Aesthetics of The Beautiful Game.

This article was downloaded by: [RMIT University]
On: 15 February 2013, At: 16:27

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Soccer & Society

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsas20
Aesthetics of the beautiful game

a
Lev Kreft
a
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of
Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Version of record first published: 08 Jan 2013.
To cite this article: Lev Kreft (2013): Aesthetics of the beautiful game, Soccer & Society,
DOI:10.1080/14660970.2012.753538
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2012.753538
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-

conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Soccer & Society
2012, 1–23, iFirst Article
Aesthetics of the beautiful game

Lev Kreft*
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
How to examine arguments for calling football ‘a beautiful game?’ To begin

with, we need to re-examine what went wrong in the first place, when sport was
compared with art. Second, we need to re-examine David Best’s criticism of
these initial comparisons (aesthetics understood as philosophy of art, art
understood as kingdom of beauty and aesthetic pleasure understood as pure
Downloaded by [RMIT University] at 16:27 15 February 2013
contemplation). His criticism calls for another kind of aesthetics. Fortunately,

there already are some well-developed new models. Actually, the idea of philo-
sophical aesthetics embraced by some of the first philosophers of sport and criti-
cized by David Best was at the same time criticized in art and aesthetics.
Twentieth-century aesthetic criticisms of aesthetics and avant-garde criticisms of
art are the point of departure for contemporary aesthetics of sport. From the
point of view of sport’s aesthetics, the most promising are new systematic
approaches to aesthetics of everyday life.
Introduction
Today, ethical aspects of sport are the most discussed topic in philosophy of sport.
Aesthetic appeal of sport comes out from time to time, but not as eulogy of sport’s
general beauty any more. Now, it is more fashionable to insist on critical approach
to contemporary sport’s spectacularity as negation of its original aesthetic authentic-
ity, or, to deal with a partial topic of beautiful movement necessary for execution of
some sports. It seems that best days for general aesthetics of sport are over.
But those flourishing days grew from misleading ideas on aesthetics, on art and
on sport. These mistaken grounds for development of the aesthetics of sport were
successfully criticized by David Best.1 Differentiation between purposive and aes-
thetic sports was one of his contributions which probably influenced the trend to
discuss aesthetic characteristics of a particular sport, while general perspective of
sport aesthetics almost disappeared. While studies on particular beauty or aesthetic
appeal of some sports are quite important, even for the sake of such studies more
general idea on sport as aesthetical activity should be developed.
The aim of this approach is, therefore, to examine possible aesthetic arguments
for calling football ‘a beautiful game’ in a way which can offer some starting points
for more general aesthetics of sport as well. To begin with, we need to re-examine
what went wrong in the first place, when sport was compared with art or even
identified as art. Secondly, we need to re-examine Best’s arguments against these
initial comparisons and identifications to find out why his criticism, in spite of its
*Email: lev.kreft@guest.arnes.si
ISSN 1466-0970 print/ISSN 1743-9590 online

Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2012.753538
http://www.tandfonline.com
2 L. Kreft
competence, failed to offer new ground for sport’s aesthetics. Aesthetics understood
as philosophy of art, art understood as kingdom of beauty and aesthetic pleasure
understood as pure contemplation were some of the targets of his criticism. This
calls for another kind of aesthetics, different from the model taken by first
aestheticians of sport.
Fortunately, there already are some well-developed models, very different from
modernist aestheticism. Actually, the idea of philosophical aesthetics embraced by
some of the first philosophers of sport and criticized by David Best was, at the
same time and before, criticized and sometimes radically abandoned in art and in
aesthetics. Twentieth-century aesthetic criticisms of aesthetics, and artistic criticisms
of art are the point of departure for contemporary aesthetics of sport. One of the
most useful results of these anti-modernist and post-modernist movements in art
theory and practice are new systematic approaches to the aesthetics of everyday life.
These offer much better starting point for the aesthetics of sport as traditional mod-
ernism ever could.

Finally, to address ‘a beautiful game’, we have to accept contemporary collo-
quial sense of a declaration ‘This is beautiful’ without its Platonic or Kantian lofty
interpretations.
The beautiful game

To call football ‘a beautiful game’ is not used in a sense criticized by David Best,
because it certainly does not denote a kind of beauty ‘essentially or necessarily
contemplative’.2 The glory of first use is disputed between Brasilian mid-fielder,
Valdir Pereira – Didi, and presenter Stuart Hall. For football believers, label of
beauty comes indisputable, but what is this indisputable source of beauty in foot-
ball? It can have hardly been developed from its definition, where genus proximus
is ‘team sport with a ball’ and differentia specifica ‘kicking a ball with the foot’
(and head, and exceptionally hand), and the game’s purpose ‘to score a goal’.
According to etymology, original specific differences of football were peasants’
games played on foot, in opposition to aristocratic games where players were
mounted on a horse. This might explain why different games of football devel-
oped from more or less the same origins, which are played on feet, but not with
feet exclusively. Etymology is never a sure bet, but football’s plebeian origin is.
For something of that origin to become beautiful, there has to be a kind of social
metamorphosis involved, as in case of ballads which, when they flourished as part
of popular art, were not among the high art. If we examine rare explanations for
football’s beauty, and expanded the use of ‘beautiful’ together with appearances of
‘football’ on the web, we find out that as football’s characteristics, beauty is quite
a simple adjective of general glorification which means all and nothing specific at
the same time. Among relatively rare elaborations, however, two more general
appear repeatedly:
(1) Football is a beautiful game because it appeals to everybody, because

anybody can play it, because you need just a place and a ball, because rules
are so simple to learn, and because after short initiation anybody can
immediately enjoy watching it.
Soccer & Society 3
(2) Football is such a beautiful game because it is completely unpredictable:

anything can happen.
These two features are confirmed by more serious scientific approach as well.
Richard Giulianotti opens his book on sociology of football with a statement that
football certainly
has some essential features which contribute to this popularity. Probably the most
important is the relative simplicity of football’s laws, equipment and body technique.
Only a few key rules must be observed if football is to be meaningfully played and
watched … Undoubtly, the simple equipment requirements of football have been a
major attraction for the lowest social classes in most parts of the world. (Underlined
by L.K.)3
Other reasons mentioned mostly concern rare and special kinds of football excel-
lence, masterhood and virtuosity observed in some players or on some occasions

