Football is war. The oft-cited dictum comes from Rinus Michels, a Dutch football coach. From war to the game of football is a leap. To defend his choice of words, off the cuff: violence has occurred in and around European stadiums. More than one fan has contemplated suicide after his (and very rarely her) team lost. But what the words more significantly denote in this chapter is the long period of peace in Europe after the Second World War. It intriguingly coincided with football championships wherein the previously warring nations found a surrogate for their rivalry, without bloodshed. Televised football matches have the same effect as EU politics. The prolonged stand-off or unfair score can be frustrating, but the game brings together nations, mostly.

Why would football serve the purpose of surrogacy for mass violence? In a nutshell, conflict between nations is predicated on simplicating peoples into nations, and among all sports football excels in replaying life and its multiplexity. Corroborating the argument, audiences of the most powerful nation, the US, have been less keen on watching the matches between national teams. Such nation has nothing to gain from risking its reputation in a game associated with the real world. The national team of the US never really impressed much anyway, nor did the squads of Russia and China. Before the war, the British were similarly too much of an empire to want to participate in the World Cup. Escapism, watching sports without feeling implicated, suited the empire better. Then came the Second World War. It left wounds among all European countries. Ten years later, German audiences appreciated being welcome again in encounters between nations. International football tournaments were and are endorsed by government leaders seated in the honorary box.Footnote 1

An adept of Michels was his compatriot Louis Van Gaal, trainer of the national Dutch team before he coached Man United. For years, journalists had cultivated Van Gaal’s image of tactical brilliance. A critical moment was in 2002 when he had to address the gathered Dutch press about his top team’s disqualification for the World Cup after losing against the Irish notorious for their kick-and-rush tactics. His voice broke into something of a squeal: ‘We did everything to exclude chance!’ The viewers saw him mentally replaying turning points of the match as he lifted his eyebrows and stared into the camera. Included must have been the scene of his star player missing a crucial penalty. The disbelief mixed in the subsequent sob tells me that in his long career Van Gaal had never accepted the point of the game. His friction with the game he so much loved explains part of football’s attraction.

Football is more of a game than a sport. In the US, ‘football’ refers to American football and so the European invention is endowed with the (auditorily ambiguous) epithet of ‘soccer’. The game of football does not model the ideal society. It mirrors the real, sometimes ugly version of society. Why then does the world love watching football? Why has its popularity dramatically increased in all corners of the planet, dominating bar life and street corner discussions? That this popularity remains unaffected by decades of accusations of the international federation’s corruption and disregard for human rights, peaking during the recent World Cup in Qatar, underlines the issue.

One reason I dare contend is that football’s mirroring of the world compensates for people’s growing disconnection from the world. It sounds like a paradox under globalization, yet every day in the information society and knowledge economy is one of striving for a model globally imposed that fails. The larger the sphere the more frames are neglected. States, systems of tax, traffic and trade, multinationals, schools and so on have to approach the citizen with a certain distrust in the assumption of shared values. By obeying this model, we live the lie of the simplex. We feel manipulated. Football, a simplication machine for staging club symbols and national flags, offers an alternative in two ways. It organizes the interaction of identities or cultures, as if simplexes need not collide and bubbles need not be. Secondly, the interaction admits the element of chance. Van Gaal endeavored to apply to the game the logic of investment of energy and intelligence. Failure was due in a game on which people bet and lose money.

As twenty-two players engage in a flow of passes and interceptions, preferably uninterrupted by the referee, and as they interact in endless permutations over a ball which cannot be touched by hand, limits tactical grip and favors improvisation, the consequence is a scarcity of goals and a fairly uncontrollable outcome. Football hardly exemplifies the law of investment on effort paying off. Not only may the best team lose, but the match itself can end in deadlock. True, because scoring a goal remains such a relatively unique event in the match, it results in euphoric climax. But fans also have to live with the specter of the goalless draw, by which ninety minutes of suspended gratification eventually lead to nothing. Football resembles the uncertainty of life, whereas modern technology in sports aims at standardization so that the powerful remains in control (which obviously makes technological outcomes less suitable for betting than football matches). Even popular culture and other creative utterances comply with the technological norm. Hit songs and Hollywood movies do not stop halfway, in a goalless draw. Football often does.

In general, players are aware of the many contingencies involved in the game and therefore tend to think in terms of periods when the ball is going their way. In some matches strikers aiming for the goal see the ball going in against all odds. At other times they hit the post or continue to make the wrong decisions in those crucial fractions of a second. Especially in tight games between comparable opponents one lucky bounce after a skirmish can make the difference (typically in the last minute of the game) and determine all the gall or praise in the newspapers the next day. Bookmakers and journalists tend to focus on the intrinsic quality of teams and (perhaps deliberately) overlook the utterly interactive process in football by which opponents contaminate each other’s play. Because technical skills are not contagious, as a match progresses, the common denominator of play often takes after the style of the defensive because weaker team, which is of course to the advantage of the latter, being more familiar with the style.

