Arsenal and Barcelona: Football for Football’s Sake

By Nick Lichtenberg

“What I have always loved about the history of the world is that it is true. That all the extraordinary things we read were no less real than you or I today. What is more, what did happen is often far more exciting and amazing than anything we could invent.”

- Ernst Gombrich, A Little History Of The World

“It was art, it was a great football night and it was two teams who went for it, an exceptional football night.

- Arsene Wenger, March 2010

In various undergraduate art history classes, I learned about patronage. In European and American cultures, Art was commissioned for many purposes, usually to venerate religion, to venerate the patron who was commissioning the artwork (e.g., portrait paintings), or better yet, to venerate the religion of said patron (e.g., a pious portrait painting).

But by the so-called “modern” age, the idea emerged of “art for art’s sake,” which stipulates that each work should be created and judged on its own merits, apart from any outside social force. The idea has been corrupted by now, of course, as the breakthroughs of the impressionists or method actors, to name a few examples, have degenerated into the exclusive property of the upper class or as vehicles for Hollywood films to make bundles of money. Art for art’s sake, experience shows, merely turns into another vehicle for commerce.

Similarly in football aesthetics. Beauty is now principally a tool to be used in the pursuit of victory. The “Total Football” Dutch ideal of the 1970s, or the versatility of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan clubs in the 1980s and ’90s, have been converted into the brute, mechanized tactics of Alex Ferguson or Jose Mourinho. After all, Mourinho’s 4-3-3 at Chelsea was the same formation used by the classic ’70s Dutch teams, but the powerful, above-all effective style of Didier Drogba is a far cry from the wasteful, fancified talents of those Dutch teams, or of the Barcelona team we witnessed last week.