only.
State of the art

The aesthetics of sport is more or less divided into two parallel particles which do
not meet each other: the spectacular and the beautiful. The aesthetics of sport spec-
tacle is critical even when it is not inspired by the Critical Theory, and tells about
sensual attractiveness of sport in terms of alienation, manipulation and ideology –
opium for the masses, to use more traditional quasi-Marxist phraseology. This kind
of aesthetics was part of much wider trend which Martin Jay called ‘denigration of
vision’,4 which turned the noblest of the senses and a source of so many metaphors
of knowledge and truth (including theory which is visual metaphor in itself) into a
source of evil temptation. The aesthetics of sport’s beauty, on the other side, is eul-
ogy of sport which, if not directly calling sport an art, treats sport as if it should be
recognized for another as important part of high-brow culture as art already was5.
One of them, more or less outside academic philosophy of sport circles, was deni-
grating contemporary sport as mass entertainment aimed at pacification of social
and class struggles and as abuse of its aesthetic attractiveness; another, involved
with affirmation of new philosophical discipline developed aesthetics of sport as
laudation gathering arguments for comparison or even equation between sport and
art – but art understood as a realm of pure beauty and pure contemplation. Philoso-
phers of sport inherited modernist idea of art as an end in itself, and shaped their
ideas on sport aesthetic appeal accordingly. But there were others who claimed that
sport is art from positions which accept mass entertainment without denigration of
its pleasure, and at the same time argued that, aesthetically, art cannot achieve what
it used to any more, while at the same time sport became aesthetic pleasure. This,
for instance, is evident in Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Welsch.6 Barthes under-
stands art as en event and artist as an artwork, and finds that sport can still offer a
tragedy while in art, it is over and dead. His is next step away from modernism in
art after Bertolt Brecht, who, during the 1920s, demanded more good sport in the-
atre, because theatre has lost its touch and needs some push from not so fine art.7
For Welsch, who is our contemporary, art and sport develop in two opposite direc-
tions: art is losing its aesthetic profile and is introducing as more and more moraliz-
ing; sport, on the other side, is getting away from its ethical ideals and is
4 L. Kreft
developing into pure aesthetic activity.8 David Best rejected ‘sport is art’ and simi-
lar views, and divided all sports into purposive and aesthetic sports,9 to proceed by
comparing the aesthetic from aesthetic sports with purposive sports: ‘So to consider
the purposive sports from the aesthetic point of view is to reduce the gap between
means and end’.10 This gap is reduced when athletes win ‘with the greatest econ-
omy and efficiency of effort’.11 To conclude that the aesthetic way to do sports is a
kind of economy and efficiency is a repetition of what was discusssed about style,
beauty and grace among evolutionary philosophers of the nineteenth century.12 It
seems that against the aesthetic used by previous philosophers of sport whose con-
cept of the aesthetic was taken from aestheticism and religion of art, David Best
took position of positivism, utilitarianism and evolutionary aesthetics, a position
which is just the opposite side of the same nineteenth-century conflict upon the aes-
thetic. Here are his four headings against the belief that sport is, or is similar to art:
(1a) The logical distinction between purposive and aesthetic sports, which is
commonly and confusedly formulated in terms of
(1b) A supposed distinction between the aesthetic and the competitive.
(2) The common misconception of the aesthetic as essentially of necessary contemplative.
(3) The suggestion that sport could be art as in the object trouvé sense.
(4) The important but largely overlooked distinction between the aesthetic and the
artistic’.13
These and many other good and acceptable reasons prove that we have to avoid
equation between sport and art as proposed by some authors, but a question
remains: are the aesthetic sports without concrete purpose, or, is a purpose in sport
something objective and mathematically measurable, or is a purpose in sport some-
thing aesthetically enjoyable and attractive in itself ? And are purposive sports with-
out aesthetic appeal for those who are involved with them, so that, for instance,
figure skater would enjoy her sport aesthetically while basketball player could not
find any other pleasure in his sport but final result? Comparisons and equations
between sport and art aimed at two instances. One, there was an instance of respect-
ability which Best found strange, asking himself ‘why it should be that sport would
somehow be endowed with greater respectability if it would be shown to be an
art’.14 Two, there was the idea that sport is not just any other part of culture, as art
also is, but that it represents another kind of pleasure principle in our cultures, that
of unrestrained bodily enjoyment and aesthetic attraction. Of course, those who
claimed that sport is art were mistaken, and Best’s remark that they overlooked dis-
tinction between the aesthetic and the artistic is absolutely correct. But, if we do
not overlook this distinction, could we claim that only Best’s aesthetic sports are
the source of the aesthetic, because with them beautiful movement becomes purpose
of sport, or, should we reconsider some aesthetic concepts used here from the point
of view of non-artistic aesthetics, if there is any?
As the aesthetic pleasure is undoubtedly part of any sport’s execution, and even
more so with all sport spectatorship, we must start from conclusion that the difference
proposed by Best between purposive and aesthetic sports is not a difference between
Soccer & Society 5
‘objective’ sports where victory is decided by some kind of calculation, and ‘subjec-
tive’ sports where beauty of movement is judged by taste which is well known for its
inconsistency and versatility. I propose that we understand this difference differently:
as a differentiation done within a field where the aesthetic arises in all cases of sport
but occupies a position of hegemonic function in some of them only. This kind of
understanding corresponds to more broadly used idea that the aesthetic can undis-
criminately appear anywhere, in all of human practices and domains of human life,
but has a hegemonic position in art where we expect that its ‘purpose’ is completely
concentrated around its aesthetic appeal. These are two different aesthetics, but not
necessarily two different aesthetic. When the aesthetic becomes a fundamental consti-
tutive pillar of semiotic structures, we can speak about ‘pure’ aesthetic of modern
Western European art which supported art for art’s sake. This is Institution Kunst as
represented in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde,15 and l’ésthetique pure
(pure aesthetics) from Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art,16 where he explains its
genesis in nineteenth century France. This is a kind of the aesthetic which reduced
the notion of ‘literature’ from all written and printed texts to writings of fine high-
brow art, excluding all popular fiction for mass consumption as well as, for instance,
books on cooking or gardening.17 Best’s final distinction, the one between the aes-
thetic and the artistic, is a negation of distinction between the aesthetic and the
contemplative, because it denies contemplation as equation between the aesthetic and
the artistic, and gives more space to the aesthetic beyond art, and, at the same time,
offers more complex idea of the artistic which is here not just for the sake of pure
aesthetic effect. Consequently, the aesthetic might appear anywhere, including every-
day life where it may spring out just by chance, and sport where it may turn our
attention away from its final purpose, or figure as its indispensable component.
The aesthetic function

These different circumstances of the aesthetic were studied for the first time by
structural linguistics and aesthetics of the Prague Linguistic Circle, mostly by one
of its leading figures Jan Mukařovský, and spread around the linguistic world by
organizer and leader of the Circle Roman Jacobson. In terms of linguistics, it is a
bit outdated today, but some of their general approaches are very useful for the
aesthetics of sport. Here are the main four:
(1) The aesthetic function appears in any language and in all kinds of our senso-
rial contact with the world. There are other functions, more or less practical,
i.e. oriented towards the world and its objects, which support practical orien-
tation in our activities, or, to formulate it more generally, support our hold
on the world. From the point of view of these other functions, sensual and
language relations are means to a practical end, or, as we call it, autotelic, an
experience which could be misguiding if it is taken out of its more meta-
physical lofty use. In everyday life, embedded within practical needs, it turns
attention from ‘what’ (purpose’ to be achieved, to ‘how’ it is achieved, or,
more generally, from life which functions into life aware of being alive. With
aesthetic function, language and sensorial material itself turn from means to
an end in itself. The aesthetic function turns attention from purely practical
orientation towards the world and from our hold on the world to narrative of
the world, its things themselves, to ourselves in it; and to the way, how the
6 L. Kreft
world is represented in our senses and our language, including pleasure and
pain these sensations and perception would offer. Aesthetic function makes
us aware of being-in-the-language, and of being-in-the world as sensual
beings, because it turns attention from informational content of language or
senses to the way how language or of senses do their job: a non-conceptual
reflection of our communication and interaction with the world.
(2) The aesthetic function can appear anywhere and at any time. In modern art,
as a concept fully developed from the eighteenth century onwards, it had a
hegemonic position which created false impression that it has no function in
other domains. But it gets its moment with other functions as well, as in the
case of science where its aesthetic appeal comes to surface when a complex-
ity of events is explained successfully in a manner which, being perfect and
simple, cannot but sustain an element of beauty. Further, it can function as
supporting element for other functions, appearing as a decorum or a festive
framework designing a context, as in football, which we can hardly imagine

nowadays without athletes’ and fans’ aesthetic outfit, Mexican waves, or the
ballet of slow-motion repetition and examination of skillful, even beautiful
movement. As Immanuel Kant proved, the aesthetic function is not ‘objec-
tive’, because it does not point to any genuine property of the objects. But it
points, according to Kant again, from our ability to articulate judgements of
aesthetic pleasure and pain to our teleological ability supporting hope that
humanity is capable to change and develop its natural world into supernatu-
ral world of perfection. According to Mukařovský, the aesthetic function is
autonomous and subjective, but subjectivity as such is not what bothered tra-
ditional discussion on taste the most. What represented a problem was that
they treated judgement of taste as something completely belonging to iso-
lated individual subjectivity. Quite the contrary, the aesthetic function always
appears in social and historical context. Being at the same time autonomous
(i.e. not oriented towards our practical hold on the world), reflexive and
socio-historically contextual, it calls for specific examination. To examine the
position of aesthetic function among other functions means to examine aes-
thetic function outside of art (meaning art in modernist terms that of hege-
mony of the aesthetic function). From such a view, we can get at another,
more general insight into art itself, beyond its modernist definition with its
domination of disinterest.
To illustrate his point, Mukařovský gave an example of Czech popular child poem.
Lets read it, or, if you can, hear it!
Voře, voře Jan.
Přiletek nemu devet vran:
První praví: Dobře voře;
Drugá praví: Nedobře voře;
Třetí praví: Dobře voře;

Soccer & Society 7
Čtvrtá praví: Nedobře voře;
Pátá praví: Dobře voře;
Šestá praví: Nedobře voře;
Sedmá praví: Dobře voře;
Vosmá praví: Nedobře voře;
Devátá praví: Dobře voře Jan.
Which would, in just occasional translation, sound like this:

Ian ploughs and ploughs.
To him fly nine crows:
The first says: good ploughing;
The second says: bad ploughing;
The third says: good ploughing;
The fourth says: bad ploughing;
The fifth says: good ploughinf;
The six says: bad ploughing;
The seeventh says: good ploughing;
The eighth says: bad ploughing;
The ninth says: good ploughing, Jan.18
Used to listen to poetry for the very sake of it, and hardly finding any purpose in
such a playful poem, we tend to discover pure aesthetic function and free play of
words, and, knowing that it should be from popular child poetry, maybe we identify
it as a counting rhyme, which already is a social use of its pure aesthetic function.
What it really represents, however, is a breathing contest: the one who can, without
second breath, get to the last crow, is a winner. Breathing exercise and competition
is its original purpose, but a purpose done with aesthetic bravado, where aesthetic
and purposeful moment turn into one. In a poetry book, its original function is lost
and it becomes just another purely aesthetic exercise. We could, of course, say
something similar about popular ballad and its original position in a social context
of dance. Pure poem, devoid of any other function, but to get printed in a book and
read alone with the help of deep contemplation is historically quite late phenome-
non, and socially restricted to certain high-brow circles only. If you are involved
8 L. Kreft
with avant-garde movements, and many of Czech artists of Mukařovský’s time and
his social circle were, you put all the effort to get rid of pure poetry, and get poetry
back to life where it represents poetic moment of its everyday flow and rhythm,
offering some sensual pleasure, because there is no aesthetic attraction without
involvement of all senses.
(3) Examined from the point of view of practical functions of sensuality and language,
the aesthetic function was put in position of something unnecessary and not really
serious, but which can make our hard living a bit more pleasant – if we can afford
such luxury. For Mukařovský and Prague Lingustic Cricle, aesthetic function is
essential, even if not hegemonic, for much more that just art-for-art's-sake. When
the aesthetic was (falsly) seen as strictly separated from all practical functions of
all other human activities and skills, the aesthetic function, so pure that philoso-
phers put it in metaphysical space as something lofty just because it has no
function at all, it was installed as pure dominant force of fine arts, while it started
to be treated as pure decorum of secondary importance in non-artistic everyday life
practice. But the aesthetic has a practical function, because pleasure and pain are
used purposefully or non-purposefully in many tactics and strategies of everday
life, and in human orientation in the world, especially in social world built by
ourselves.
(4) Consequently (especially according to 2.), we cannot study relationship between

the aesthetic and other, practical functions, in art. In art, this relationship is dis-
torted and the aesthetic is divinized into pure contemplation (as in modernist
art), or into grandiose redemptive or revolutionary force (as in avant-garde art).
At this point, through examination of the aesthetic function in everyday life, the
aesthetic of sport (and of football) can enter the picture. Even more so in our
own times, when art ceased to be religion of beauty and contemplation and
when everyday life became theater of aesthetization, including production,
distribution or consummation of commodities, and aesthetic commodification of
politics, media, and sport itself. If compared with the end of the 19th Century
(still an epoch of modernist art and aesthetics), and even compared with the first
half of the 20th Century (an epoch of avant-garde art and Prague Linguistic
Circle itself), contemporary art is much less obsessed with beauty and aesthetics;
on the other side, however, our whole social and cultural being goes on in an
extremely aestheticized environment, including our own bodies and persons. The
unstoppable triumph of football might represent, at least partly, one of the
consequences and also supporting features of such double aesthetization/
anaesthetization.
Aesthetics of everyday life

Batteux’s reduction of art to production of practically useless and non-utilitarian
artefacts of fine art excluded all ‘utilitarian’ kinds of aesthetic fulfilment and enjoy-
ment from the concept. Kant elaborated the idea of pure aesthetic judgement to
avoid any purpose, interest or end from it. Hegel’s (and Schelling’s) reduction of
aesthetics to philosophy of art excluded ‘natural beauty’ as the last resort of every-
day aesthetics from philosophy. What remained is fine art and pure aesthetics.19 To
introduce aesthetics of everyday life again, these fences of purity had to be decon-
structed, and that was not an easy job, and is seems that there is another possibility:
just to leave aesthetics behind and start anew without its deconstruction and transi-
tion from ‘pure’ to ‘everyday’. To make a choice, we have to consider possibility
that aesthetics of everyday life, without critical reshaping and restructuring of tradi-
Soccer & Society 9
tional aesthetics, could fall in the same contradictions and repeat the same mistakes.
Here, I agree with Katya Mandoki’s central thesis in Everyday Aesthetics ‘that it is
not only possible but indespensable to open up aesthetics towards the wealth and
complexity of everyday life in its different manifestations’.20 The whole first part
‘Labyrinths of Aesthetics’,21 is then discussing problems, fetishes, myths and fears
of aesthetics. Instead of going into details of her criticism, I propose to start from a
question concerning sensus communis: can we a priori count on sensus communis
to agree with judgement of taste ‘This is beautiful’ only when this judgement is
‘pure’, i.e. when this judgement is pronounced devoid of any interest or purpose or
end? And, is a judgement in the same form ‘Football is a beautiful game’ pure and
disinterested judgement, confirming autotelic character of sport, or not? These two
questions themselves call for deconstruction of Kantian ‘purity’ if understood as an
argument for unavoidable contemplativeness as prerequisite for aesthetic judgement.
It is true that we have to notice a difference between judgement of taste which
appreciates our subjective relationship with an object for the sake of this object
present as such, without any interest involved with its material existence, and a sim-
ple judgement of interest which is expressing usefulness of an object as a means
for something else we really appreciate, desire, or want to possess. In saying ‘Foot-
ball is the beautiful game’, we do not intend to possess football, or to use it as
means for something else than football; we just judge that it is beautiful to play,
and/or to watch. But such attitude, while recognizing autotelic value of football
because it engages epithet beautiful, does not mean that football calls for contem-
plation. To illustrate the difference between autotelic aesthetic value of an object,
and contemplative aesthetic value of the same object, we can think of a difference
between Italian opera, and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk – universal work of art. In
Italian opera of the nineteenth century, people went to listen to the music, of course,
and that with passion unheard about elsewhere, but it was a social occasion at the
same time as well, to see others and to be seen by them, to discuss actualities and
gossip, to make business and to find love and also to express nationalist feelings of
Risorgimento, perhaps by shouting ‘Viva Verdi!’ as a code for ‘Viva Vittorio
Emanuelle Re D’Italia!’. There was a concentration for arias and other outstanding
parts, but who would concentrate on all and everything? Stendhal, a connosieur of
Italian opera if there ever was one, wrote that only in France, people think that you
have to hear all the music, as if listening was some kind of exercise and duty.22
This free atmosphere of enjoyment, entertainment and social festival was confronted
by Richard Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk, a non-opera, to create, with force of
theatrical illusion developed to perfection, a collective unity from modern individu-
alized persons. His theatre in Bayreuth is an example of the idea: there are no
boxes or any other separate places for the public, people have to sit in rows within
a space which is organized perspectivally and anthropometrically in a way which
disables looking around or anywhere else but all the time on the stage, because any
other move is optically and physically unpleasant; on the other side, orchestra is
hidden in a hole under the stage so that people would not watch them but only
stage illusion; to support perfect sound of its music, architectural shell makes
orchestra’s place unbearably hot, up to 40 °C. The idea to perform a few hours
piece without a break was never really imposed upon spectators, but it was
expressed in Wagner’s plans. These are not just two kinds of theatres: they are two
opposed ideas of political and social space and its rules. What kind of theatre is
football? The formulation of question sounds wrong, because football is a kind of
10 L. Kreft
theatre only if we use ‘theatre’ as a metaphor, as in ‘theatre of war’ and similar