Ask any football pundit and s/he will tell you that a country needs more than eleven good players to win the World Cup. It has got to do with team spirit and, most of all, a particular attitude to the game. The Dutch have for decades been delivering some of the greatest stars of world football. Arguably the best master tacticians are found among Dutch coaches. Yet Holland never won the World Cup. One unparalleled squad of superstars after the other lost the final, in 1974, 1978 and 2010. A contrast with the much less talented national team of their small southern neighbor, Belgium, is interesting. Until the so-called golden generation in 2015 when the Belgian team headed the FIFA ranking for years, the country’s media and supporters preferred a magico-realist discourse opposing the positivistic approach to football from Holland. The only renowned Belgian trainer, Goethals, who won the European cup of clubs for Marseille, was nicknamed le magicien. Whereas other squads gladly point to their organization (the Germans) and virtuosity (the Brazilians), the Belgian explanations for their relative success mostly revolved around the coach’s lucky charm. The ‘rabbit foot’ of national team coach Guy Thijs became legendary during his unlikely series of successes in the 1980s. If for many decades luck was something the Belgian players and their audience seemed to count on and got them qualified for a record six consecutive World Cups and a semi-final, these days it is tactics and technical skills that fill the Belgian sports pages. After the country spawned a series of talented technical players in the last decade, fans conspicuously left behind the magico-realism. It did not bode well for the European Championship title of 2021 predicted for the Belgian team.

Much like the diviner’s oracle, whose validity we discovered to depend on the presence of the ancestral spirit, football expects the viewers, who identify with their team, to subject themselves to something beyond their control, which is described as luck and more neutrally as chance. The chapter on divination elaborately discussed the technical term, the real. European fans cherish the concept of luck in their experience of the game. The role of luck makes the game seem more real. Even the boring match becomes acceptable. The respect for chance explains why we allow the lucky goal or the wrongly granted penalty to determine the result and thus the destination of several millions of Euros. Encapsulated in a capitalist market, football retains ‘non-modern’ features. Until the recent introduction of the Video Assistant Referees (VAR), these features had become ludicrous in the eyes of outsiders. As articulated by Robert Wagman, an American journalist used to the visual technology available in American football and spurning FIFA’s earlier decision to ban video-screens from the stadiums so that replays would not confront the referee’s decisions: ‘Too many of soccer’s movers and shakers come from countries where the game is so woven into the social fabric, they likely have long ago lost sight of exactly what the role of professional sport actually is—to entertain. They see themselves as something akin to high priests administering a religion.’Footnote 2 What nation would indeed be foolish enough to have its name and flag put on the line in an event defying technology, performance, even entertainment, and in its train generating more frustration?

Well, one European nation, Germany, did so to rid itself of the stain of world war through a ritual of atonement which was to compete in World Cup qualifiers. Another European nation, ex-Empire Great Britain, began to participate anyway after that war, albeit divided in cultural identities without the imperialist association: England, Scotland, Wales and North Ireland. Football excitement accommodated a restrained society embracing the surrogate for violence.Footnote 3 It is more than a surrogate. Everyone (well, almost) watches. The national teams perform on the world stage. Viewers from eliminated teams choose another contender to identify with (national chauvinism is not necessary, just as African and Asian fans of Man United and Liverpool replay the local rivalry at their homes). The outcome is uncertain. If we lay the pieces of the puzzle, they all add up to one thing, which is the meaning of an oracle. Think of all those moments in a game accompanied with screams and sighs when you so deeply wish the team you identify with to score. You want to feel destiny on your side. Pure chance is given a meaning, a reason with collective significance. An international football match has all the traits of staging and revealing collective reason. Then does the intensity of catharsis become comprehensible, and the sincere involvement of all layers of the population, including world leaders. The revelation of collective reason, whereby one wins without destroying the game (the species), is the context to understand the geopolitical lure.

Nations in the global south participate passionately, to experience equal membership in the world for once, and challenge the status quo in geopolitics. Millions of neutral spectators count on the game’s contingency and the pleasure of watching the established world hierarchy (a structural simplex) subverted by an alternative one. But surely, the US superpower’s president would not want to sit in the honorary box to watch this, to suffer through the match with uncertain outcome against France, Iran or North Korea. In the Olympics, countries with bigger populations such as the US, China and Russia are statistically likely to win more medals. The Olympics are a better bet to keep up the appearance of superiority, and the implicit meritocratic model. The model far from mirrors people’s daily experience of society. In a game mirroring life, victory makes for a unequaled sensation. So does defeat. I cannot help hinting here at cases of football fan passion to the point of suicide and heart-attack, or hooliganism, indeed the likes of which cannot be found in any other sport.

