The football World Cup ended with an actual game of football. These days, that is almost a novelty.
First we had to get through presidents, sponsors, singers, ceremonies, universal messages and a twenty-seven-minute half-time interval, during which Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber and BTS turned the final into a football-themed offshoot of the Super Bowl. The first half had been over for so long that, when the players finally came back out, one of them may well have asked the referee what the score was.
Once upon a time, the World Cup final was the World Cup final. Now it is the sporting interlude in the Madonna World Tour.
Football still has its uses. It separates one performance from the next, fills the gaps between shots of the FIFA president and justifies the presence of a stadium underneath the stage. And should the match turn out to be a good one, so much the better. But let us not get carried away: we would not want the ball to interfere with the entertainment.
The tournament was consistent, at least. We saw the president of the United States take a personal interest in the suspension of an American player, and FIFA find a way to put the punishment on hold. Having evidently dealt with the lesser matters — wars, the economy, international politics — he was finally free to devote himself to the serious business of a centre-forward’s red card.
We also saw an England–Argentina semi-final in which, to my eyes, Argentina were plainly favoured. Perhaps it was not all scripted. The trouble is that these days, even when it is not scripted, it looks as though it is. Messi against Yamal was the right final, the one that belonged on the poster. Try spending months preparing the artwork for the old king against the boy wonder and then turning up with England instead.
That is what football has become: five-a-side.
Not under the rules, obviously. The pitch is larger, there are eleven players, and somewhere in FIFA’s offices there is surely an official whose job is to certify that football is not futsal.
Fortunately, the human eye has yet to affiliate itself with a governing body.
What the eye sees is teams compressed into thirty metres, short possession, pressing, the goalkeeper as playmaker, defenders escorting attackers like security staff and hundreds of passes played mainly to prepare the ground for further passes.
Every now and then, somebody shoots. The crowd is startled.
In the 1970s and 1980s, defenders often went too far. They would take the ball, your ankle, your leg and part of your family tree. Then they would put the leg in the fridge and go home. On Monday morning, you would ring their doorbell.
“Sorry to bother you. Any chance I could have at least the knee back? We’re playing again on Sunday.”
It was not pretty, and perhaps it was not civilised. At times it was not even football.
But somewhere between amputation and being forbidden to inconvenience an attacker, there must have been some middle ground. Perhaps it was called a tackle.
The modern defender lives like a defendant released under strict conditions. He may run alongside his opponent, observe him, accompany him towards goal and, provided he maintains a cooperative manner, perhaps make contact with his shoulder. Gently. But if he tries to take the ball, he must be ready to prove to the referee, VAR, the slow-motion replay and the court of public opinion that his foot had democratic intentions.
A foul is no longer a foul: it is a point of law.
Offside is no longer a position: it is a theorem in topology.
Handball has become a field of study in which three former referees, after twenty-two replays, can produce five different opinions. When the ball goes in, the supporter does not celebrate. He looks at the referee, the linesman and the giant screen, then waits for a surveyor locked in a room to establish whether the attacker’s eyebrow was beyond the defender’s kneecap.
Once the paperwork clears, he may celebrate the goal he saw four minutes earlier.
I am not saying I miss the butcher. But I do miss the defender a little. Quite a lot, in fact.
The same thing has happened in tennis, for the opposite reason.
Football was transformed by constantly changing the rules. Tennis was transformed by leaving the rules untouched while rackets, strings, balls, surfaces, bodies and commercial interests all changed around them.
Nobody abolished serve-and-volley. That would have been vulgar.
They allowed it to die of freedom.
The volley still exists. The sliced backhand still exists. The unexpected approach, the chip-and-charge and the touch game all still exist. Contemporary tennis preserves them as museums preserve horse-drawn carriages: fascinating relics of an age when people moved about in ways that now seem incomprehensible.
The modern player may still come to the net. He can do so after serving at 220 kilometres an hour, receiving a return at his feet and drawing up his will. He may even win the point. The following week, if his head is still attached to his neck, he might try it again.
Or he might decide not to bother.
More forgiving rackets, strings capable of generating enormous spin and surfaces chosen partly for commercial reasons have made one dominant language profitable: serve, return, baseline, topspin, power and athletic coverage.
Martina Navratilova has long proposed reducing racket-head sizes to restore the importance of precision and net play. As far back as 2003, she, McEnroe, Becker and other champions were arguing that technology had made tennis more uniform and one-dimensional. It is such a sensible idea that we can all relax: it will never be implemented.
Wilson, Babolat, Head and the other respectable churches of the racket trade must be allowed to sell a fifty-five-year-old chartered accountant Alcaraz’s racket. The accountant will buy it, walk on to court and send his first ball into the back fence, but he will send it into the back fence with the correct equipment.
The dream would be to play like the champion.
Failing with his racket remains a perfectly satisfying substitute.
In alpine ski racing, they actually do the opposite. The recreational skier may be given easier, more effective equipment: he cannot ski properly, after all, so he needs some help. Professionals are subject to limits on dimensions, construction and turning radius. Because if elite athletes were allowed to exploit everything technology could produce, eventually it would not be only the skiers competing. The design departments would be competing too. And skiing might lose much of its vocabulary.
In tennis, by contrast, limiting professional equipment in order to protect the richness of the game sounds like an assault on Western liberty.
Far better to limit the game in order to protect the catalogue.
Now it is doubles’ turn. The ATP is considering halving draw sizes and cutting the share of prize money allocated to the discipline. They will not abolish it, naturally. They will take away players, money, space and opportunities. Then, once it is dead, they will explain that nobody was interested in it any more.
It is always the neatest method.
First you starve it. Then you weigh it.
Doubles is suspicious anyway. It contains serving, returning, volleying, lobbing, reflexes, angles, partnership and control of space. It has four players and tactics that require attention. It is far too complicated to become content.
That is the whole idea. Football and tennis are no longer expected merely to produce a contest. They must produce images that explain themselves, recognisable champions, simple stories, marketable stars and moments that can be clipped for people looking at their phones while watching television.
Defending slows down the plot. A tackle might remove the protagonist from the pitch. Doubles has too many people. Serve-and-volley takes years to understand and only a few seconds to finish the point. Look down at your phone and you have missed it. A draw makes sponsors miserable. And fifteen minutes at half-time is not enough for Madonna even to find a parking space.
Everything must become easier to follow, more attacking, more uniform.
More marketable.
Today’s athletes are not worse. They are fitter, faster, more powerful and probably more complete. The paradox is that they compete in sports that are less complete.
The modern full-back can do more things, but the full-back barely exists any more. The tennis player possesses more strokes, many of them increasingly alike, and uses them within the same pattern. As players have become more complete, they have all begun to resemble one another.
The market does not ban the old languages.
It merely makes them not worth speaking.
And so football has become five-a-side, tennis has become an artillery duel, and sport has become whatever happens between one ad break and the next.
They did not abolish football and tennis.
They improved them until they became something else.
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