extensions. What theatre and football both belong to, at least by origin, is ritual,
while spectacle is a form which influences and at least partly embraces their con-
temporary appearance. From the point of view of aesthetics and the aesthetic func-
tion, however, they both belong to dramatical (re)presentations of human condition.
The way from ritual to ‘capitalist game’23 brought many changes, but what
remained intact is a ball which, in principle, cannot be touched by hands. Ball rep-
resents a sphere, geometrically perfect object capable of movement, and game is a
struggle to push or otherwise move it into its proper place, symbolizing cyclical
reconciliation between humans and gods, and re-establishment of universal har-
mony. Ancient societies thought that humans have divine duty to take care of the
cosmic harmony to re-establish itself in cyclical turns, after disorder and conflict.
For Arlei Sander Damo, here lies aesthetically significant difference between foot-
ball as ancient and as modern ritual: modern game of football is a ritual of separa-
tion, divide and disunity between victorious and defeated team. This is what he
calls ‘ritual disjuntivo’:24 ancient games represented sacrifice to re-establish lost
harmony between gods and humans, and in universe as such; modern games are
secularized rituals which have an end in themselves – to establish division between
winners and losers. This change produces different aesthetics, concentrated on play
and counter-play as human and social, not divine and cosmic movements, and has
an unpredictable end. In ancient versions, the end was known in advance (re-estab-
lished harmony), while in modern game, as a result, it is known only in retrospec-
tive. This does not mean that in ancient game, there were no winners and losers –
we know that in some versions and in some epochs, defeated team was even
sacrificed to gods, but this was just a part of obligatory reconciliation as prescribed
end of the game. Unpredictable finality of closure produces open, life-like drama-
turgy which is a source of aesthetic attractiveness and active involvement of both
players and beholders. This openness means that the universe is unpredictably open
to our action and its results, and our position in this universe (Richard Avenarius
would call it ‘the natural concept of the world’25, and Husserl changed it to
‘Lebenswelt’26 – lifeworld), in contrast with predictable world of physical causality)
is the essential spectacle of football. Repetitive character of ancient game which
enabled cyclical reconciliation between human and divine on expense of human
sacrifice, real or symbolic, disappeared, to open space for finality of one game’s
result, and to open time dimension for unending repetitiveness of game after game,
each unique in its unpredictability. Immersing itself in lifeworld of a game means
taking a risk on the other, more basic side of predictable divine world, or predict-
able world of physical or social causality. Here, aesthetics means that we (those
who play and those who watch) are in the world which belongs to us as we belong
in it, a situation which calls for decisions about the way to proceed without certain
principles which would enable us to control or predict the outcome, because the
movement is contingent and stretched between decisions of players divided into
two opposite teams, movement of the ball touched by foot, and implementation of
the rules. Aesthetic feeling starts here from this unpredictable movement of the
game, and not from appreciation of beautiful bodies, their gestures or collective
dance. It is the primordial human aesthetics: the dramaturgy of unpredictability of
the lifeworld, transformed into a game which demands from all participants, specta-
torship included, an involvement without which it is not possible to follow unwind-
ing of a game, be it as active player involved with his or her own movement
Soccer & Society 11
woven into and with movements of the other 21 actors and a ball, or as spectator
who cannot just ‘understand’ the unwinding movement(s) without involvement,
meaning that he or she embodies herself or himself into the situation which pro-
duces meaning and sense as it develops: just understanding it is not enough. That is
the meaning of deep play, Bentham’s metaphor27 and Geertz’s concept.28 Arlei San-
der Damo translates deep play into um jogo absorvente, and uses this metaphorical
concept for Brasilian football culture. ‘Being absorbed’ in and by football game, in
comparison with Bentham’s original observation that there are occasions when
human beings, in spite of rationalist and utilitarian philosophical premises about
their behaviour, act extremely irrational by putting at stake everything they have
and what they are for something which, from the rational standpoint, is worth noth-
ing. To put fascination with football that high, while it is possible in some extreme
cases, is an exaggeration (perhaps not for Brasil?), but it points into right direction
and is, therefore, useful for explanatory reasons. For football, or some other sport
games, it is not enough, as for theatre, only to pretend that what is going on is
‘real’, or, as David Osipovich much better defines theatrical situation that in this
interaction between performers and observers ‘performers pretend that the interac-
tion is something other than what it actually is and that the observers are aware of
this pretense’.29 For a situation of a competitive sport game such as football, we
have to pretend that what the interaction actually is, is the most important, all-
embracing and serious lifeworld we inhabit for the time being, and deep play atti-
tude is a moment of our behaviour which introduces, makes and proves that that is
a fact. That is the aesthetic: it turns attention from mere rational and useful func-
tional existence to being alive, which can be a pleasure or a pain.
Now, we can turn again to initial and seemingly superficial popular explanation
why should football be considered a beautiful game: because it can easily reach
anybody, and because it is unpredictable. It is worth to approach it from another
point of view – that of Walter Benjamin. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’,30 speaking of new epoch of prevailing sensitivity of the
masses, he introduces his well-known idea about the ‘death of aura’ of artworks,
comparing it with natural objects, and then gives two main characteristics of mass
sensitivity/mass aesthetics: to enjoy without a distance, and to repeat the same plea-
sure again and again. Football is mass pleasure of typically plebeian origin, and in
all uniqueness of particular game much more repetitive than any theatrical play. At
the same time, it is easily accessible, and was easily accessible before means of
mass entertainment and global flow of images and texts, because it can be played
anywhere, even in a classroom during short break, or at home, perhaps in both
cases with an Indian rubber instead of ball, and it can be enjoyed within or without
association adapting association football rules to means and people you have at dis-
posal, or inventing new rules by yourself. Football does not belong to those rare
and fine pleasures accessible to the happy few only, which have to be touched pre-
cisely and according to fine rules you do know nothing about, but know that they
are here exactly with intention to leave those nobodies who do not belong embar-
rassed. Football is open to any belonging, or, as Katya Mandoki might say, with
football, it is so easy ‘to latch on’, and so attractive ‘to be latched by’ it …31
Everyday, aesthetics is not ‘another aesthetics’, or ‘lower aesthetics’ if compared
with aesthetics developed as philosophy of fine art. It is new approach to the aes-
thetic as one of most important dimensions of life. The differentiation between
philosophical approaches, for instance, between phenomenological, Lacanian, evolu-
12 L. Kreft
tionary or Marxist approach to everyday and to fundamental human conditions will

