Letter Fourteen | 12/3 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

It’s good to be back after a weeklong hiatus. I’ve been doing so much “serious” writing that the chance to write a little more casually is such a relief. I’ve also been sick. Thankfully, we’ve had such wonderful guest contributors—I’ve been looking forward to bringing in these other voices, our friends, all week. Even if our stakes are relatively low, there’s something robustly satisfying about seeing something you care about, something you’ve helped develop, extend its network to include other people you care about, too.

Also, Peter and Joe and Miles all had, like, throughlines to their letters. Structure, thematizations, callbacks. Maybe it’s obvious, but I’m absolutely over here just vibing.

There was one excellent result and one very poor result today. The US outshot the Dutch but lost 3-1; after the match van Gaal or somebody said that the Americans were technically talented but tactically naïve, which I mostly agree with. This is the best USMNT I’ve ever witnessed, but they lack both the subtlety and the mercilessness of the top sides. Pulisic and McKennie and Dest and Weah all seem of a type to me: more than technically competent, young and fast and strong, but somehow limited in, like, spatiotemporal imagination, if that makes sense. Sometimes it seems like Brazil or France play three-and-a-half-dimensional soccer, like there’s another plane, just slightly askew to the field, that exerts a small but unmistakable effect on play—some players are sensitive to this plane, and others are not. This is what I mean by subtlety. Mercilessness is that collective stoniness that I see in the very best teams, too—the old tiki-taka Spain and Germany when they last won the Cup epitomize this for me. It’s an automatism, an ability to exert pressure grounded not even in confidence but some kind of preconscious pre-confidence: not the belief that your touch will be perfect, but the ability to keep the question from ever arising at all.

Anyway, this is what the US still lacks—and, to be fair, most other teams do too. It’s not even always an aesthetic positive, but even when it’s not beautiful that stony mercilessness is mesmerizing, in the way a huge industrial machine can be. When mercilessness and subtlety combine, the absolutely new can occur, although it appears in other contexts and arrangements, too. The USWNT will carry a more complex narrative into the Women’s World Cup this summer—we’ll write about them, too, I’m sure.

Speaking of the USMNT, I suppose now is the right time to talk about the big but also microscopic virtual elephant: the semi-automatic VAR and the offside call against Tim Weah in the US’s final group stage match against Iran.

Here’s the photo: https://twitter.com/JTansey90/status/1597680850350792704

People online will say that offside is an objective concept. It’s binary, Boolean, one or zero, on or off. And if we’re talking strictly in an analytic sense, that’s true: the concepts and definitions that we use to define offside are arranged in such a way that any case must produce either a situation of onside or offside. It’s an absolute and exclusive apparatus.

The problem is that soccer is not played with analytic concepts, but rather bodies and objects in real space and time, and attaching analytic concepts to bodies and objects in any actually “objective” way has proven impossible. This isn’t bad postmodern legerdemain: it’s the conclusion of a bunch of analytic philosophy’s heavy hitters. If Ben Shapiro wants to call W.V.O. Quine, like, an ontological snowflake, let him. That would be actually very funny.

The point of language is the games we play with it, the kinds of things it makes possible in the world, what our goals are. And soccer happens at the scale of the human. Even forgetting the fact that, as we narrow our vision, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the facts of an offside situation (when has a pass been played? where on the arm does the legal zone begin?), we have to remember the goal of the language game we play with the word “offside” and its explanation in the rule book: to prevent the game from, you know, getting aesthetically worse. It’s there to prevent cherry-picking, to stop soccer from adopting American football’s obsession with verticality (just, you know, with feet). Does this micro-analysis of offside help achieve that goal? No, obviously not.

(Also it’s not even more objective. No one scale of vision is more objective than another. Scales are like spatio-temporal reference frames. The millimeter does not produce a “more correct” offside call than the foot or yard. Zoom out far enough, the players converge. Zoom in far enough, and the players become probabilistic distributions. We’re trading one partial vision at one arbitrary scale for another, but we’re calling it more objective.)

VAR is fine. Just keep it at the scale of the human.

The VAR-automation-offside conversation is linked directly to other conversations, which are also bad, made by other people, who are also wrong. See, for example, the Dudes Whomst Are Mad about the USMNT splitting their $13m prize for escaping the group stage with the USWNT by contractual obligation. The Dudes argue that the women ought to be compensated based on how much revenue they bring in, which suggests their inability to (among other things) distinguish the USWNT from its players, wages from the money that circulates in international sport, and also (my god) the point of sports from all the stupid bullshit that’s not the point of sports. Never mind the fact that they’re obviously wrong (the USWNT carried soccer as a cultural object in the US for years, which was obviously good for the whole pyramid, the men included), what’s more concerning are their noodle imaginations, their weird contradictory jumble of the Protestant work ethic, neoliberal meritocracy, and MBA-consultancy thinking (plus also the misogyny, of course).

Another of these conversations circles what I have named the Sportscaster’s Fallacy, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how causality works. If only, the fallacy goes, Player X had done Action Y half an hour ago (scored a goal, saved the penalty, whatever), then Situation Z, happening right now, would mean something totally different! What they miss is that Situation Z depends on Player X doing Action Y—if Player X doesn’t, then the assemblage of objects and potentialities that allowed Situation Z to manifest as it did would be impossible. It’s just a lack of imagination. Likewise the total disregard for luck, which baseball talks about in ways much better than soccer. If, say, Messi takes a good penalty but the keeper guesses right and makes a great save, people will say, well, Messi just lost focus. He couldn’t deliver. He choked. As if the only obstacle to the material realization of Messi’s will is the strength of his will. As if luck isn’t just a real but often the dominant element in the unfolding of things.  

Anyway, you’re right: I do have feelings about Ted Lasso, but I’m going to hold off because I want to write about it later. In the meantime, let me say how good Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century is: a weird, obsessive deliberation of Zidane, yes, but also the technology of the image, celebrity, and entropy.

Glad Argentina are through because I want more Messi, as sad as I am for the Australians, who availed themselves well.

Looking forward to seeing how our little knockout-round wagers turn out. I look forward to your last-minute win after you bet all your points on, like, a 7-6 scoreline in the final.

Back and better than ever,

Ryan