The Unexamined Game: Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football
It is said that, at 33 years old, Alexander the Great cried salt tears when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer. Almost two millennia later, in 2009, another young man found himself crying, on a pitchside in Abu Dhabi. Before the match, the Club World Cup final between Barcelona and Copa Libertadores winners Estudiantes, Pep Guardiola had been uncharacteristically despondent. “The future is bleak,” he said, “because there is no way we can improve on what we have achieved so far.” As Lionel Messi’s header late in extra-time overturned the South American’s early lead, Guardiola found himself facing the prospect of a future in which there were no more worlds to conquer. He could suppress it no longer. The tears flowed.
Where do you go when you have reached the end of football? Was Guardiola crying tears of joy, because he had arrived there? Or were they tears of sadness, as he realized he had nowhere new to go? Perhaps there were elements of both that night in the heady air of the Zayed Sports City Stadium.
In the age of tiki-taka — as it was to become known — this confliction of joy and despair was commonplace. You could hear it at the edge of Andres Iniesta’s voice in an interview after Spain’s European Championship win in 2012. “We feel identified with our style of play,” he said. “A few years ago, this style changed the history of Spain for good.” And yet, “when a team always wants to attack against an opponent who are shutting up shop, who are only trying to stop you hurting them, football is not as attractive as when the game is open, with two teams who are looking to win.”
Where there should have been completeness, there was a lack. Something was missing. The end of football, heralded by Guardiola that night in 2009, had not only produced beauty, but also a style of play that still dogs the Catalan manager a decade later: defenses sitting deep, soaking up pressure and also sucking much of the joy out of the game.
It was only a matter of time before tiki-taka itself was blamed for this state of affairs. By the time Guardiola left Barcelona in 2012, there had occurred, as Sid Lowe put it, “a backlash against Barcelona’s style and their steadfast, almost evangelical commitment to it, which came together in the Spain-are-boring debate of Euro 2012, one that appeared in Spain, not just abroad.” To an increasing number of supporters, the end of football signalled a death, not an apogee.
Five years on, though, football is as popular as ever. The age of tiki-taka and the end of football it occasioned seem now to be little more than a blip in the gradually unfolding history of the sport. This raises a number of questions, about the nature of the game itself, about how it changes over time and about whether the idea of an end of football even makes sense, let alone whether we’ll reach one. Before we can answer these questions, however, it will help to take a closer look at the rise and, in particular, the fall of tiki-taka.
~
The history of European football can be roughly divided into periods of national dominance. The English domination of the ‘70s gave way in the late ‘80s and ‘90s to an Italian ascendency: from 1989-1998, there was a Serie A team in every European Cup final but one. After a brief resurgence by the Premier League, the first decade of the 21st century was marked by the supremacy of Spanish football, continentally and internationally. Barcelona’s Champions League wins in 2006, 2009 and 2011 correlated with Spain’s dominance at the international level, with a World Cup in 2010 sandwiched by European Championship wins in 2008 and 2012.
The world media were besotted. Even Henry Winter, usually the perfect journalistic embodiment of the British stiff upper lip, appeared to have left his sangfroid in his other jacket pocket when he wrote, “Joyfulness pervades Barcelona’s play, seen in the passing between Lionel Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta, disciples of a glorious gospel.”
Before long, it had become de jure to wax lyrical about los conquistadores, rolling the exotic names off the tongue and citing possession statistics with abandon. In pubs where the concept of the “tactic” had barely ever been raised as a conversation topic, old men in flat caps were now speaking of tiki-taka as if it were as quotidian as the pork scratchings that hung behind the bar.
As we have seen, however, tiki-taka’s dominance also gave rise to a more insidious sentiment within the coteries of football journalism. For it did not seem to be the case that a new style of football had emerged which might, in time, be replaced by another; it felt as though there was nothing more to do, no tactical system that might topple the Spanish from their position of dominance. There was a “best” way of playing, and it had finally arrived. As Alfredo Relano put it in AS, “Barcelona have shown that perfection is possible. There is no antidote to their exquisite football.”