not disappear in this shift from art to everyday aesthetics, but the place of sport
aesthetics gets different approach and perspective if it is part of everyday aesthetics,
and not just another field compared with artistics/philosophy of art. First move in
the direction of everyday aesthetics happened when aesthetics as philosophy of
‘pure’ or fine art was criticized for the first time, in work of Jean-Marie Guyau, and
in Max Dessoir’s programme for general science of art which should replace aes-
thetics. Guyau opened way to think about aesthetic phenomena outside art, and in
everyday life; May Dessoir founded a substitute for aesthetics which included non-
European artistic cultures (most of them ignorant about western idea of ‘pure’ aes-
thetics and of reduction of everyday aesthetic pleasures from fine art) as well as
non-artistic appearances of the aesthetic. Some thoughts on aesthetic of everyday
life were included in broader studies of everyday life or practice of everyday, as
those by Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Agnes Heller32. During the last
few decades, new studies appeared which focus on aesthetic of everyday life, for
instance, these by Ellen Dissanayake, Ossi Naukkarinen, Crispin Sartwell, Yuriko
Saito and a group of authors included in Andrew Light’s and Jonathan M. Smith’s
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.33 In her systematic approach to the study of every-
day aesthetics up to now, Katya Mandoki discusses matrixes as the places where
‘identities are bred, sustained, and cultivated. A matrix is to the collective subject
what a body is to the individual subject, namely, its indispensable material and mor-
phological codition’.34 She treats some matrixes (or types of matrixes) in detail
(family, religion, school, medical matrix, occultist matrix and arts). Sport matrix is
discussed shortly, just to delineate it from arts, and to name its central symbol. The
need to distinguish sport from arts comes from Wolfgang Welsch who, in compar-
ing their contemporary praxis, concluded that art changed from being something
aesthetical into an ethical activity, while sport which started as ethical activity
turned into one of the most visible contemporary aesthetic phenomena. Katya
Mandoki agrees that sport has many features in common with arts, such as agon-
ism, especially in comparison with dramatic arts, or technical excellency and skill
needed for execution of both. Still, ‘what distinguishes the sport matrix from the
artistic has greater weight than what both share: their semantic and syntactic den-
sity’.35 On average, we can agree with that, of course, because arts produce much
more complex web of meaning in much more complicated way that sports, usually
can. Sport is more oriented towards a result, which means winning and losing, than
to sophisticated histories. Dramatic aspect, stronger than those of the arts, lies in
unpredictability, because sport competition or sport game has to happen for real to
be discussed and concluded in an open way, without previously defined proceedings
and ending. That is why Katya Mandoki proposes tryumph as defining symbolic
frame for sport: winning or losing is important more than the way which leads to
decision and conclusion. But this proves also that Mandoki thinks about sport in
terms of spectacular professional sport only, and sees it only through eyes of its
public. What a person bodily involved with some sport experiences, especially in
sport games like football where, beside purely bodily movements requested for
game’s execution, one has to develop a special social skill of playing together and
playing against the unpredictable individual and collective Other, however, is
another and very complex story. Everyday aesthetics of sport is still a project to be
developed, including some starting points which would go beyond simple under-
standing of sport as very skillful body activity without much sense by its own,
Soccer & Society 13
which is (especially from traditional Marxist and Critical Theory point of view) so
much used and abused by politics, nation-state, business and capital, etc. All these
critical apporaches, while they have something important to tell about contemporary
situation of professional high-level sport which gets all the attention of global media
and global public, miss the point when it should be explained why sport is aestheti-
cally so attractive, as much as they miss another point, namely, why people accept
all kinds of ideology, manipulation and alienation in sport with such enthusiasm,
while they detest what Kellner calls infotainment by not believing in informations
they get from media any more, and detest politics as entertainment even more. Any
comparison can show, for example, that audience of basketball game, even in USA
where public is believed to be more of a ‘concert’ kind, is much more active and
involved than public of an opera, for instance. Also, if we compare beholder of a
canvass with spectator of athletic competition, we have a right to say that semantic
and syntactic density is on the side of canvass’ beholder, while watching a 100 m or
steeplechase is much more simple in terms of meaning and complexity. But what
results could we get if we compare professional actor doing his or her job in a the-
atre, the same role and the same text day by day, knowing all dramatic events by
heart and expecting to get home as soon as possible, with football player entering the
field together with his or her 10 companions, and with 11 opponents, accompanied
by judges, photo-journalists, coaches and their supporting technical teams, in front of
tens of thousands spectators at the stadium, some of them strictly supporting one
team or another, and feeling touch of even bigger audience on the other side of TV
cameras, and knowing that what will happen in next less than two hours is something
unique and unrepeatable, including final decision on who will leave the event as win-
ner and who as loser? It is not just fun and entertainment involved here, but a mean-
ingful tension, pleasant and painful, and this tension is changing with every moment
of the game because you or your team’s position and chances are moving up and
down all the time, together with moving of ball and everybody else. Each particular
situation has a meaning and complexity you are expected to grasp, and not just to
understand, because what you have to do is answer with your body movement, not
with verbal analysis or rhetoric bravado. This is a situation of extreme semantic and
perhaps even syntactic density on the basic aesthetic level, that of moving individual
and collective bodies according not just to rules but in the first instance by the
unforeseeable and quite often unexpected movement of the ball and the others, which
calls for an instant and always risky answer in terms of starting new body movement
without knowing for sure what can happen and what would the answer of the others
be, because there is no text. Not even the best coaches, however, knowing and expe-
rienced, cannot prepare you and the whole team as directors can. The aesthetic
dimension of sport cannot be expressed in its orientation to triumph only, because
even originally, in ancient Greek language, agon is not a competition just to win over
your opponent, with victory as the only thing that matters. It is a competition to win
respect and to show respect for other competitors, for your group or community
which watches you. Each sport event is at the same time more than just a triumph of
the victorious side: it is live and life event with a pending a triumph of sport itself as
a way to live life in a meaningful way, testing and risking what (as in deep play)
most of those involved in sports would never test or risk in a ‘real’ life – better to
say, in other matrixes. Everyday aesthetics of sport cannot be reduced to beautiful
movements, or to admiration of beautiful and healthy bodies (or narcissistic
admiration of your own body, for instance) and their movements: there is much more
14 L. Kreft
movement, including movement of sensual and body meaning involved with sport
games and competitions.
Conclusions
To say that ‘Football is the beautiful game’ sounds like aesthetic judgement in
Kant’s analysis. There is one difference, if we accept that calling football the beauti-
ful game came from Brasil: it was said by a football player and not by beholder.
Even if we think that professional commentator from England was the first one to
use the expression, it still did not come from the position of the usual aesthetic
judge – it comes from active involvement, not from ‘disinterested’ position. It is
not a judgement of this or that game, it is a judgement of whole series and set of
objects, similar to ‘Art is beautiful’. And most important, ‘beautiful’ in this judge-
ment does not denote a kind of harmony, balance of constituting parts in a whole,
or, as in the idea of a perfect artistic master-piece, that nothing can be taken from
or added to the object because it is already perfect. ‘Beautiful’ here means that
being-in-the-football, engaged as a player or otherwise, is beautiful and worth doing
and watching. This is not fine-art’s idea of the beautiful. Instead of any lofty defini-
tion of the beautiful, this is plebeian everyday use where ‘beautiful’ is not part of
contemplative approach to beauty as some sanctity but an approach which belongs
to vita activa. Football is the beautiful game because it means life of beautiful
action ‘in live’, the reverse and the opposite of contemplative life, and it suggests
that the whole experience of being part of it, or taking part in it, is beautiful. This,
of course, is far away from ‘pure’ and contemplative attitude. It is impure and
involved.
Engagement and active life, even as spectator taking part in the event – these
characteristics show the direction to everyday aesthetics. When aesthetics appeared
as separate discipline, it was described by Baumgarten as ‘lower gnoseology’, so
that logic, as gnoseology of conceptual knowledge, would remain untouched and
unchallenged as higher discipline. Is everyday aesthetics, in comparison with tradi-
tional aesthetics – philosophy of fine art, in the same position, being ‘lower aesthet-
ics?’ Such approach would guide us to accept that aesthetic experience of everyday
life is something impure, not raffinate but possibly raffish. Aesthetics of everyday
life is lower in a different sense, as that which comes first, and has to continue to
exist, because it is fundamental aesthetics of life. Here, life has to be understood as
being in lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Lifeworld is a place where Arendt’s vita activa
belongs, where three movements of our life according to Patočka36 shape our exis-
tence, and where Merleau-Ponty situational perception of risk, indetermination and
challenge to act appears. Hannah Arendt recognizes three fundamental human activ-
ities: labour (corresponding to the biological process of the human body), work
(corresponding to the unnaturalness of human existence) and action as ‘the only
activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or
matter’, and ‘corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men,
not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.37 Patocka’s three movements of
life are acceptance (movement of anchoring ourselves in the world), defence (move-
ment of work, struggle, dependency and need) and truth, which belong respectively
to vegetative, animative and rational life. The relationship between these
movements is not hierarchical, and they are not separated one from the other,
because we are all of these movements and we need all three of them for our being
Soccer & Society 15
in the world. Here, movement is essential, and we are always in movement, which
means that we are always in a contingent situation where nothing is defined,
assured or closed. It is an open world of possibilities, uncertain decisions,
ambiguous struggle and chosen, but risky ends. Here is where aesthetics of every-
day life belongs, starting from joy of being alive and feeling alive which is part of
our action and movement, and not of our detachment from them, watching from a
stable distance. Aesthetics of acting and moving is aesthetics of our lives, immersed
in the world together with all the others, acting with or against the others, and pro-
ceeding with our movements without a really solid ground for certain anticipation
of that which comes next.
The division of sports in purposive and aesthetic sports is not the division from
the aesthetic point of view, its criteria are criteria of measuring results, and not of a
way we aesthetically experience, play or watch sport. At its best, it represents an
idea of sport viewed from traditional artistics, useful for denying the claim that
sport is (similar to) art, but unhelpful if one expects that aesthetics of sport could
be developed from this point on. Criteria for measurement of results tend to become
more and more exact and objective, which put a number of sports which could be
called ‘aesthetic’ decades ago now into purposive category (gymnastics, ski-jump-
ing, ice-skating, etc.), because strict rules apply for ‘artistic impression’, or ‘style’.
In this pair of opposites, aesthetic sport is that which has a kind of art-like beauty
movement of the body, and this movement counts as one of the starting point for
measurement of success and final result. Just everything people feel, perceive or
sense is not aesthetic, but pleasure and pain involved with being-in-the-world
situation are. Reduction of the aesthetic to the beautiful excludes some aesthetically
very strong situations, for instance, those of ugly, or that of lost battle, so perfectly
represented by Shakespeare in his history chronicles. To get at the aesthetic in sport,
we have to consult athletes and their experiences of the aesthetic as well as specta-
