Why Soccer is the Most Universal Language on the Planet

Soccer is a language, probably the most universal language on the planet. It is spoken more widely than English, Arabic, or Chinese and practiced more widely than any religion. In 1954, the French soccer journalist Jean Eskenazi wrote an essay on the “universality” of the game. It is, he declared, “the only denominator common to all people, the only universal Esperanto . . . a world language, whose grammar is unchanging from the North Pole to the Equator.” Although mutually intelligible everywhere it is played, it is still delightfully varied, “spoken in each corner of the globe with a particular accent.” The Swedish writer Fredrik Ekelund similarly calls the game the “Esperanto of the feet.” The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote a book of letters about the 2014 men’s World Cup with Ekelund, offers a vivid example of how this language works. Picked up once by a German truck driver while he was hitchhiking, Knausgaard found he had no common language with which to pass the time during the long ride. Then, he began saying the names of soccer players. He started with a Norwegian footballer, Rune Bratseth, and the German recognized him, “brightening up and repeating it several times.” Knausgaard continues, “Then he said a name, so I said Ja! Ja!” These names, keys to a broader set of shared memories and experiences and feelings, were a thread of connection.

Every soccer game is a story. But it is not easy to capture it in words. Why, wonders the Mexican novelist and journalist Juan Villoro, has there never been “a great football novel”? The answer, he suggests, may be that every game is already “its own epic, its own tragedy, its own comedy,” all at once. The works of literature that do try to narrate soccer, including many remarkable short stories, often do so by piecing together fragments of story, attempting to capture the way moments on the pitch somehow condense the drama of life. Knausgaard imagines a piece of writing about just one game, one that would concentrate “on only these 90 minutes, chart all the incidents, all the moves, also all the names and not just follow them on the pitch but in life, their stories before the game, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, friends, what happened after the game, the following years, the career that finished, life in a satellite town outside some Colombian or Iranian city.” In any given game, he suggests, is a whole world. The 90 minutes are “inexhaustible.” Perhaps David Kilpatrick had the right idea when he decided he would write a short poem in response to every game in the 2014 men’s World Cup, considering “each game itself a text to be read.” He sat in front of his television, pen in hand, producing 64 poems, at turns humorous, tragic, elegiac.

Soccer never stops. The clock never stops ticking, for any reason—there are no timeouts, no pauses. There is just halftime, and then a break before and between overtime periods, if they occur. The only concession to the fact that time may have been lost because of injury or intentional time wasting on the part of a team is the referee’s right to add time to the end of the game, but it is almost never more than five minutes. Soccer time is very different from what we experience in basketball or American football—where the clock starts and stops constantly, making the actual time it takes to watch any game unpredictable—as well as from baseball, which has no clock at all. This is one of the defining features of the game. Although you never know what will happen in a soccer match, you can be sure about how long it will take: 90 minutes, usually a little more, or 120 if things go into overtime, and a little longer if there is a penalty kick shootout.

“That is one of the reasons we return again and again to the game, hoping to catch a glimpse of beauty that we never can predict, or even imagine, before it happens.”

Soccer’s rules have changed little since they were set down in the 19th century. It’s true that a few people have offered intriguing alternatives to the way it is structured. In the 1960s Asger Jorn, a Danish Situationist artist inspired by Marxist ideas, decided there was no reason to limit soccer games to only two teams in perpetual opposition. Why not open things up a bit? He created “three-sided football,” sometimes more pointedly called “Anarchist Football.” It is played on a hexagon with three teams and three goals. There is no referee—no state to legislate what happens—and the game turns into a complex swirl of temporary alliances and understandings. Two teams can go against one, collaborating at least for a time, but also change tactics and friends as the situation warrants. And the winner of the game is not the team that scores the most goals, but the one that, through collaboration and alliance with other teams, manages to suffer the fewest goals against them. The game has a regular following in Europe, with matches organized in England and France, and a nascent set of leagues in the United States too.

For now, though, soccer remains a dialectic, never-ending struggle between two teams. “In a football match,” the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writes—with delicious understatement—“everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” Imagine how wonderful it would be if there weren’t any defense: so much easier to dribble a ball gracefully across the pitch, pass to your teammates, and score a beautiful goal. There also, of course, would be no drama—and therefore no point. It is the back-and-forth between offense and defense, which generations of players and coaches have tried to figure out how to control, that makes soccer beautifully unpredictable and therefore endlessly fascinating. 

Soccer is, as we often hear, the “beautiful game.” What makes it so? A “beautiful play,” writes literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “is an epiphany of form” that happens through the “sudden, surprising convergence of several athletes’ bodies” in a particular place, at a particular moment. Such moments are delightful precisely because they are unpredicted and unknown even for the “players who perform them, because they must be achieved against the unpredictable resistance of the other team’s defense.” The fact that such a play has to overcome intense and carefully deployed opposition, whose goal is to “destroy the emerging form and precipitate chaos,” is what makes it feel like a kind of miracle. “There are few experiences,” admits Gumbrecht, “that make my heart beat faster than a beautiful play.” It is also evanescent, as is the feeling it produces. Although you can watch a replay of an amazing moment in soccer, that never really captures the epiphany and awe that accompany its first unfolding. That is one of the reasons we return again and again to the game, hoping to catch a glimpse of beauty that we never can predict, or even imagine, before it happens. 

Soccer is sensual. It is about the pleasure of watching athletes’ bodies, their faces, their motion, admiring and commenting on their hairstyles and tattoos. When we talk and write about soccer, we evoke—more often unconsciously than consciously—its sensuality, its role as a source of pleasure. “The goal is soccer’s orgasm,” notes the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, probably the sport’s most eloquent and poetic chronicler. The ball goes into the goal, inciting shouts of ecstatic joy. The sexual metaphor is, on one level, obvious: it is about male penetration. Yet what this metaphor actually means to those who play and those who watch is anything but simple. And goals, in any case, are very rare, a fleeting exception within the game. Soccer may be the most tantric of sports. Some of the greatest and most riveting games end 0–0. Perhaps what is truly sensual about soccer is that it is about interplay, relationships, motion between people, all tied up with our deepest and most mysterious emotions.

In soccer, there are simply no guarantees. A team can seem to be doing everything right—have a coach nicknamed “the Professor” who recruits the best players in the world, approach their training scientifically, mobilize the best doctors and studies, analyze and perfect tactics endlessly, bring in team psychologists, energize a devoted fan base in a beautiful stadium at the heart of a global capital—and still never quite live up to expectations. Even after all that, on a bad day, the team can seem like a collection of players who have no idea what they are doing on the pitch.

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From The Language of the Game. Used with permission of Basic Books, and imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2018 by Laurent Dubois.