~
The 2014 World Cup burst into life as a football arched through the air off the boot of Daley Blind, met the head of a full-stretch Robin van Persie, flew over a despairing Iker Casillas and nestled in the back of the net. The Spanish collapsed to a 5-1 defeat, and the end of football, which had seemed so tangible in the preceding years, lay in tatters at the feet of the global media who had championed it.
The Independent’s Jack de Menezes summed up the general feeling: “Some have claimed that the end of Spain’s six-year domination of world football does not mean the end of tiki-taka,” he wrote, “but simply a new dawn in the history of Spanish football as the old guard come to the end of their careers. This simply is not true.”
There was a growing recognition that tiki-taka had failed to adapt to the tactics developed to expose its frailties. In the latter years of the 2000s, when Barcelona and Spain were at their peaks, opponents would sit back in a bid to absorb pressure, seeking to prevent the inevitable, but offering very little by way of attacking threat. The approach was self-defeating: tiki-taka relied on retention of possession around the halfway line; deep defenses did little to prevent that, and so simply invited wave after wave of attack from the team with the ball.
But younger coaches brought with them new styles of play, and eventually the balance of power shifted. Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund began the revolution which reached a crescendo in 2013-14, when Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid won La Liga ahead of Real Madrid and Barcelona sides both thought to be at the height of their powers.
What these managers discovered was that by pressing higher up the pitch, and destabilizing the opposition’s possession in midfield, tiki-taka lost its threat. Without the freedom to control the ball around the halfway line, the Spanish style became effectively useless. Soon enough, possession percentage numbers were dismissed as largely irrelevant; pundits began to focus less on how much of the ball a team had and more on where they had it, and what they did when they lost or won it. A new era of football had been born.
As well as showing the world how to beat tiki-taka, Klopp and Simeone had undermined the concept of the end of football as such. For it wasn’t that they had discovered a newer, more complete system than tiki-taka. Rather, they had found an unexpected way to counter it. The idea that there can be an end of football suggests the sport is moving in a particular direction, that each new tactical system is an upgrade on the old one, that, as Relano suggested, perfection is possible. What the success of Klopp and Simeone showed, in contrast, was that tactics develop far more reactively, that newer systems don’t build on old ones so much as they infiltrate them.
It took only half a decade for the widely-held belief tiki-taka was the perfect tactical system to appear hopelessly naive. The original Cruyffian ideal, set in place as the cornerstone of Guardiola’s Barcelona monolith, had, within a few short seasons, come crumbling down. The end of football turned out only to be a new beginning.
~
The idea of the end of history is hardly new. In 1992, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a book whose title did little to conceal its daring ambition. Through the course of The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama argued that the advent of Western liberalism might, in fact, be the final moment in humanity’s historical development.
He originally proposed the idea in an earlier essay, “The End of History?” published in The National Interest in 1989. In it, he claimed: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Fukuyama, whose ideas were heavily influenced by those of German philosopher (and Manchester United assistant manager) G.W.F. Hegel, views history as a kind of protracted struggle, the end goal of which is the full realization of human freedom. He’s not alone in this approach. Karl Marx did the same, arguing history was moving inexorably toward a communist moment in which states would “wither away” and people would begin to administer their own lives, without the need for government. Fukuyama’s argument is essentially the same, except he believes liberal democracy, not communism, is our final destination.
The “universalization of Western liberal democracy” that Fukuyama talked about — which felt so palpable during the ‘90s, when mass mobilization of capital markets fomented into an effervescent optimism about the possibilities of Western society — came crashing down with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001. Before long, as the War on Terror dragged on and recession hit in 2008, the idea we had arrived at the end of history came to seem, well, wrong — just like the idea we had arrived, in 2009-12, at the end football.