tors and their experiences, but in doing that we have to take in account that sports,
with exception of Best’s ‘aesthetic sports’, are not concentrated upon artistic ideal
of harmonious beauty, so often imposed on sport through ideology of ancient
Greece, but upon competition as the dramatic process with uncertain end(s). Our
sports are ‘disjunctive rituals’, rituals of differentiation between winners and losers,
and not rituals of re-established harmony of the universe. Therefore, their aesthetic
aspect lies in ‘drama-in-progress’ movement, its unpredictability and its tensions,
and in actions and decisions our bodies made in spur of the moment.
When we say that sport is part of lifeworld, and so is his aesthetic, we have to
explain what we have in mind. First, it means that sport, however, measured and
rationalized through its scientific treatment, mostly kinesiological, remains part of
the lived world, and not that of scientific processes. Or, to put it more traditionally,
sport as much as art cannot become part of Democritian or Cartesian certainty
where pure and recognized causality is the only rule. Whatever effort we put to
gain control over results, and over sometimes so thin line between success and
failure, we still find out that achievements we long for have to be reached in the
world of Epicurean or Gassendi’s uncertainty, where all the fun of life comes out
just because it is unpredictable and beyond total control – especially where you
enter the world of the others, and where you become the other for the others, in the
world of human condition and human movements.
Also, when we say that sport goes on in real life, we have in mind quite unique
status. Sport is not art, but they shared their respective positions inside ritual at the
16 L. Kreft
beginning, and belonged under the same notion of technique – techné, meaning
human skill executed according to certain rules which can be taught. Here, the con-
nection between sport and art stops: sport is neither mimesis nor representation. It
is part of the lifeworld, but separated from ‘real’ life, where ‘real’ means life of
labour and work. So, it is lifeworld of action, but this kind of action is on the other
side of biological necessity and it does not leave a product – artefact. Sport action
is not for real, and it is not a pretence like in theatre where all present there, actors
and public, ‘are aware of the pretense’ that ‘the interaction is something other than
what it actually is’.38 Quite the contrary, here, in sport, action and interaction are
what they actually are, but there is another kind of pretence: has a purpose in itself.
Ritual resources of sport were not autotelic; their purpose was to reconciliate gods
with humans, and re-establish cosmic harmony presumably endangered by human
action. The shift of the purpose of sport from ritual to secular, from struggling with
gods to peaceful coexistence between gods and humans, to human triumph, as
Katya Mandoki calls the end of modern sport, is a turn from purposeful to autotelic
activity. This autotelic activity is in relationship with all the other ingredients of
lifeworld, but it is not part of ‘real’ life understood as life of labour and work, but
it is related to life of labour and work as a simulation. Sometimes sport is explained
as a war-like struggle without weapons, but it is much more than compensation or
substitution, and for more than just for war: it is a simulation of lifeworld action
containing all three movements of human life: acceptance, defence and truth. There
are different levels and kinds of simulation, as there are different sports with differ-
ent characters, but all sports have some of the aesthetic attraction which, as Edmund
Burke believed, beats imitation because it is a real thing.39 Movement of life is a
story of life, because without movement there is no narration, but there is no his-
tory as life itself. Ability to simulate existing and possible worlds seems one of
those specific abilities which supported evolutionary success of the human species,
and is still necessary for development of higher skills, as in children’s games which
were, among other, an important source of modern sports. But, to be able to enter
the world of simulation, a touch of the aesthetic is necessary.
For mimesis, you need to study the real thing and imitate its most characteristic
features in fiction; for representation, you need to add to mimesis mutual under-
standing that things are not what they really are, so that it is not necessary just to
imitate but to be given authorization by the public to appear as something else then
what it is or what you are. For simulation, you have to open a place for another
world inside this world, without imitation or representation, just by giving your sen-
suality and perception different aspect which enables a whole new lifeworld to
appear without changing the worlds or travelling from one to another. In theatre,
presence of actors and audience needs sharing of pretence ‘that the actors are not
themselves but characters; or that the action is something other than what it actually
is; or that the action is taking place in a location other than where it is actually tak-
ing place; or that the audience is not there; or that the audience is something other
than an audience watching a performance’.40 Nothing of this applies for sport, but
it still needs a kind of pretence, and this is a pretence that what really goes on is
part of reality which is a world of sport, one of the possible worlds which we can
make and not just imagine: a world of our simulation. Where Romans saw death of
Christians in the arena, Christians saw baptism in blood which transported martyrs
directly from here to heavens: the aesthetic turn leaves reality as it is, but gives it
completely different meaning. Such a turn is necessary to change view from natural
Soccer & Society 17
world to world of science, or, from scientific world of causal certainty to lifeworld
of contingency and risk. Breathing is a natural function which has to continue on
and on without thinking, but, if we walk or run, and start to breathe deeply with
whole lungs, this effort can bring about an awareness of our breathing which is
otherwise absent; to become aware of your own breathing means to sense and per-
cept your own ‘being-alive’, and can, thus, become a source of pleasure, even if
exercise brings some pain. This sometimes painful pleasure of being alive, and per-
ception of being in the world of ‘convention’, still as real as it can be, is everyday
aesthetic at its strongest. This convention does not happen through negotiations,
and cannot appear as a result of a system of rules: it needs to be felt and percepted
in reality, not as reality. One can be informed that what he or she is watching is a
game, and that this game is a kind of sport; one can be informed about the rules of
this new and strange game; but, one starts to fell the game and follow its movement
with pleasure only when one is able to enter the world of this game, to become part
of its kind of simulation: the aesthetic effect is what makes possible the convention
that this game is one of the possible worlds, and not just ‘some guys running after
the ball like crazy’. Convention which involves a creation of another reality inside
lifeworld needs aesthetic sensus communis. When I say ‘Let’s this stick be a snake’,
it needs a simple pretence, but the moment we start to play how we are afraid, how
we fight against this fear, when we start to organize ourselves into a team to win
the game against the snake, when we introduce another team to play the role of the
snake and it develops into a complicated game with complicated rules of pretence
and of simulation, we need to create a circle of a territory and a circle of atmo-
sphere where these rules rule, where we play ‘the snake’ game, and, finally, we are
in this atmosphere which, at least for a moment, becomes the only world we inha-
bit. The proof that simulation is not just a convention but a real, functioning world
of our own making is in its aisthesis. Baudrillard’s commentary that we created
such an abundant world of simulated worlds that we finally discovered that ‘real
reality’ is just one of these simulated worlds cannot erase the difference between
scientific universe and lifeworld, even if we think of both under terms of
simulation, and cannot but put sport, in spite of all efforts to train, to measure and
to judge it scientifically, into lifeworld as one of its most important simulations.
Aesthetics of football, studied as part of everyday aesthetics and as part of sport
games’ simulation of lifeworld, should start from description of specific lifeworld of
football, which is quite a different framework from scientific kinesiological
approach, or from traditional aesthetics’ approach from the standpoint of ‘beauty’
and ‘the aesthetic’ obtained from art and used for artworld understanding. There are
scientifically controllable situations in football, and science is trying to plan and
control them as much as possible. There are really beautiful moments in football
game with aesthetic bravado, if you want to use such language, from goal man fly-
ing through the air and touching the ball gracefully just with a tip of his fingers, to
a stopper removing ball from the tip of the attacker without even touching him, in
a sweeping movement performed on a grass, but done in a smooth manner of water
skier. But football is called a beautiful game for its whole architecture, and espe-
cially for a simulation of the lifeworld which is extremely artificial and still so easy
and familiar. Its basics is a touch of foot on the ball, an unusual meeting which
demands quite extraordinary skill which has no regular use in other spheres of life.
This contact is happening on the grass, a natural element (now sometimes artificial,
I admit) absent from some of other sports, but shaped and managed as a kind of
18 L. Kreft
French classicist idea of rectangular and controlled nature, and not as English ‘natu-
ral’ garden with unvisible ‘ho-ho’ dividing ‘domesticated nature’ from ‘wild nat-
ure’. Ninety minutes divided into half, with short break, are almost scientifically
measured perfect period of sustainability which still allows for skillful movement,
involved tension and attracted attention. Big field, but just big enough for 22
persons engaging in a contest of individual and collective ability to play a game as
a team, by rules which make the purpose harder to accomplish. It is a game which
allows for a physical contact, but not too aggressive or even violent one; still, it is
hardly possible to play it without at least sometimes crossing over the line of
allowed physical contact, and it is even possible to commit a tactical foul, when to
commit foul and get punished for it is cheaper than allowing the opponent to pro-
ceed with its movement. There are certain parts of playing ground, however, where
more strict and different rules apply, and consequently make tactical foul a tactical
nonsense. Not to enter into all different rules, these rules together with characteristic
shape and division of the field, and especially with necessary division of the team
on the field into different roles, tasks and sectors make for a special dramatic
engagement and movement where situation changes with every singular move so
much that it becomes charged with different possible outcomes. Anything can hap-
pen! – this common argument for beauty of football, before telling about unex-
pected final results, describes the movement of the game more than correctly: each
moment of the game has so many potential outcomes and solutions that it is not
possible to play the game without ongoing uncertainty and risk of a wrong estima-
tion. All these features, and others which we could additionally mention, build a
dramatic narrative which is not a mimesis or representation of something else, but
which simulates dramatic social dimension of lifeworld so quintessentially well that
football, put under a guidance of association, appeals to different social strata, dif-
ferent cultures and different historical circumstances. When football is called a
beautiful game, it is this universal dramatic character which is described, and not
‘the aesthetic’ used for ‘aesthetic sports’. Football is a purposive game where its
purpose cannot be reached without a dramatic narrative as the only way to get
there.
Aesthetic attraction of sport in general and of football in particular is a target of
numerous criticisms developed from the point of view of Marxism, critical theory,
New Left, situationism, Althusserian school and sometimes even cultural studies
and post-structuralism. Common ground for these criticisms isthat pleasure in and
desire for sport and football consists of alienation, manipulation and ideology –
three immortal gods of social criticims of the 1960s. From this point of view, aes-
thetic pleasure born in modern sport circumstances is no more than creation of
artificial spectacular paradise which makes people happy without reason (because
they are enslaved and not free), which puts false nationalist ideas into their heads,
and which makes them consume more and more of products to satisfy artificial
needs produced by capitalist system. Such description, however, elaborated and well
argued, has a serious flaw. It explains why and how is football false and alienated
‘beautiful’ game (because people cannot get to their real pleasures and happiness),
but at the same time it explains pleasure in sport and football as a kind of creatio
ex nihilo, thus declaring at the same time that sport in general and football in partic-
ular are artificial pleasures as such. But how can something completely artificial
become pleasurable? Or, to ask directly: if alienation, manipulation and ideology
work so that they can produce aesthetic pleasure from nothing, in a field where
Soccer & Society 19
without alienation, manipulation and ideology there would be no pleasure (except

