What we see when we watch football::
In 1972, four half-hour episodes on the BBC attempted to change how we approached visual culture and how we saw the world around us. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was a landmark in the history of arts broadcasting and education. Berger, an art critic, playwright and Booker Prize-winning novelist, who fought against injustice and wrote articles and essays on society and politics, passed away in January this year. This piece is not an obituary or analysis of his works; it is about football, or as Berger would perhaps have put it, what we see when we watch football.
On 13 June 2014, Holland handed defending world champions Spain a humiliating 5-1 defeat. In the days that followed, the image dominating newspapers, social media and TV channels was that of Robin van Persie suspended mid-flight, right after heading the ball that would beat Iker Casillas and open the Dutch scoring spree. It was a magnificent feat of athleticism resulting in one of the most spectacular goals in World Cup history. But what do we make of the image?
For a person who had not watched the match (or replays or highlights clips), the whole game would be condensed into that one image. They would never know of the opening goal – Xabi Alonso’s penalty – nor would they know anything of the other four Dutch goals. Given the importance given to that one image, they would perhaps assume that Van Persie’s goal was the winner when in fact it was an equaliser. About the goal itself, they would also not know that Daley Blind had provided the assist – a fantastic one at that.
One would think the true context of the image could only be understood by a person who had watched the match. However, how far is that possible either? The image that we see on our TV screens or the monitors of our laptops and tablets is taken by a mounted camera that moves. This movement makes a lot of difference on how we view the game, for the focus of the image and therefore our eye is always on the ball. When Blind has the ball, our complete attention is focused on him – we do not notice the moment when Van Persie begins his run, neither do we notice how Arjen Robben draws away Gerard Piqué from Van Persie’s path.
If one stretches the idea of context further still, it is easy to conclude that only a person who knew that Spain had beaten Holland in the final of the previous World Cup, or knew that Van Persie, Blind and Holland manager Louis van Gaal were scheduled to be reunited at Manchester United right after the World Cup – in short, a fan of the sport – would understand the importance of the goal and the celebration that followed: Van Persie high-fiving van Gaal – another photo that went viral on social media.
A photograph is the result of a photographer’s decision that an instant is worth recording. In his essay Understanding a Photograph, Berger explains that the essence of a photograph is the simple message: “I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.” According to Berger: “A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum.”
So, what is missing from the “Flying Dutchman” photo of Van Persie is everything that led up to that moment. While the photo invokes all that is missing from it, this invocation is only realised and understood by the viewer who has prior knowledge of the context and larger background.
At the heart of any football match is the concept of space and time. How each player reacts to these two factors determines how good they are as footballers. In Brilliant Orange, David Winner describes a photo taken at the De Meer stadium in 1995, the year Van Gaal’s Ajax team was the best in Europe: “Tearing forward, the Ajax ‘shadow striker’ Jari Litmanen has the ball at his feet near the centre-circle. Ten metres ahead of him, centre-forward Patrick Kluivert is a ball of coiled energy, surrounded by defenders, but poised to make his move. Left-winger Marc Overmars and right-winger Finidi George are already running into space. Behind Litmanen, the three other members of the midfield diamond that day, Edgar Davids on the left, Arnold Scholten on the right and Winston Bogarde behind, are advancing with cool menace.”
The photo was taken by Hans van der Meer to depict what he calls the “moment of tension”. “There are one or two moments when a situation develops and you understand something will happen,” explains Van der Meer. “This is the moment of tension, of possibility. Everyone in the crowd shares this tension. The pleasure of going to a football game is that you all feel this together. It’s like chess. When newspapers report a chess game, they don’t show you the final move. They show you the position 10 moves from the end because that is the most dramatic situation. The midfield is often more dramatic than the penalty area. The moment of the goal is not particularly interesting. What happens just before the goal: that is much more interesting.”
Van der Meer does not tend to take photos of matches from the sidelines or from behind the goal. He works high in the stands, usually near the halfway line. This enables him to show space that close-ups taken with long telephoto lenses at ground level fail to capture. In Van der Meer’s photographs of Ajax, we can see Total Football at its peak.
Similarly, to understand just how organised, structured and disciplined Antonio Conte’s Italy team were at Euro 2016, it is best to look at this short clip, which was shot from above the opposition’s goalposts on a more-or-less static camera that did not zoom in on any particular player.
