Cold, hard numbers and warm, wet feelings
Football has become a content factory, sustained by ceaseless quantification and commodified emotion.
The datafication of everything came for football some years back in a big way, as analysts started applying US sports lenses to a much more fluid game. I've got no problem with people trying to be smart about their practices and would place the analytics revolution in football in a long-line of other improvements, whether it be tactics, conditioning, sports medicine, etc. And as a progressive, a modernist, etc I should be in favour of this, or at least not knee-jerk reactionary in the face of it. It’s also why I’m not against doping in sports – it seems to draw an arbitrary line between one techno-scientific improvement and a whole bunch of others we deem kosher. But that’s a different argument for another time.
What I want to express here is my hatred for the ceaseless quantification of football, because it comes accompanied with so much else that seems to be distorting the game: the technocracy of Video-Assisted Refereeing, the oligarchisation of the game, the associated tendency of the game becoming ‘placeless’ – an anywhere game played on the football moon, etc.
And by ‘distortion,’ what I really mean is evacuating beauty, fun, and genuine competition from the game, and breaking the continuity that used to exist between football and watched played by ordinary people and the hyper-professionalised environment in which the top-level game is played. It’s the killing off of values that one felt could remain untouched by the prevailing historical direction of travel: that of rationalisation, quantification, and commodification (a process that often runs in that precise order as something goes from being a particular artefact of life to being something bought and sold). And I think the reason so many dedicate so much energy to hating this process in football (when you might argue they should be angry about far more important things) is that it feels like their taken-for-granted, sub-political enjoyments are being taken away from them. You could live with – that is, struggle through – innumerable offenses and takings-of-advantage in the wider world of work and life, but at least you still had football, right?
Anyway, what I find interesting is how the coldness and dryness of stats and analytics has come accompanied by things that are normally understood as hot and wet (quiet at the back!) Which is to say: anger, rage, vengeance, wounded egos, need for recognition, etc. Alongside data-fication has come a transformation in fandom.
You know how movies used to be enjoyed but are now all about fandom – that is, the uncritical dedication to your ‘team’ and all the point-scoring that goes along with it? Well, football, the home of fandom, has undergone fandom-isation too. The game isn’t a whole practice to be enjoyed, whether casually or as a ‘connoisseur’ (which is a ridiculous term to use regarding football but here we are). It is broken apart into component parts, flattened, and made amenable to comparison, exchange. How many goals did Mo Salah score? Yeah, well, Haaland has this many xG (expected goals). Oh, your centre-back was dribbled-past how many times? Yeah but his win% when on the pitch is so much higher than your guy’s! (This caricature in no way captures the pettiness, rancour, hypocrisy, and bile of these sorts of arguments now – especially not as they’re had out on social media).
But it goes further, it’s not just inter-fan competition (what’s new there? That’s existed since at least the ‘60s, when the idea of exclusive club fandom really becomes a thing, at least in England). You can no longer enjoy excellence, skill, beauty. You have to see the whites of the eyes of the other guy as you tell him your guy totally owned his guy. Oh yeah? That’s just anecdotal. Here are stats to show you your guy is the most owned. Recognise me! ME! I did it! (Well, no, my guy did it, but I chose my guy! And he has more numbers than you can ever imagine. He collects numbers for fun. Your guy just has, like, few numbers. Maybe 3 (three)).
What’s interesting to me, beyond football – and in a sort of Illouz-ian vein – is how the cold, hard and dry world of quantification, analytics and stats, intermeshes with stuff that you could call “heavily psychologically overdetermined”, but maybe more simply put is just the stuff of emotion, not instrumental reason.
I mention Illouz because she’s sort of the doyenne of looking at capitalism this way. Capitalism was meant, following Weber, to be all rationalistic. And indeed, there is an unstoppable train of rationalisation that eats up everything in its way, leaving no other value untouched. And yet the end result is not something bereft of emotion. Capitalism today is all interlaced with communication, empathy, feeling, vulnerability, etc.
It all seems to come together in contemporary football fandom. The home of Passion®