football and the ban is here.

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Football, so far, has largely been immune from such tinkering. The 1925 change in the offside law and the 1992 outlawing of the backpass are the only major changes since the end of the First World War, despite the constant amendments made by IFAB, largely as a response to VAR. Perhaps data will change that; perhaps it will lead to a perfectibility that is somehow sterile and less fun than what went before.

But football is a robust and flexible sport, the lack of law changes evidence of its fundamental strength as a game. Pep Guardiola’s possession-heavy positional game seemed hegemonic, but was in part permitted by the inclination of referees to penalise any physical contact. The ‘let-it-flow’ directive put an end to that; as physicality returned to the game, so football has moved into its modern era of direct balls and set-plays. Tweaking that valve back slightly would probably readmit the more diminutive creator to the game.

By and large, football sorts itself out – and when law changes are made they tend to have unintended consequences. The shift to three points for a win, for instance, was intended to make play less defensive and increase the number of goals; in fact, what it did was make the game dirtier. Faced with losing two points rather than one, a team in the lead fought harder to protect their advantage. That arguably did improve the spectacle, just not in the way anybody thought it would.

VAR, similarly, seems at least in part responsible for the current focus on corners and direct play. The way offside is now interpreted militates against smaller, quicker centre-forwards; one pixel beyond the last defender and he is offside whereas pre-VAR he might have been deemed level. Defenders have always had to deal with the fact that when defending set-plays, the consequences for them of being penalised for a foul were greater than for a forward: one is risking a penalty, the other a free-kick 100 yards from goal. But that has been exaggerated by asymmetric nature of VAR, which can alert the referee to any foul in the box by a defender but only a foul in the box by a forward if it leads to a goal. A practical example of this came in the penalty Manchester United were awarded at Fulham earlier this season, when Calvin Bassey was deemed to have fouled Mason Mount while Luke Shaw was committed exactly the same foul six feet behind him. VAR could only look at one incident. That gives attackers a significant advantage at set-plays.

Already, though, the reaction to set-plays and long throws has begun. Sunderland brought in the advertising hoardings to neuter Arsenal’s long throws. Chelsea took to leaving an additional two players up the pitch so that Tottenham had to leave defenders back and couldn’t pack the box from their long throws, making it easier for Robert Sánchez to come and claim. Football tends to find a way.

For now, football remains complex enough, varied enough, that there is no single ‘correct’ way of playing. But still, club football is a lot closer to some ideal of perfection than the international game. The reasons are obvious. If a club has two very good left wingers and no right-back, they can sell a winger and buy a right-back; national teams cannot. And club managers have far longer to work with their players. National sides are imperfect, cobbled together. They’re compromises between a manager’s dream and the reality, as club sides used to be.

As a result there’s something nostalgic about the international game. The quality may not be as good, it may not be as sophisticated, but that means that it’s far more about emotion and will, about individual moments of inspiration, whether from players or managers. It’s more relatable. Hungary against Ireland was a great example. It looked nothing like the Premier League. It was about tension and moments of frenzy – and, frankly, it was all the better for it.

It’s not just that, assuming a certain level of competence, drama and narrative outweighs quality, it’s that, in some sports, an excess of technical and tactical excellence seems to make the experience worse.