Instant replays after goals generally show just the assist and the final shot. Here too there is a hierarchy of screen-time. The assist is shown once, maybe twice, but the final shot is shown four or five times from varying angles. The pass that set up the assist is often not shown at all. For a goal resulting from patient build-up play of say 20+ passes, the instant replay would perhaps show only the last two or three passes and the final shot.
The same, however, does not hold for a goal that results from a solo run. In these cases each replay shows – from various angles, at various speeds – how the individual managed to dribble past each of the defenders before slotting in the ball at the back of the net. Football coverage today focuses mostly on the individuality of each player. We live in the age of the spectacle and the constant, unwavering focus on the individual has ensured that players are at all times going through a sort of screen test for the television. Through replays and photos, we are invited to share the ecstatic joy, pain, agony, frustration and disappointment felt by individual players. The performance of a team is even described by statistics on individuals – goals, bookings, tackles made, distance run, dribbles completed and so on.
Somewhere we lose the sense of the team, the collective. For teams such as Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, Jupp Heynckes’ Munich, Conte’s Italy and Joachim Löw’s Germany – which are often described as the outworking of one individual’s philosophy – it becomes difficult to ignore the almost clockwork working of the team as one single unit, so they are heralded as “revolutionary” or “spectacular” even though the fundamentals of their styles have existed for decades.
Focussing on individual feats of athleticism, heroism or bravado dissolves the concept of a team; it downplays the rigorous training by players, the hours spent at the drawing board by managers before each match and the work put in by the coaches and support staff. Hand in hand with this form of live coverage and photography is the fact that most top-flight clubs today do not have open training sessions. They are closed off to the public and, when on occasion they are opened, the public sometimes has to pay an entry fee.
Stadiums do not allow spectators to bring cameras to football matches. On the other hand, clubs playing non-league football or in the lower leagues freely allow the use of cameras. Photos of these matches are usually significantly different. Taken mostly from the stands, many of these photos are full shots of the pitch. There are fewer close-up shots and invariably there will be photos of the winning team celebrating with their fans after the match.
In modern top-flight football, there is a tangible distance between fans and players. These footballers have now been elevated into gods. The stadium has become a sacred space – tellingly, Chelsea want their new stadium to be a “cathedral” of football – where the supporter can witness the gods do battle, but not make any form of political statement. The sacred arena is not to be polluted with earthly, mortal things such as society and politics.
The art book publisher Taschen produced a book on football photography in the 1970s called Age of Innocence. It was an apt title as the 1970s were football’s last gasp before big-money corporate entities swallowed it up. The decade marked the final time footballers were were still, at some level, “our lads”. As Ed Vulliamy wrote in his review of the book: “There was an innocence, not least in the presumption by thousands of teenagers from Merseyside that one could saunter down to London and watch a Cup final by bunking in.”
The first World Cup to be broadcast on television was that of 1954. In the early days of the video camera, football matches were generally covered by two cameras. The intention was to document the event rather than uphold the spectacle. With the 1966 World Cup in England, everything changed. This was partly because the host country had one of the world’s best TV networks at the time. Moreover, the nature of the broadcasting contracts ensured a more direct involvement of TV companies in the tournament.
Whole tournaments could now be condensed into single images invoking the “prime spectacle” – Bobby Moore on the shoulders of his England team-mates holding the Jules Rimet trophy aloft (1966), Jairzinho lifting Pelé up as the latter looks directly at the camera with a clenched fist in the air (1970), Franz Beckenbauer grinning as he lifts the World Cup trophy (1974), Daniel Passarella being carried by a crowd(1978) and so on.
The close-up photo has also given sponsors a chance to show off their logos. As football became a fully fledged business opportunity in the era of the Premier League and Champions League, it was only a matter of time before players were given a compulsory yellow card for taking off their shirts. A removed shirt, of course, means the corporate giant that sponsors the team misses out on screen time when the camera closes in on the player.
Close-up shots are not inherently bad, but the way the action is covered is helping to create a mystical cult of genius around footballers, which in turn influences the economics and politics of the sport. If we want to reclaim football from corporations that alienate fans from the teams they support, it might be worth looking at the game in a different way.
– The Guardian 
The iconic image of the 1966 World Cup – captain Bobby Moore on the shoulders of the England team.
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