perhaps lower kind of physical pleasure of players themselves), then it is certainly
not possible to fight against alienation, manipulation and ideology, and it is
certainly impossible to discover cases of alienation, manipulation and ideology: they
are overwhelming water in which we are totally immersed. Critical theory approach
cannot explain why people long for alienation, why we enjoy manipulation and
why we accept ideological image of the world as safe, if not right one, and in sport,
it cannot explain why football, for instance, is pleasurable in itself, and has a dra-
matic narrative which is aesthetically attractive – which is proved, if not by any-
thing else, by alienation, manipulation and ideology, not to mention profit-oriented
businesses, which all appear in this popular field exactly because it is aesthetically
attractive and aesthetically powerful. Aesthetic attraction of football is not a sign of
alienation, manipulation or ideology – it is just what it appears to be: a sign of rare
pleasure. It is interesting how strange it sounds if we say that reading poetry is an
alienated and manipulative business which makes people forget and forgive all evils
of their world and their lives, and fills their existence with longing for love and
friendship, when they should start to fight for their rights and change in their
enslaved position. But this avant-garde argument has the same structure as that on
football, and can be well founded, but for a fact that it does not want to admit that
poetry must have some real power if it can prevent people from starting a rebellion.
With sport and football this kind of argumentation is even more suspicious than
when it is attacking poetry, because it represents elitist criticisms of plebeian plea-
sures, similar to high-brow neglect and contempt of tele-novelas (and before that, in
the nineteenth century, of melodramas). But if we want to study and research aes-
thetic appeal, we have at least to recognize that it exists, even if not in such strong
scientific emanation as gravitation, which, believed to be just an ideology, caused
people to drown. As Marx reports in The German Ideology,41 from this anti-ideo-
logical position people should learn how to swim by forgetting about gravitation, as
the idea which was put in their heads through manipulation – and because they
have this idea in their head, they cannot swim.
On the other side, phenomenological approach to natural world or lifeworld,
itself in opposition to scientific image of the world treated in a similar way as
Marxism treats ideology, makes much better sense if we want to discover what goes
on in aesthetic situation of sport, and why is football so attractive and such impor-
tant source of pleasure for so many people. This approach reveals unique circum-
stances of being in the event as player or spectator, and enables us to grasp the
uncertainty of the situation where everybody is in action, and where to act means
to take a decision not only about movement of your own, but also betting on move-
ment of the others without any certainty that the others, be it from your own or
opposite side, will proceed as expected. The thrill of this kind of bet, which in sport
means that you bet literally on your body and with your body movement, is the
source of the aesthetic dimension of football. However, this kind of approach, con-
trary to that of the Critical Theory of society, usually does not reveal the fact that
our lifeworld, sport and football included, is almost completely colonized by social
relations dominated by capital: commodification, mediatization, informatization,
globalization, etc. The rules of the game themselves were changed and adapted
many times to serve market interests, media interest, entertainment interests, etc.
These changes, enforced by associations which regulate football as a global game
together with international systems of competition, have an impact on lifeworld sit-
20 L. Kreft
uation of the game. Football is the most recognized beautiful game on global scale
for its dramatic aesthetics, but its dramatic aesthetics has been shaped to support
above mentioned interests and needs. These interests and needs would not be there
if football would not be such an attractive and dramatic game anyway, but their
‘autotelic’, domesticated presence in game situation itself has to be recognized as
such as well, to give grounds for critical aesthetic analysis which will not start from
circumstances which are external to game as such, but from phenomenology of
game which is in itself ‘autotelically’ capitalist dramaturgy. Just to name an exam-
ple: how football balls are produced now, and how and which are chosen to become
official balls for different competitions and championships? In search of the most
dramatic ball movement, great efforts and a lot of money are invested, and criteria
for selection are a mixture of physic’s ability to produce more dramatic and more
risky movement, and capital’s ability to colonize the whole field of football, starting
from its associations which are part of capital management already for many dec-
ades. The very movement of ball, for instance in the case of World Championship
in South Africa, is predetermined by ball’s ability to fly with more beautiful curve,
i.e. with more unpredictable and more dramatic abilities – with a limit which makes
difference between dramatic unpredictability which can still be managed by high
level players, and pure random which is dramatic in completely different way, as
drawing a lot and not as a social simulation game.
Notes
1. Best, ‘The Aesthetics of Sport’ (7th Chapter), 99–122 and Best ‘Art and Sport’, 69–80.
2. Best ‘Art and Sport’, 70.
3. Giulianotti ‘Foreword’, xi-xii.
4. Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
5. Frayssinet called sport performance ‘l'oeuvre athlétique’ Le sport parmi les beaux-arts;
Lenk introduced sport as the eighth art in Die achte Kunst; Grupe defended sport as
high culture in Sport als Kultur.
6. Barthes, Mythologies (‘Le Monde oú l'on catche’, ‘Le Tour de France comme epopée’);
Welsch, ‘Sport – Viewed Aesthetically and even as an Art?’ (delivered at International
Congress of Aesthetics in Ljubljana – Slovenia 1998), now. available at Wolfgang Wel-
sch's web site: University of Jena – Welsch, ‘Sport-Viewed Aesthetically and even as an
Art?’, www.uni-jena.de/welsch/
7. Brecht, ‘Mehr Guten Sport’., 31–4 and other Brecht's writings on sport, collected in this
edition.
8. It is interesting that this change in sport was predicted in 1928 in Sandilands' Atalanta
or the Future of Sport: ‘In considering the position of blood sports in the future our task
is an easy one: they will not be tolerated. Our sporting problems will be economic and
aesthetic rather than ethical’ (80). Of course, he did not envisage ethical problems aris-
ing from industrialization and post-industrialization of cheating, as doping, for instance.
9. Best, Philosophy and Human Movement, 103–5. Purposive sports are those where their
end (to win) can be achieved without any aesthetic effort, aesthetic sports are those
where aesthetic effort counts, so that it is not possible to win without it (like figure-skat-
ing).
10. Best, Philosophy of Human Movement, 107.
11. Ibid.
12. The most important of them was Herbert Spencer. In his ‘Philosophy of Style’ from
1852, he defined style in similar manner: ‘Regarding language as an apparatus of sym-
bols for conveying thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more
simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced’, and
‘Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, we may say
that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency, and that
Soccer & Society 21
in composition the chief thing to be done is to reduce the friction and inertia to the
smallest amount’ (Spencer, Literary Style and Music. Including Two Short Essays on
Gracefulness and Beauty, 3–4). In the essay on gracefulness, gracefulness ‘describes
motion that is effected with economy of force’ (Spencer, ‘Gracefullness’, 107), most vis-
ible with figure-skating: ‘The reference to skating suggests that graceful motion might
be defined as motion in curved lines’ (Spencer, Literary Style and Music, 112), which
according to Spencer proves that curved motion is the most economical motion.
13. Best, ‘Art and Sport’, 69.
14. Ibid.
15. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (transl. by Michael Shaw, Theory and History of
Literature, Vol. 4.
16. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (transl. By
Susan Emanuel).
17. This process of reduction was described by Williams in Marxism and Literature and by
Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction – see his conclusions on construction of
‘literature’, ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’, 20–1).
18. Translated by L.K.
19. On pure aesthetics and its social and class background, see: Bourdieu, ‘La genèse histor-
ique de l'esthétique pure’. Bourdie, Les règles de l'art, 465–509.
20. Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics. Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities, xvii.
21. Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, 1–42.
22. Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, 20: ‘La salle de Louvois est excellente pour donner au plaisir
musical cette espèce de draw-back (difficulté de naître); ensuite en écoute avec pédante-
rie; on se fait un devoir de tout entendre. Se faire un devoir! Guelle phrase anglasie,
quelle ideé anti-musical! C'est comme se faire un devoir d'avoir soif’ (facsimile by
Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, Paris 1932, is accessible at The Internet Archive.
http://www.archive.org/stream/viedrossinisui00stengoog).
23. Amorim, Theatro y Futebol. Por uma dramaturgia do espetáculo fotebolístico. Univer-
sidade Federal da Bahia – Escuela de Teatro/Escuela de Dança. http://www.bibliotecadig-
ital.ufba.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=2896.
24. Damo, ‘Futebol e estética’, 84.
25. Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbergiff.
26. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences (transl. By David Carr).
27. Bentham, The Theory of Legislation (facs. of Trübner's edition from 1864).
28. Geertz, ‘Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’.
29. Osipovich, ‘What is a Theatrical Performance?’, 461.
30. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Marxist Internet
Archive. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.
31. Katya Mandoki calls basic and primal aesthetic experiences of everyday life aesthetic
latching-on and latched-by. See: Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, 67 and passim.
32. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life; Heller,
Everyday Life.
33. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why; Naukkarinen, Aes-
thetics of the Unavoidable: Aesthetic Variations in Human Appearance; Sartwell, The
Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Tradition; Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics; Light and Smith, eds. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.
34. Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, 177.
35. Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics, 191.
36. Patočka,. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History.
37. Arendt, The Human Condition. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.
edu/arendt.
38. Osipovich, ‘What is a Theatrical Performance?’, 461.
39. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti-
ful, 47: ‘… in a moment of emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative
weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real simpathy’.
40. Osipovich, ‘What Is a Theatrical Performance?’, 469.
41. Marx, ‘Preface’, The German Ideology. Marxist Internet Archive. http://www.marxist.
org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.html.
22 L. Kreft
References
Amorim, Adriana Silva. Theatro y Futebol. Por uma dramaturgia da espetáculo fotebolísti-
co. Salvador: Universidade Federal da Bahia – Escuela de Teatro/Escuela de Dança,
2009. http://www.bibliotecadigital.ufba.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=2896.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://
www.iep.utm.edu/arendt.
Avenarius, Richard. Der Menschliche Weltbegrifff. Leipzig: O.R. Riesland, 1891.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Le Seuil, 1957.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Marxist
Internet Archive. http://www.marxist.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.
htm.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Theory of Legislation. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004 (facs. of
Trübner's edition from 1864).
Best, David. ‘The Aesthetics of Sport’. In Philosophy of Human Movement, ed. David Best,
99–122. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978.
Best, David. ‘Art and Sport’. Journal of Aesthetuc Education 14 (1980): 69–80.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Filed. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. (Les règles de l'art. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998.)
Brecht, Bertolt. Der Kinhaken und andere Box. Und Sportgeschichten, ed. Günther Berg.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 2395 – Suhrkamp, 1995.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Mineapolis, MN: Unversity of Minnesota Press,
1984.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1984.
Damo, Arlei Sander. ‘Futebol e estética. São Paule em Perspectiva, 15 (2001): 82–91.
Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Washington, DC:
University of Washington Press, 1996.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Frayssinet, Pierre. Le Sport parmi les beaux-arts. Bruxelles: Éditions Arts et voyages and
Dargaud, 1968.
Giulianotti, Richard. Football. A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press,
1999.
Grupe, Ommo. Sport als Kultur. Osnabrück: Fromm and Editions Interfrom, 1987.
Heller, Anges. Everyday Life. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1984.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1970.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso Book, 2008.
Lenk, Hans. Die achte Kunst. Osnabrück: Fromm and Edition Interfrom, 1985.
Light, Andres and Jonathan Smith, eds., The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2005.
Mandoki, Katya. Everyday Aesthetics. Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities.
Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007.
Marx, Karl. ‘The German Ideology’. Marxist Internet Archive. http://www.marxist.org/
archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.html.
Naukkarinen, Ossi. Aesthetics of the Unavoidable: Aesthetic Variations in Human
Appearance. Lahti: International Institute for Applied Aesthetics, 1998.
Osipovich, David. ‘What is a Theatrical Performance?’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 64 (2006): 461–70.
Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996.
Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Sandiland, G. S. Atalanta or the Future of Sport. New York, NY: Keegan Paul – Trubner &
Co., 1928.
Sartwell, Crispin. The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Tradition.
New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Soccer & Society 23
Spencer, Herbert. Literary Style and Music. Including Two Short Essays on Gracefulness
and Beauty. London: Watts and Co., 1950.
Stendhal. Vie de Rossini. Paris: Auguste Boulland et Co., 1984. (facsimile by Librairie Anci-
enne Honoré Champion, Paris 1932, at: The Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/
stream/viederossinisui00stengoog).
Welsch, Wolfgang. ‘Sport – Viewed Aesthetically and even as an Art?’ University of Jena.
http://www.uni-jena.de/welsch/.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Aesthetics of The Beautiful Game.