In both cases, the lesson appears to be the same: History is not teleological, it is not moving toward a particular end. Whatever progress there is seems to unfold through a series of contradictions — a status quo emerges, is called into a question by some opposition and is eventually replaced. This progression is what Hegel would refer to as dialectical.
The term refers, in its simplest form, to the back and forth between two sides of an argument, and dates back to the ancient Greeks. Plato famously employed the Socratic method as a means of developing his ideas. In his dialogues, two interlocutors (Plato and Socrates, for example) argue from two different positions, moving back and forth between them, slowly refining their original ideas into more sophisticated ones. So far, so simple.
There are times, however, when the two interlocutors simply contradict one another, meaning one or both of them must be wrong. Plato’s solution to this was to start again, to select new positions from which to argue and once more begin the process of refining them.
Hegel didn’t like this approach, claiming it required the philosopher to “wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss.” If you were to abandon the dialectical process as soon as a contradiction arose, he wondered, how could you ever make any progress at all?
His solution was to introduce a third moment into his dialectic — he called it “sublation,” but it’s often referred to as “synthesis” — in which the useful aspects of the contradictory ideas are taken up and their limitations sloughed off (or, to use Hegel’s word, “negated”). In this way, the central contradiction remains, but is developed in some way, viewed as it is within the broader context of the dialectical process as a whole. Hegel believed this allowed him to make sense of the contradictions he saw pervading philosophy — subject-object, freedom-nature, being-nothing — and move beyond them.
This progression is not, it’s important to note, teleological. It doesn’t move of necessity toward a final end. New oppositions will always emerge ready to impel the dialectic forward into a new contradiction. Never wearying, never concluding, history rolls on.
~
The parallel between football and Hegel’s dialectic is no accident. On the one hand, footballers are playing against the conditions of the game itself — they’re trying to do things with the ball on the field in order to achieve an end (namely, score a goal). But on the other, their actions directly impinge upon those of their opponents. The things they do, the style in which they play, impacts the things their opponents do, the style in which they play.
This might seem almost too trivial to be worth pointing out, but it explains a great deal of the stress experienced by the world’s best managers. During his time at Bayern Munich, for example, Guardiola said, “What I want, my desire, is to have 100 percent possession.” This sort of claim, hardly an outlier in Guardiola’s various musings on the game, makes it seem as if the Catalan manager is railing against football’s dialectical nature. He wants to control matches entirely, to be free from the intervention of the opposition.
At the same time, however, he has routinely lamented teams who sit too deep against him, ceding ever higher percentages of possession. Indeed, the dialectical nature of the game has perhaps never been so muted as it was during tiki-taka’s acme, when even other supposedly elite teams would sit deep and simply hope to survive Barcelona’s onslaught. But as we’ve seen, Guardiola was already concerned at that time that there was no way for his side to improve on what they had achieved so far. Not only could he not escape football’s dialectical nature, he found himself craving it.
There can be no end of football, then, because the game is inherently dialectical — structured around opposites. The history of football bears this out. When a new approach emerges, no matter how dominant it might appear, it’s only a matter of time before a new style undermines it. There can be no resolution here, no final synthesis, only a never-ending series of contradictions, generating endless new possibilities.
Even as football moved beyond tiki-taka, the tactic wasn’t left behind entirely. It was simply taken up in new forms, by different teams and different managers (and some of the same ones). Guardiola himself has been responsible for much of this, developing new iterations of tiki-taka first at Bayern and now City. As he does so, the perennial antagonists of tiki-taka plot their responses, ready for some future sublation.
~
If the history of football teaches us anything, then, it teaches us that the search for a final telos is unproductive. For it is precisely the oppositional nature of the game that drives it forward. As soon as one style of play becomes dominant, others begin their machinations, plotting its downfall. Success can only lead to greater opposition. The circle continues.
And it’s for precisely this reason that we continue to enjoy football. There is a fundamental incompleteness to the game, infinite room for opposition, that prevents staleness from setting in. We long for an ending, but live in the hope it will never arrive. In the end, football will have no end. Long live the beautiful game.