In short, soccer does not favor the analytical approach as much as American football does with field zones, clock management and the play-calling system of quarterbacks. With a bouncing ball ideally in continuous play, Brazilian alchemy works better. If you believe that victory is the logical outcome of the player’s technical merits and efforts, then the element of chance becomes an external factor, an intrusive, world-shattering experience when rearing its unmistakable head. Chance is the worst choice for an enemy. By denying its reality and claiming to earn victory on the basis of one’s invested efforts and talent alone, the player pays a heavy price: he is left on his own to carry the burden of all chance events, specifically felt with every step on his way from the middle of the pitch to the penalty mark. He thus misses the penalty. Such a modern subject, individualized to an atom, forgets the ludic in ritual and will all too bluntly claim that football is war.

American football exemplifies the simplex. Soccer embodies the multiplex. A simplification of mine indeed (for once the noun includes ‘if’).Footnote 4 So, we are talking of a tendency. Here is another one, from Chapter “Nine: A Model Leader”: Republicans vote for models, Democrats for mirrors. What could confirm the tendency? Well, suppose Republicans prefer the first sport, as opposed to Democrats liking better the second sport? Time for a statistic for once. Brace yourself and probe the two-dimensional index with the surprising caption ‘Your politics are hilariously indicative of which sports you like.’Footnote 5 Guess where on the political index you will find American college football, and where Major League Soccer as well as European soccer? In their spare time watching sports, Democrats want to mirror society; Republicans prefer the model where the best always wins. The meritocracy attracts (but in real life Republicans simplicate as much as democrats, “Chapter Nine: A Model Leader” demonstrated). Simplex communication, which skips verification of a claimed state of affairs, leads to political choices with a ritual character, either modeling or mirroring reality. The issues that need remedying through a certain policy with a sense of urgency, disappear in the background. A US presidential election is a ritual providing catharsis. A football match organizes catharsis, quite effectively since the ritual mirrors society.

However, has a football match ever changed society for the better the day after? The extreme capitalism of FIFA and the major clubs of the UEFA Champions League leaves no doubt about it. The aforementioned catharsis mirrors but does not transform society. The hope revived by the real of unpredictable success is soon crushed. The multiplex of a football game shields spectators from the simplex they are engrossed in before and after the game. Very rarely do fans face the delusion, which could expose their actual powerlessness. In 2018 exceptionally, just after Brazil lost its quarter-final in the World Cup (against Belgium), the many young unemployed in Haiti who had supported the Latin-American football alchemists, found the zest to massively demonstrate against their corrupt government, now that the globally organized delusion was over. Experiencing the real, weekly on Wednesday and Saturday, is no guarantee for exposing the simplex sustaining a regime.

The global attraction of watching football reveals a thirst for the multiplex and the real that is indicative of its counterpart, the proliferation of simplexes worldwide. By mirroring the erratic, a football match temporarily de-simplicates. True, like art performances or spirit possession séances, the mirroring of a situation does more than serve escapism; the participants perform their experienced reality.Footnote 6 But the sports performance does not instigate structural change. In fact, simplexes have been infiltrating the performance. It probably characterizes my age cohort to deem significant that in 1990 a national football team lining up before the match would variedly react to the national anthem, some players ignoring it, others looking a bit annoyed, the exceptional patriotic one singing aloud. This attitude respected the player’s possibly mixed feelings about dictatorial or communist regimes in the 1980s seeking legitimacy through international matches. The squads today sing the anthem aloud at the start of the match while obediently looking up at the flag. They comply with the sponsor’s format doctored for success.Footnote 7 What I notice then is the simplex at work, a unidimensional concept instrumental in bringing about an intended affect. They do it without the irony of a frame in a sphere (e.g., ‘it’s just something one does’). The inauthenticity bothers the actors little because of their separation of meaning (the performance) and feeling (how one feels about the regime). Society is this, and humans are that.

Simplex society wears down cultural sensitivity, anthropology and frameshift just as they are most needed. It approaches globalization as a completed process. The World Cup used to be an occasion to learn about other cultures through the way national teams play the game and how the fans behave, their manner of cheering and dressing up, with drums or the Viking thunder clap or the noisy vuvuzela. Every team enacts its frame within the porous sphere of the competition. The choreographed football ballet of Brazilian players lining up one-on-one during warmup 15 minutes before the match has always impressed spectators in the stadium (not televised) and probably is effective at intimidating the opponent. The tone has changed. In the 2022 World Cup several commentators denounced the Brazilian team’s choreographed dances after each goal, especially after their trainer dared to join.Footnote 8 As if meaning were frameless, the Brazilians dancing supposedly humiliated the opponent. To imagine that, culture must seem an identity, entirely curatable and to be readjusted in function of the segregated sphere, the football bubble.