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Aesthetics of The Beautiful Game.

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [RMIT University]

On: 15 February 2013, At: 16:27

Soccer & Society

Aesthetics of the beautiful game

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2012.753538

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-

Aesthetics of the beautiful game

Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

How to examine arguments for calling football ‘a beautiful game?’ To begin

contemplation). His criticism calls for another kind of aesthetics. Fortunately,

ISSN 1466-0970 print/ISSN 1743-9590 online

ernism ever could.

The beautiful game

(1) Football is a beautiful game because it appeals to everybody, because

(2) Football is such a beautiful game because it is completely unpredictable:

lence, masterhood and virtuosity observed in some players or on some occasions

State of the art

(1b) A supposed distinction between the aesthetic and the competitive.

(2) The common misconception of the aesthetic as essentially of necessary contemplative.

The aesthetic function

framework designing a context, as in football, which we can hardly imagine

Voře, voře Jan.

Přiletek nemu devet vran:

První praví: Dobře voře;

Drugá praví: Nedobře voře;

Třetí praví: Dobře voře;

Čtvrtá praví: Nedobře voře;

Pátá praví: Dobře voře;

Šestá praví: Nedobře voře;

Sedmá praví: Dobře voře;

Vosmá praví: Nedobře voře;

Devátá praví: Dobře voře Jan.

Which would, in just occasional translation, sound like this:

Ian ploughs and ploughs.

To him ﬂy nine crows:

The ﬁrst says: good ploughing;

The second says: bad ploughing;

The third says: good ploughing;

The fourth says: bad ploughing;

The ﬁfth says: good ploughinf;

The six says: bad ploughing;

The seeventh says: good ploughing;

The eighth says: bad ploughing;

The ninth says: good ploughing, Jan.18

(4) Consequently (especially according to 2.), we cannot study relationship between

Aesthetics of everyday life

theatre only if we use ‘theatre’ as a metaphor, as in ‘theatre of war’ and similar

tionary or Marxist approach to everyday and to fundamental human conditions will

without alienation, manipulation and ideology there would be no pleasure (except

You might also like

Přiletek nemu devet vran: