Let There Be Light
Cover. La Liberté Guidant le Peuple [1830]. Artist: Eugène Delacroix [1798 - 1863].
Preface
This text is replicated from articles written by football writers Jozsef ‘Hungaro’ Bózsik [transl. Gorka Melchor] and Jamie Hamilton.
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Guardiola, Valdano and the Temptation of the Demiurge
Jozsef ‘Hungaro’ Bózsik
In The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare writes 'headstrong liberty is lashed with woe'. The English author is establishing a paradox* between the ineluctable free will and the fear towards exercising said liberty.
* paradox [n.] a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth e.g. less is more.
We are well aware that free will, without any legal or moral restrictions, eventually degenerates into tyranny. I have the free will to decide whether or not I can kill my enemy, but without rules that limit or punish, we will find ourselves in the 'law of the strongest' [or 'law of the jungle'.
That is the reason why we relinquish absolute [total] liberty in order to live in society. We can define this relation between liberty and order in two ways: a. the ontological; b. the historical and cultural. The ontological argument is that which doesn´t change over time. The historical and cultural one is that which changes over the dimension of time.
The relation between a football player´s liberty and the collective´s order is an ontological element of the game, that will be found in any place or time. However, the type of relationship between liberty and order will express itself in different ways depending on each place and time, it is its historical dimension more so than its ontological one.
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'We are well aware that free will, without any legal or moral restrictions, eventually degenerates into tyranny. I have the free will to decide whether or not I can kill my enemy, but without rules that limit or punish, we will find ourselves in the 'law of the strongest' [or 'law of the jungle'].'
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For us to fully comprehend the dialogue between 'The Philosopher of Football' Jorge Valdano and football manager 'Pep' Guardiola, I did this introduction. Valdano works on the historical and cultural dimension, when he reflects on whether or not the player´s free will is being neglected in favour of an exasperated and authoritarian* collective order.
* authoritarianism [n.] the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience [compliance] to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
Pep Guardiola calls this order a 'method'† and he defines it as all players realising what is being done on the pitch at all times, given that absolute liberty would lead to chaos [ontological argument]. However, Valdano made a historical questioning, building from the socially acceptable premise [a true or false proposition or statement] that today´s football always has certain differences with the football that has been played in the past.
† Juego de Posición [n,]. Translated as 'positional play,' the main principle behind Juego de Posición is to always look for superiority on the football pitch. This superiority can be achieved by being position-ally, numerically ['overloads'] or qualitatively [intellectually], superior.
Initially, Guardiola protects himself from the question, as a contemporary coach, when he defends the existence of order as an axiom* [ontological argument], but as he still needs to address the question, he follows the path from the ontological to the historical and cultural in order to affirm that: En el fútbol moderno, jugar así [sin orden ni método] sería un caos ['In modern football, playing that way [without order nor method] would be chaos'].
* axiom [n.] a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.
Note that he establishes a distinction: a. modern football; b. not-modern football. In 'modern football', the 'method' is necessary; however, in 'not-modern' football it would not be necessary. Thus, the first contradiction: the method is not inherently [ontologically] necessary in football, it only becomes necessary in 'modern football' [historically and culturally]. From this point onwards, Guardiola is always working under the historical and cultural dimension and starts defending his point of view: Players can’t have the freedom to make decisions in each moment without having the collective direction.
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'Players can’t have the freedom to make decisions in each moment without having the collective direction.'
- 'Pep' Guardiola
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For him, the method would be a collective direction that is above and orientates the decision of the player. For example, in 2015 Thierry Henry [who won the Champions League and two La Liga titles during a three-year stint with Guardiola at Barcelona] revealed that a fuming Guardiola had hauled him off in a Champions League match for disobeying orders, even though he'd opened the scoring for Barca:
'Basically from training to the game, up until the last third, he [Guardiola] used to call it the ‘Three Ps’ – Play, Possession and Position. And the most important one was position ... He had a plan. If you don’t actually do what he’s asking you to do, you’re going to be in trouble.'
Henry decided to disregard Guardiola's instructions in a 2008 encounter with Sporting Lisbon. Abandoning his post on the left flank, the 125-cap French international ventured across the pitch and found himself in the right place at the right time to poke Messi's ball across into the net and break the deadlock. The visiting Barcelona fans went wild, but Pep was far from impressed.
'Me being me I went there [to the right wing] to play with Leo [Messi] and I could hear Guardiola being upset because I wasn’t on the side of the dugout. I didn’t really care, you know. I scored a goal, leading against Sporting Lisbon at half-time, all nice and everything, and he took me off. I was like ‘what did I do wrong?' Henry recalled. 'Very similar to Van Gaal, when Pep had a plan, respect the plan'.'
The purpose of the method is to offer the player a degree of security in the face of the uncertainty of the game. That is to say, it is about healing the fear of the unknown. Coming back to Shakespeare: in Guardiola´s eyes, liberty is more about fear of the autonomy of will, rather than about the enjoyment of free will, it is fear of freedom, because 'headstrong liberty is lashed with woe'.
At the end of his reasoning, Guardiola makes clear his conception of the relation between liberty and order. However, he treats it like a necessity and not like an option: 'We want to give players the security that whatever will happen they will be able to solve it'.
Recently, [Jack] Grealish said that Guardiola does not like when the possession of the ball is lost, thus he would prefer a safer play than a riskier one. They step on the pitch with a list of instructions in their head of what to do, what not to do, how to operate, how to recognise the pattern or mechanism and how to offer continuity.
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The purpose of the method is to offer the player a degree of security in the face of the uncertainty of the game. That is to say, it is about healing the fear of the unknown. Coming back to Shakespeare: in Guardiola´s eyes, liberty is more about fear of the autonomy of will, rather than about the enjoyment of free will, it is fear of freedom, because 'headstrong liberty is lashed with woe'.
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Pep Guardiola´s vision of order posseses a historical and cultural background that surrounds certain aspects of Dutch* and English football and that bears resemblance - sometimes subconsciously - to the religious molding and cultural makeup of the place.
Note 1
To Pep Guardiola, Johan Cruyff represented everything he wanted to be as a coach and a manager and he would become a devoted student of Cruyff. He. Cruyff, was, quite simply, a visionary. A brilliant footballer who became a brilliant coach – a rarity indeed - and somebody who spotted the spark of genius in Pep from the first moment he saw him play.
John Calvin* argued that, due to the fact that humans had lost their liberty because of the original sin, we were trapped in the chains of sin, and only grace [via an action or move of a demiurge†] had the ability to set free, by selecting its 'own [those who followed the doctrine and therefore were worthy]'. The formal equality between men is established, but this order works like a demiurge that disciplines the bodies and its gestural expressions, it hierarchises society and transforms public life into social performance.
* John Calvin [1509 - 1564]. French theologian, pastor, reformer and principal figure in the development of Christian theology later called Calvinism; and its doctrines of predestination and of God's absolute sovereignty in the salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation. From 1600 until the second half of the 20th century, Calvinism became the de facto state religion in the Netherlands.
† demiurge [n.] In the Gnostic and certain other belief systems, a supernatural being imagined as creating or fashioning the world in subordination to the Supreme Being, and sometimes regarded as the originator of evil.
In the Victorian era, the British Empire was a prime example of this process of foundation of civil liberties via a hierarchical, disciplinary and socially performative order. In this anglosaxon world, order is not a limiting factor to our desires, but the foundation of civil liberty because it concedes rights and duties so that the strongest are not able to prevent the exercise of free will to those beneath them. The order that strikes us with the claw of power would also be guarantor of our liberty, limited - in theory - only by the legislation and not just the sovereign´s will [negative liberty].
With time, this concept of liberty will start expanding with the guaranteed action of the State [positive liberty]. What really matters is that, in this anglosaxon world, monarchy is memory and politics is the demiurge that creates the order which produces the civil liberty of its citizens.
The way in which Guardiola sees the relationship between the free will and the method carries this cultural vision. The coach is a demiurge that saves his players from uncertainty, and embeds a collective imaginary that has to be followed through his mechanisms. In this embedded order, it is the demiurge who is the one who saves its own from chaos and disorder, that is to say, from the prison of uncertainty the original sin had put us in. Not knowingly, Guardiola's perception of order carries strong elements from the idea of predestination and the temptation of the demiurge.
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'In the Victorian era, the British Empire was a prime example of this process of foundation of civil liberties via a hierarchical, disciplinary and socially performative order. In this anglosaxon world, order is not a limiting factor to our desires, but the foundation of civil liberty because it concedes rights and duties so that the strongest are not able to prevent the exercise of free will to those beneath them.'
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In spite of their mutual admiration, the culture and subconscious of Valdano were shaped in a different place. Saint Augustine said that free will in the quest of the things´ and one´s own truth was the first good in and of itself, even if it made mistakes. That´s why, in his Confessions, Saint Augustine welcomes the error almost like a cornerstone in the self awareness journey of oneself and not like an immovable jail. Order is no longer a moral demiurge, but a flexible negotiation between each individual and his own self for the sake of inner liberty.
Argentina, like all of America, a hybrid culture built on the contact between heterogeneous [diverse in character or content] civilisations, establishes violent negotiations, but also resistance frontiers, creating outflow lines and flexibility. Our order is constituted by unbridled and extravagant gestures.
In the anglosaxon world, there is a series of things that should and should not be done, and you are only free starting from, and therefore accepting, this premise. In Latin America, when it comes to order, we might have a great formal list of what should and should not be done, but - in the end - everything is negotiated. This negotiation can be for the worse, like when it covers up a powerful man, or for the better, like when it protects the resistance of the weak in the face of an unjust context. Here, the historical and cultural dimension of the relation between liberty and order becomes clearer.
I distinguish two important dimensions in order to understand this relation: liberty of the body and liberty of decision. Some instructions require great discipline of the body and gestural restraint, a profound rationalisation of where to be and what to do, as admitted by Guardiola himself.
Here, the demiurge holds the power over the bodies. Meanwhile, the more flexible and role-driven orders [in contrast to the more position-driven paradigm Guardiola adopts] need great capability to move, open empty spaces, reading said spaces and invading them, in a much more spontaneous and organic way. Here, the order brings great flexibility to the movement of the bodies, it requires negotiation.
Recently, the Argentinian attacking midfielder Zaracho made this distinction quite clear:
Con Sampaoli no me sentía cómodo por el estilo. Quería que fuera más posicional. Cuando llegó Cuca tuve más libertad para ir a buscar espacios con el balón, tirar diagonales ['With Sampaoli I didn´t feel comfortable because of the style - the 'method'. He wanted me to be more positional. When Cuca arrived, I had more liberty to go find spaces with the ball, trace diagonals'].
Liberty of decision is another aspect. Former central attacking midfielders Cesc Fábregas and Christian Eriksen affirm that with Antonio Conte* everything was a question of following what was already predefined, whereas with other coaches they could use more their intuition to decide in the moment.
* Antonio Conte [1969 - ]. Italian professional football manager and former midfielder who 'seeks to build teams defined by warriors. It is his belief that the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. The collective, above all else, is his message.'
It makes no sense to discuss whether or not there is liberty in Guardiola, given that indiscipline is part and parcel of free will -something Guardiola won't tolerate. More interesting would be to approach the relation between liberty and order from the point of view of the liberty of the body and the mind. And from this, realise that more flexible orders exist.
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Fernando Diniz vs The Man-Machine
Jamie Hamilton
Intro Prologue
The year is 2023. Global football is run by FIFA from their headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Propped up by corporate sponsorship, five European leagues dwarf all others in popularity and wealth with non-European nations left to fight over the scraps.
This centralisation of power is mirrored on the pitch, European positional systems dominate an ever-narrowing landscape of playing styles with players conditioned to adhere to the strict demands of the Western coaching elite. Regardless of culture or background, young footballers from all over the world are forced to conform to the rules of these systems or risk facing exclusion from the highest levels of competition.
These systems are self-serving, the maximisation of their own functionality and efficiency are prioritised over any romantic notions of human connection or creativity. Desire is harnessed as fuel for the system, human-beings are the batteries powering The Machine; Spirit is just another resource to be extracted.
At this point its easier to imagine the end of football than the end of Positional Systems Play. There is no alternative, it’s the slow cancellation of the future, the end of history punctuated by the rational occupation of space.
But in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil something is stirring. There are whispers of a brave new style that rejects the impositions of the conquering European systems, a style that seeks to resurrect what had been previously thought to have been lost, to summon once more a spirit of the past and revivify it with a breath from the now.
Fernando Diniz is Head Coach of Fluminense; Football’s future hangs in the balance…
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'... in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil something is stirring. There are whispers of a brave new style that rejects the impositions of the conquering European systems, a style that seeks to resurrect what had been previously thought to have been lost, to summon once more a spirit of the past and revivify it with a breath from the now.'
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Machinic Analysis
The slow-hijacking of human consciousness by The Machine began long before football was ever conceived. The takeover was no smash-and-grab, more a gradual creep over millennia, an invisible intruder from the outside relentlessly inching its way into the human psyche measure by measure.
The Machine’s great strength is its difficulty to identify - its ability to remain hidden in plain sight.
The Machine is everywhere all at once…The Machine is abstraction…The Machine is definition…The Machine is quantity…The Machine is logic…The Machine is repetition…The Machine is standardisation…The Machine is that 20 grand fairy-tale wedding that’s gonna be oh so different from all the rest. The Machine is factory…The Machine is classroom…The Machine is measurement…The Machine is maps…The Machine is blueprint…The Machine is number…The Machine is procedure…The Machine is automation…
The Machine is that dream job you kid yourself will make you happy when all it does is soften your bones and crushes your heart. The Machine is geometry…The Machine is calculation…The Machine is rationality…The Machine is accountancy…The Machine is Capital…The Machine is consumerism…The Machine is next-day-delivery…The Machine is debt…The Machine is checking your mobile banking app every 5 minutes until your tax deducted minimum wage finally drops in.
The Machine is The Military Industrial Complex…The Machine is The Opioid Epidemic…The Machine is the Atomic Bomb…The Machine is The Suez Canal…The Machine is The Dutch East India Company…The Machine is Resource Extraction…The Machine is efficiency…The Machine is productivity…The Machine is surveillance…The Machine is being told how free you are while everything about you is being shaped to conform to the requirements of the system.
The Machine is not technology itself; this is not a protest ‘against technology’. The Machine in question is but one strain of technological usage - it is a distinct positionality within the field of technology, a particular flavour of technique. It is the prioritisation of standardisation, automation and repetition, a flattening out of human creativity through mechanized processes designed to benefit and serve some external non-human entity.
Newsreel...Tune in for a Coaching Masterclass...
The tactics are put on the field to help them [the players] to express their talent more often than not…I use the tactics to create some patterns so everyone can be more comfortable, they can have more time and express their talent as much as possible…with the ball if I can create some patterns like if 20 balls arrive in the box for our strikers to have more chances to score a goal this is tactics…I don’t believe tactics is you do whatever you want because after that it’s a little bit chaos and in the chaos you don’t know what exactly is going to happen.
- Josep ‘Pep’ Guardiola
I think my job in particular is to create chances and to create a structure that we can create chances.
- Thomas Tuchel
It was like going to school. Conte will tell you exactly how he wants it from the goalkeeper until you score a goal, what you have to do, exactly everything.
- Cesc Fabregas [on Antonio Conte]
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'The slow-hijacking of human consciousness by The Machine began long before football was ever conceived ... The Machine is everywhere all at once…The Machine is abstraction…The Machine is definition…The Machine is quantity…The Machine is logic…The Machine is repetition…The Machine is standardisation … It is the prioritisation of standardisation, automation and repetition, a flattening out of human creativity through mechanised processes designed to benefit and serve some external non-human entity.'
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Positionism
The term ‘Positional Play’ appeared some time ago now. It was billed as an English translation of the Spanish Juego de Posicion. This mysterious method was apparently the secret magic behind Pep Guardiola’s generational Barcelona side of 2008–2011, a mind-bending system of rules and sprawling logic charts directing the on-field actions of the players - no more than 2 in a vertical line, a maximum of 3 horizontally, when he goes there he goes here, when the ball is here you are there.
The pitch is re-interpreted as an elaborate grid, a schematic floorplan compartmentalised into a dizzying array of rectangular corridors and offices. The partitions are designed to keep the players apart. The distances and spacing between the players are paramount in Positional Play, don’t get too close, the occupation of space must be rational, don’t you understand? I said rational dammit! rational according to the blueprint! it’s all right here in the plan, can’t you see? just stick to the plan and nothing will go wrong. Now stop all this chatting and get back to your desks.
Positional Play is a Machinic mode of football where the system governs with an iron fist. Like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt who had exclusive access to the divine will of the Gods, the coaches of Positionism appeal to the authority of the system when justifying their approach. The system demands that you pass here, not there - the probabilities are higher, chance creation is more efficient. You must stand still and wait here, alone without the ball, to occupy these defenders. Its not my choice boys, it’s just fact, it’s what the logic of the system demands.
And just like those God-Kings of old, the Positionist implements patterns of standardisation and repetition to ensure protocols are met and structures are maintained, the automatisms and pre-ascribed patterns dutifully animated by the humble workers. The triangles constructed on the pitch may not be made of desert stone, but these meticulously calculated straight-lined geometric shapes of human flesh and blood are monuments to their leader’s desires for immortality none the less.
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'Positional Play is a Machinic mode of football where the system governs with an iron fist. Like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt who had exclusive access to the divine will of the Gods, the coaches of Positionism appeal to the authority of the system when justifying their approach. The system demands that you pass here, not there - the probabilities are higher, chance creation is more efficient. You must stand still and wait here, alone without the ball, to occupy these defenders. Its not my choice boys, it’s just fact, it’s what the logic of the system demands.'
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Ginga
It is by way of a well-documented historical process that football arrived in Brazil from Europe. The colonising Europeans had already been extracting resources from Brazil’s fertile ground for centuries and by the early summer of 1894, when Englishman Charles Miller returned from his education in Southampton armed with a football and knowledge of the rules of Association Football, their systematic rape of the continent was well underway.
In the time since their ‘discovery’ of this foreign land, the Old World’s rabid lust to consume exotic produce such as sugar and coffee had fuelled The Machine to step-up and maximise production. Terrible fleets of slave-ships were trafficked across The Atlantic from Africa and, along with platoons of indigenous captives, their human cargo was set to backbreaking work in the endless fields of vast sweltering plantations - humanity is secondary to the unquestionable authority of The Machine.
Fugitives who were able to escape from the plantations found refuge in hidden areas called quilombos [inaccessible areas usually consisting of fewer than a hundred people surviving through farming and raiding] and capoeiras [open areas] in which to perform capoeira: a form of acrobatic Brazilian martial art - derived from African challenge dances - done to distinctive vocal and instrumental music and relying upon swaying as the key movement to outmanoeuvre the opposition’.
Master of capoeira [mestre de capoeira], Almir das Areias, defined capoeira as a 'fight, a dance, a form of personal defense, sport, culture, art and folklore, as well as music, poetry, celebration, amusement, recreation and, above all, a form of struggle, a public demonstration and expression of the people, the oppressed common man in general, who is in search of survival, freedom and dignity.'
Brazilian academic Luis Uehara identifies ginga [pronounced jinga] as originating from capoeira. In his 2006 book, The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt cites Brazilian social commentator and writer, Gilberto Freyre as the source of ginga in a footballing context: '…Our passes…our tricks…that something which is related to dance, to capoeira, mark the Brazilian style of football, which rounds and sweetens the game the British invented, the game which they and other Europeans play in such an acute and angular way’.
The mythic Brazilian style embodied by the great players and teams of the 50’s, 60s, 70s and 80’s incorporated the idea of ginga, it was a play coloured by constant movement with fluid, spontaneous and disguised flows in both individual actions and interactions between teammates - an ingenious rhythmic slave-dance reappropriated for sporting confrontation. It was in stark contrast to the ‘acute and angular’ play of the Europeans - an intoxicating antidote to the static confines of early Positionism.
The perpetual novelty of these ever-shifting inter-player perspectives brought about by ginga afforded a creativity and artistry that for decades was able to confuse and short-circuit the predictably Machinic systems and structures of so many Northern opponents.
But The Machine does not stop.
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Newsreel...
Tele Santan's Brazil Lose to Italy in the 1982 World Cup!...
It's [41] years ago that, according to Brazilian attacking midfielder Zico, football died. On 5 July 1982, in the Estadi de Sarrià in Barcelona, Tele Santana's majestic Brazil lost to Italy and were eliminated from the World Cup. With them went the nostalgic form of Brazilian football, the fluid attacking style that had won them three World Cups between 1958 and 1970.
1982 was a return to the old style, the rhythmic midfield triangles, the sudden explosions of pace, the sense of self-expression. The formation of the midfield was serendipitous. Brazil had four vastly talented creative midfielders - Zico, Sócrates, Falcão and Cerezo - but no wide players whatsoever apart from Eder. Cerezo and Falcão – both registas, deep-lying playmakers – sat behind Zico and Sócrates – the trequartistas – while Eder was deployed as an auxiliary centre-forward, playing off the lumbering Serginho.
* trequartista [n.] At its core, a trequartista is a player who occupies an advanced central attacking midfield position. This position is often just behind the main striker, and the trequartista is responsible for creating and scoring goals. In Italian, the term trequartista translates to 'three-quarters,' referring to the player's position on the pitch.
The formation was thus a 4-2-2-2, with a strong central column flanked by two marauding full-backs in Leandro and Júnior. EuropeCatenaccio or The Chain is a tactical system in football with a strong emphasis on defence. In Italian, catenaccio means 'door-bolt', which implies a highly organised and effective backline defence focused on nullifying opponents' attacks and preventing goal-scoring opportunities.ans may have argued it lacked width, but this was a team of such fluency and poise in possession that they created it with their movement.
They produced the most exhilarating football the World Cup had known since 1970. They beat the USSR 2-1, swatted aside Scotland 4-1 and New Zealand 4-0. In the second group phase, they comfortably beat the reigning world champions Argentina, leaving them needing just a draw against Italy to reach the semi-finals. It was considered a formality.
Italy were in the phase of il gioco all'Italiana rather than out-and-out catenaccio,* but caution remained they underlying theme. The game in the Sarrià was seen as an allegory: the attacking and defensive schools of football meeting ... And so was set in motion the pattern for the game: Brazilian attacking, and Italian resistance ... Perhaps, needing only a draw to progress, they should have tightened up and held what they had, but that was not the Brazilian way. They kept attacking, and paid the price.
* catenaccio [n.] A tactical system in football with a strong emphasis on defence. In Italian, catenaccio means 'door-bolt', which implies a highly organised and effective backline defence focused on nullifying opponents' attacks and preventing goal-scoring opportunities.
A Conti corner was half-cleared, Marco Tardelli half-hit his shot from the edge of the area and Rossi, played onside by a dozing Júnior, hooked the ball past Peres. It was, as Brian Glanville said, 'the game in which Brazil's glorious midfield, put finally to the test, could not make up for the deficiencies behind and in front of it'.
It was a game, moreover, that lay on a fault-line of history. It may not have been the day that football died, but it was the day that a certain naivety in football died; it was the day after which it was no longer possible simply to pick the best players and allow them to get on with it; it was the day that system won. There was still a place for great individual attacking talents, but they had to be incorporated into something knowing, had to be protected and covered for.
As Tim Vickery argues in The Blizzard, Holland's victories over Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil at the 1974 World Cup prompted a radical change of philosophy in South American football as a whole. It was then in Brazil that the technocrats took over – 1982 and to a lesser extent 1986 were the final failings of the old style.
What was clear ... is that system was king.[1]
1. Jonathan Wilson [2012]. Italy 3-2 Brazil, 1982: The Day Naivety, Not Football Itself, Died. The Guardian.
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' ... according to Zico, football died [on the 5 July 1982]. It may not have been the day that football died, but it was the day that a certain naivety in football died; it was the day after which it was no longer possible simply to pick the best players and allow them to get on with it; it was the day that system won. There was still a place for great individual attacking talents, but they had to be incorporated into something knowing, had to be protected and covered for.'
- Jonathan Wilson
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Fernando Diniz vs The Man Machine
There are an infinite number of ways to view and understand the world. But when one worldview achieves such dominance that all others fade into the background we approach what is known as a point of singularity.
All alternatives have been cancelled.
We now live on the cusp of such an event. The Machinic enframing of the world threatens to envelop everyone and everything in its path. But not yet, out in the margins the soft winds of revolution are beginning to swirl, there is hushed talk of a man who is said to possess an inner strength, some rare ability to withstand the encroachment of The Machine. The man’s name is Fernando Diniz.
One of nine brothers, Diniz grew up to enjoy a successful playing career as a midfielder for top tier Brazilian clubs such as Palmeiras, Corinthians, Fluminense and Flamengo. After retiring at 34, Diniz moved into coaching taking charge of various lower league clubs but it wasn’t until he arrived at Audax SP that his team’s unique playing style began to be noticed by a wider audience.
In 2016 [during his second stint at Audax] he took the unfashionable club to the final of the Campeonato Paulista where they lost to Santos. But Diniz’s unorthodox approach had the pundits reaching for comparisons to the 'Tiki-Taka' possession play of Guardiola’s Barcelona - a comparison which persists to this day; where we find Diniz in charge of a Fluminense side playing some of the most thrilling football Brazil has seen since Tele Santana’s great 1982 team and the last days of ginga.
But it is in this very conflation [the act or process of combining two or more separate things into one whole] that the true distinction between Diniz’s method and highly sophisticated Positionism of Guardiola shows itself.
‘His team is absolutely positional’ says Diniz of Guardiola’s style, ‘it’s a game where players keep their positions in the lanes of the field they occupy and the game reaches them…my team is totally different, we change positions a lot…we try to apply a dynamic game, it’s a different collective participation'.
In contrast, when asked about the importance of his Manchester City player’s movement, Guardiola made it abundantly clear that the reporter’s perception was mistaken. 'Move the ball' Guardiola enthused, 'it looks like the movement is the players but the movement is the ball…everyone has to be in their position, when you move much its not good…the ball comes where we are, we don’t go to pick up the ball. It’s completely different.'
The systemic machinations of Positionism dictate where the players must be. They must be in their slots. They can switch and rotate but only ever between these pre-allocated situational locations. If the ball is here, you are here. The human players do not interpret space, rather they learn where to locate themselves within an already defined generalised conceptualisation of space. The Machine has done the thinking for you - the players are cogs in The Man-Machine.
Diniz’s system is different. It is still a system but it is not of The Machine. It is a system of greater elegance and complexity than Positionism as it is designed to prioritise localised moments of inter-player creativity by allowing them freedom to interpret space as they experience it in the moment. It rejects the perceived stability of ‘rational’ space occupation and seeks to maximise instances where players can gather close together in small areas to weave unpredictable patterns and create new collaborative connections. Proximity and movement over position and space.
To The Machinic eye the rational structure of Diniz’s team appears far-from-equilibrium - the team is unbalanced! Its unstable you fool! But imagine a swaying capoeirista leaning back so far on one foot with body twisted that any untrained participant would immediately lose balance and collapse in a heap on the ground - now imagine this is the moment where novelty emerges and the critical advantage is created.
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'In my conception of living life, I prefer life to be more art than science, what is artistic marks forever, it moves people'.
- Fernando Diniz
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Proximity Play
By rejecting the Machinic definition of space as a barren flatland waiting passively to be populated we can begin to view the green of the football field as a place of coming-together for the players to collaborate and create new patterns and worlds; we can escape the prison grids of Positionism. There is an alternative way to the straight-lined geometry of Europe’s Positional neurosis.
Despite its ever-accelerating expansion, The Machine still cannot account for human communication on the subtlest of levels, the reading of each other’s eyes, the intuitive knowing of one another’s deepest conceits. This is why apparently chaotic Proximity Play remains off-limits to Positionism - The Machine cannot compute the potentials of such interactions and arrangements as it has not yet processed and replicated the most complex aspects of human experience.
The hour is growing late if Positionism is to be overcome and a new paradigm entered into. And it is through the methods of coaches like Diniz that we can see a chink in the armour of The Machine. For the game to evolve down a more artistic, dynamic and human timeline the locus of creative responsibility must be returned to the interpretive power of the players rather than remain locked in the possession of high-priest coaches of Positionist systems doctrine.
No football system is ever total.