Aleksandar Hemon was visiting Chicago in 1992 when war broke out back home in his native Sarajevo. Unable to go back, he stayed in the United States, watching “CNN extensively and voyeuristically as it covered the slow killing of my hometown” and feeling “thoroughly disconnected from the world around me.” He had long played soccer in Sarajevo, but in Chicago at first he “couldn’t find anybody to play soccer with.” He writes, “Not playing soccer tormented me.” He felt as if he were “at sea” and wasn’t “fully alive.” Then, riding his bicycle past a lakeside field one day, he saw a group “warming up and kicking the ball around.” He asked if he could join.1
These weekly soccer games brought together players from “Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Belize, Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Eritrea, Ghana, Cameroon, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Korea” and even a “very good” Tibetan goalie. The games became Hemon’s new home, the place where he fit within something bigger. In the midst of the joyful, chaotic games, he occasionally found “that moment of transcendence that might be familiar with those who practice sports with other people; the moment, arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy the ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours.” It is a moment that almost always “perishes—as moments tend to—when you complete the pass.” Yet, when making that pass to a teammate—“fully aware that it is going to be miskicked and wasted”—Hemon had that “pleasant, tingling sensation of being connected with something bigger and better than me.”2
The Swedish novelist Fredrik Ekelund writes similarly about the “fantastic understanding” that he has felt often while playing in a “kickabout… the almost telepathic communication with the ‘Other’, the player who spots you, the player who—without you ever having met or exchanged a word—knows exactly where you want the ball, and at the same moment you, or rather I, know where he wants it played back to him.” When you play, he writes, you can “forget yourself” and “feel bigger somehow,” part of something unexpected, a web of connections and movement and possibility.3
The title of Hemon’s memoiristic essay is “If God Existed, He’d Be a Solid Midfielder.” With this phrase, Hemon captures something powerful about the position of midfielder. It is that player, he suggests, that best embodies the miracle of connection that Hemon found in his weekly games in Chicago. When all goes well, the midfielder is a fulcrum around which a team plays, the organizing force, the center to and from which all things pass. When you play as midfielder, writes Gwendolyn Oxenham, you have to be “everywhere, all the time.… All points connect through you.” Midfielders can be a bit invisible to those who have recently come to the game, and yet in a sense they are the most riveting players to watch. “Where is the most work in a football game?” the Danish coach Sepp Piontek asked. “In the midfield. They are involved in attack and defense.”4
What exactly is a midfielder? Since the development of the WM formation and the many other tactical formations that flowed from it, many players have occupied positions on the field that can be broadly thought of as “midfield.” Today, commentators often talk about “attacking midfielders,” who essentially serve as strikers, versus “holding midfielders” or “defensive midfielders,” who stand as the front line of the central defense. In all of these different roles, however, it remains the capacity for flexibility, and for seeing and sensing the motion and pulse of the entire game, that makes for a strong midfielder.
The Brazilian Waldir Pereira, nicknamed Didi, helped shape the modern midfield position. In a photograph taken during the 1962 World Cup, Didi is pictured concentrating on a game of chess. It is a fitting metaphor, for at his best on the field he was always several steps ahead, finding ways to advance against the opponent without exposing the king—that is, the goal—behind him.5
Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Didi became one of the most prominent Afro-Brazilian players of his time. The great defender of an earlier generation, Domingos de Guia, noted that Didi’s skills may have been honed to such high levels because he had to constantly overcome the racism of Brazilian society to earn himself a place at the highest levels of the sport. “If he had been white, he wouldn’t have been so perfect and precise a stylist,” de Guia claimed. Didi came of age in the wake of Brazil’s traumatic loss in the 1950 World Cup, which had been blamed on Afro-Brazilian players, including the goalie Moacir Barbosa Nascimento. The Brazilian Football Confederation was determined to avenge this loss during the 1958 World Cup. The group claimed it was going to assure victory by using a “scientific” approach to training the team, hiring specialized trainers to oversee the diet and exercise of the players and bringing on a team psychologist to evaluate prospective players. Having blamed black players for the 1950 loss, the confederation also initially created a team made up entirely of white or very light-skinned players—with the exception of Didi, who was considered “absolutely irreplaceable” in the midfield.6
The attacking skills of the 1958 Brazilian team’s strikers, including Pelé, are what have made it perhaps the most famous team in the history of soccer. But as Roger Kittleson writes in his history of Brazilian soccer, their goals were all based on the midfield work of Didi, who was the “conductor of the team.” He controlled the ball brilliantly, but more importantly he controlled the larger flow of the game thanks to his masterful positioning. Didi’s posture and passing, according to Kittleson, gave him “the air of an imperial magistrate.” He was a “classic midfield general,” prompting journalists to give him the nickname “Black Napoleon.” As Eduardo Galeano writes, Didi was like a “poised statue of himself… standing at the center of the field,” where he was “lord and master.” He was adept at sending long balls forward, passing them high in the air across much of the pitch, perfectly placed so his teammates could score. For Galeano, Didi embodied one of the truths of soccer: that it was the ball that needed to run, not the player. He played “unhurriedly,” and beautifully.7
Didi called on various powers to help him play. Before playing a championship match with his team Botafogo, for example, he promised his patron saint he would walk across Rio from end to end if his team won. They did win, and Didi went straight from the game in his uniform, fulfilling his promise, walking across the city that very night. His romance with a singer and actress from Bahia, Guiomar Baptista, was a frequent topic of commentary in the newspapers, and she handled his business affairs. He suffered so much from being apart from her that during the 1958 World Cup, when the Brazilian team was kept in a closed camp to prevent the distractions of contact with the outside world, he went on a hunger strike, insisting that he at least be allowed to talk to Baptista by phone. The coach refused, and Didi ultimately gave in and started eating again.8
Didi’s technical skills were legendary. He had a “touch so subtle that he did not need to play quickly,” Kittleson writes, “holding his position before maneuvering slightly to let adversaries rush futilely by him.” He could be a rough player, giving strong tackles when needed to win the ball. “His preference, though, was to a play a beautiful, flowing game, running as much as he had to, but letting the ball run even more.” He became famous for a signature move he developed called the folha seca, or “dry leaf.” This was a way of taking free kicks that left goalkeepers confused and helpless. The ball, writes Galeano, “would leave the ground spinning and continue spinning on the fly, dancing about and changing direction like a dry leaf carried by the wind, until she flew precisely where the goalkeeper least expected.” With a goal scored this way in a match against Peru in 1957, Didi secured Brazil’s qualification for the 1958 World Cup.9
When Brazil faced England early in that tournament, the English team managers had understood, writes Jonathan Wilson, that “the way to stop Brazil was to stop Didi.” They asked one defender to “sit tight” on the Brazilian midfielder, and it worked. England was able to scrape through with a goalless draw. It helped the English that, at first, the Brazilian strikers lacked spark. The team psychologist had judged which players were suitable to be included for the tournament. Among those he tried to disqualify was the striker Manuel Francisco dos Santos, nicknamed Garrincha. The psychologist deemed him too much of a show-off. In a warm-up game against the Italian professional team Fiorentina before the tournament, Garrincha had maneuvered around the goalkeeper with the ball but felt that just kicking it into the empty net wouldn’t quite be enough. So he waited for the goalie to recover, then dribbled around him again and, only then, finally scored. The psychologist also determined that the seventeen-year-old Pelé was “obviously infantile” and lacked a “sense of responsibility.” “You may be right,” Pelé politely told the psychologist. “But the thing is, you don’t know anything about football.” Luckily for Brazil, and for soccer, the coach ultimately overruled the psychologist, and both Garrincha and Pelé were on the field for a critical match against the Soviet Union. The presence of the two dynamic strikers was a vital boost, but their success in the tournament depended on the tactical structure that Didi had already built for the team, from its center.10
The plan was to shock the opponents with Brazilian skill from the first minutes of the game. “Remember,” the manager told Didi before the match, “the first pass goes to Garrincha.” Didi passed smoothly to Garrincha, who feinted as if he would move one direction, then went the other way around the Soviet defender, leaving him on the ground. He then slowed down so the defender could get up—and he could beat him again. And then he did it a third time, leaving the defender lying behind him once more. Garrincha then took a shot that hit the post. Soon after, Pelé shot and hit the crossbar of the goal, and a minute later Didi passed a beautiful through ball, which streaked far down the pitch past the defenders and reached a Brazilian player who rushed toward the goal and scored. The French sportswriter Gabriel Hanot called the beginning of the game “the greatest three minutes of soccer ever played.” The understanding between Didi, Garrincha, and Pelé was almost uncanny, a brilliant display of motion and dynamism between midfield and strikers.11
Brazil’s defeat of the Soviet Union was the beginning of a string of victories. They confronted a strong French team led by a brilliant player born and raised in Morocco, Just Fontaine, who scored thirteen goals during the World Cup, a record that still stands. But even France was no match for Brazil, who defeated them 5–2. Brazil marched into the final, facing the home team Sweden. Four minutes in, Sweden scored, and the Brazilian players were visibly shaken. As Brazilian player Mário Zagallo later recalled, the team anxiously thought they might be headed for a replay of the defeat of 1950. But Didi, writes Kittleson, “scooped the ball out of the net, put it under his arm, and walked as slowly as he could back to the center of the field.” Along the way, he calmed the players by telling them the Swedes would be easy to beat: “I guarantee these gringos can’t play at all.” He then started the game back up by passing the ball perfectly over a Swedish defender so that it landed right at the feet of Garrincha. The Brazilian team was now ready to come back. They scored their first goal a few minutes later, and went on to win the game 5–2. As always, Didi’s roving, serene play in the midfield opened up the space ahead and enabled the forwards to make goal after goal.12
A generation later, when Brazil shone once more at the 1970 men’s World Cup, it was again a vital midfield player who led the team to victory: Gérson de Oliveira Nunes, known as Gérson. In his history of soccer tactics, Wilson notes that many soccer fans consider this tournament “the apogee” of the history of the sport, and the Brazilian team that won it as “the greatest side the world has known and probably ever will know.” A Brazilian journalist went so far as to compare the significance of his national team’s victory to the “conquest of the moon by the Americans” the previous year. Brazil’s team had, in fact, gone through a NASA physical training program in preparation for the tournament. Both the moon landing and the World Cup were witnessed by unprecedented numbers of people because of the expansion of television, making them what Wilson calls “the first two great global events of the tele-cultural age.” As with the moon landing, many observers considered the “majesty” of what happened on the pitch during the 1970 World Cup to be “somehow a victory for all humanity.” “Our team was the best,” Gérson explained simply. “Those who saw it, saw it. Those who didn’t will never see it again.”13
In 1958, the World Cup had been televised for the first time, so some viewers were able to see the brilliant play of Pelé and Didi live. It aired in black and white, however, and without commentary. Occasionally, a clock was superimposed over the visuals of the field to indicate how much time was left in the game. Despite the very basic production of the spectacle, there was a vast audience. When France made it into the semifinal match that year, French people bought two hundred thousand television sets in the course of a few days—a substantial addition to the million sets already owned in the country. By 1970, television ownership was much more widespread globally, and broadcasts were coming in color. The World Cup was the ideal television spectacle. Brazil, effuses Wilson, “played in vibrant yellow with shorts of cobalt blue: they were perfect for the new age of color television. Under the iridescent heat of the Mexican sun, it seemed as though this was the future: bright and brilliant.” What’s more, for the first time, broadcasters used slow-motion technology to show replays of goals. All of this made the 1970 World Cup a kind of aesthetic revelation, as viewers began to learn to experience the game in new ways.14
If it was such a brilliant spectacle, of course, it was because the team was full of brilliant players. There was Pelé, the majestic Carlos Alberto in defense, and the forward Jairzinho—appropriately nicknamed Furacão, the hurricane—who scored in every game in the final round of the World Cup. Connecting all of this together was the midfielder Gérson, the player who set up many of Jairzinho’s goals. As the team trained in Mexico, Wilson writes, Gérson “spent hours practicing clipping diagonal balls” to Jairzinho, “calibrating his left foot, making adjustments for the thinness of the Mexican air.” The altitude shaped how the game was played during the tournament, slowing down the game, making it harder for the Italian players to pursue the Brazilian players and shut down their advances, and therefore creating space on the field that Brazil used to devastating effect.15
Brazil shone early during the 1970 tournament in a group stage match against England, the reigning men’s World Cup champions. As Hugh McIlvanney wrote at the time, the game crystallized everything dramatic about the sport. The two most recent champions were facing off, bringing with them “their fierce pride in their separate philosophies of the game,” and “the football world was watching for a sign.” It was a “concentrated drama,” with players going into the match “with the certain knowledge that the result will stay with them, however submerged, for the rest of their lives.” Defeat would “deposit a small, ineradicable sentiment.” Victory would leave “a few tiny bubbles of pleasure” that would “never quite disappear.”16
After their team was eliminated from the tournament, Mexican fans adopted the Brazilian team as their own, and the night before the game there was a “raucous assault” on the Hilton Hotel, where the English players were staying. The Mexican police contented themselves with standing inside the doors of the hotel but did nothing to stop the all-night cacophony. The English team had helped to provoke this response, in part by having their own bus brought to Mexico from England, rather than relying on one provided by the tournament organizers. “Do you think we have not yet discovered the wheel or the internal combustion engine?” a Mexican observer wondered. While opposing fans kept the English from sleeping, the Brazilians were up worrying whether Gérson, who had pulled a thigh muscle in Brazil’s first game against Czechoslovakia, would be able to play. The midfielder was determined. “This is the match that stands between us and the World Cup,” he declared, and even if he was going to “damage the leg badly” by playing, he was ready to do so to defeat England. The team doctor ultimately decided to keep Gérson off the field against England. Although it was a tough game for Brazil because of the excellent goalkeeping of Gordon Banks, the home favorites were ultimately able to pull out a 1–0 victory, and a rested Gérson was ready for the next games.17
Gérson, wrote McIlvanney, was pivotal for Brazil, and not just for his “brilliance as an individual.” He shaped the entire team’s motion through the “alertness with which he read situations, the subtlety of his running,” and the “deadly variety” of his passes. He brought “a sophisticated tactical intelligence and a fierce, infectious will” to the field. “He, even more than Pelé, was the team’s formative thinker on the field, compulsively driving, instructing and cajoling throughout the ninety minutes.” Gérson was, in other words, a worthy heir to the great Didi and his role in the 1958 and 1962 World Cup victories.18
Brazil ended up facing Italy in the final. As he made his way to the game that day, McIlvanney wrote, “every joke seemed funnier, every face friendlier,” everyone delighting at the “prospect of one of the last great communal rituals available to our society.” There is a kind of electricity that only a World Cup can produce. Forty years later, I went to watch Spain play Holland in the final of the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa and felt precisely the same way: each interaction and detail infused with delight and meaning, everyone sharing a similar, slightly stupefied grin that said, “I can’t quite believe I am here, at the center of the world.”19
The Mexican fans were fully behind Brazil in 1970—so it was essentially a home game for the visitors—and many observers were confidently predicting a Brazilian victory. One Rio columnist, Armando Nogueira, offered a “simple, technical reason why Brazil would definitely win.” The Italians were using a sweeper—that is, a defender who stayed in front of the goal—and so they could not mark, or cover, all the Brazilian players individually. “The Brazil player they will not mark is Gérson,” Nogueira predicted. “He will be deep in midfield at the start and they will leave him alone. He will have space, he will move through to shoot, probably score and certainly decide the match.” Many such predictions, of course, are made before games and turn out to be totally wrong, and those who pronounce them hope afterward they will be forgotten. But Nogueira, it turns out, was right. The Italians left Gérson largely unmarked, leaving him open to build up Brazil’s plans, to devastating effect.20
Pelé scored in the eighteenth minute, but before halftime Italy had scored, leaving the game 1–1. Throughout the half, Gérson was testing the Italian side, discovering weaknesses, but without fully exposing his own strategy of attack. Interviewed after the game, Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool at the time, declared Gérson’s patience during the first half of the game one of the most impressive things about the 1970 World Cup. Though Gérson had realized that he could create difficulties for Italy if he moved up, Shankly noted, he also “knew that if he did too much of it they would see what was happening and try to find a solution at the interval. So he waited until the second half. Then the Italians had no chance to discuss the problem. They were sunk.” As McIlvanney puts it, Gérson came out into the second half of the game “like an arsonist who had been allowed to stoke up on matches and petrol” and was now “ready to set the game alight.”21
In the sixty-sixth minute, Gérson scored a beautiful goal. He started it with a pass to the wing, and then moved forward into perfect position. He moved past a tackle by a defender and then sent forward a shot remarkable for its “clean force.” McIlvanney writes, “It flew more than twenty yards in a killing diagonal and was still only waist height when it hit the far side-netting.” Now it was clear that Gérson was “the central influence of the match, the hub of the wheel that was grinding Italy down.” He soon set up another goal, lifting the ball toward Pelé, who was perfectly placed in front of the goal. Pelé headed the ball down in front of Jairzinho, who ran the ball into the net, putting Brazil up 3–1. Italy was now so confounded that a player delivered the ball at one point straight to Gérson, a move “about as profitable as throwing live grenades against a rubber wall.” Before the game ended, Carlos Alberto had scored one more streaking goal.22
During the final minutes of the game, the Azteca stadium seemed about to explode. When the ball was sent into the stands, a fan grabbed it and didn’t want to give it up. The German referee frantically signaled the sidelines—I need a ball!—and eventually one was produced. By then, however, someone had pried the ball away from the fan in the stands, and so for a moment there were two balls on the pitch. A fan ran onto the grass, as if to say, “We all know the game is over, and it is time to celebrate.” When the whistle was finally blown, people thronged onto the pitch. Pelé was hoisted onto the backs of fans, a large Mexican hat was placed on his head, and he was galloped around the field almost as if he were riding a horse made up of human beings. At one point, Carlos Alberto, running around with the World Cup, dropped the gold top of the trophy, and a little boy picked it up and tried to run off with it until another Brazilian player pried it from his hands. It was a breathtaking, almost surreal, victory. The next day, Pelé woke up and thought maybe he had dreamed the whole thing. Even seeing his medal on his bedside table didn’t fully reassure him. He called his wife to ask, “Are we really the champions?”23
McIlvanney penned perhaps the finest summary of what this moment meant:
Those last minutes contained a distillation of their football, its beauty and élan and undiluted joy. Other teams thrill us and make us respect them. The Brazilians at their finest give us pleasure so natural and deep as to be a vivid physical experience. This was what we had hoped for, the ritual we had come to share. The qualities that make football the most graceful and electric and moving of team sports were being laid before us. Brazilians are proud of their own unique abilities but it is not hard to believe that they were anxious to say something about the game as well as about themselves. You cannot be the best in the world at a game without loving it and all of us who sat, flushed with excitement, in the stands of the Aztec sensed that what we were seeing was a kind of tribute.24
In retrospect, the moment seems even more vital because it ultimately represented a kind of “zenith never to be repeated” in the history of soccer, according to Wilson. After 1970, the game began to change, and the space the Brazilian team used so effectively during that tournament would evaporate as new developments pushed soccer toward a faster, more pressing game. In 1974, a “Brazilian midfield based on elaboration and passing” was overwhelmed in a game against a new force: the Dutch, whose development of “Total Football” transformed the game, the role of the midfielder, and the space of the pitch for good.25
It was, in a way, surprising that soccer was revolutionized by the Netherlands. In the 1950s, their national team was, according to Wilson, “barely even a joke.” In his history of Total Football, David Winner connects developments in society, culture, and the tactics of soccer in Holland during the late 1960s and 1970s. Total Football, he argues, was the result of a convergence of developments in architecture and social experience, along with the presence of an innovative and brilliant group of players and coaches, first at one club, Ajax, and then on the Dutch national team. Among them, the most legendary was the midfielder Johan Cruyff. Lanky and long-haired, with an “anarchic attitude, and a love of provoking the establishment,” he and those around him reshaped the very idea of what team, position, and play were on the pitch. Cruyff was an intellectual leader, full of “bizarre counter-intuitive ideas that were so brilliant that people followed his lead,” as one admirer put it. Upon first seeing him play, one journalist called him “Pythagoras in boots.” He was, writes Winner, “anti-system but, paradoxically, he had a system: one based on creative individualism.” His influence was profound not only in Holland but in Barcelona, where he played in the 1970s and managed from 1988 to 1996. The style of today’s Barcelona, considered by many the greatest and most riveting professional team in the world, is very much an extension and embodiment of Total Football.26
Total Football emerged at a time when European intellectual life was being shaped by a series of revolutionary new approaches to understanding human society. These movements included the structuralism promoted by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, new approaches to language exemplified in the work of Roland Barthes, and the historical school known as Annales, which focused on longue-durée (long-term) processes and structures. All of these were united by a concern with understanding the ways in which a range of structures—discursive, ideological, material, cultural—shaped human thought and life, and the ways these structures both circumscribed and defined possibilities for change and, occasionally, opened up spaces for transformation. These broad intellectual currents also influenced design and architecture. In Holland, for instance, structuralist designers and architects sought out new ways of imagining buildings and cities. In 1963, Dutch designer Wim Crouwel created a “Total Design” studio, seeking forms of practice aimed at creating holistic and interrelated systems. The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck argued similarly that “all systems should be familiarized, one with the other, in such a way that their combined impact and interaction can be appreciated as a single complex system.”27
Total Football might be described as structuralism on the pitch. Like the new approaches to urban design and architecture, it was all about thinking of space in a different way. At its core was a “conceptual revolution,” writes Winner, “based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and could be altered by a team playing on it.” The principle was deceptively simple: when a team has possession of the ball, that team’s goal is “to make the pitch as large as possible, spreading play to the wings and seeing every run and movement as a way to increase and exploit the available space.” When the other team has possession of the ball, space has to be shut down, constrained, essentially “destroyed” to limit the motion of the other team. This is done by pressing “deep into the other side’s half, hunting for the ball,” and making strategic use of the offside rule by having defenders positioned as high as possible on the pitch toward the opposing goal, about ten yards back from the halfway line. Players, especially in the midfield, consistently rush forward toward the opposing goal, seeking to break up the play of advancing players from the other side. Midfielder Johan Neeskens played this role for Ajax, pursuing attacking players so ferociously that his “prey tended to try and retreat into their own half to try and get away from him.” They couldn’t, though, because he would keep following them even there. Other defenders soon followed his lead, and in time “Ajax hunted in packs,” with “the defense so far forward that opposition would be caught offside if they tried to attack.”28
The defining approach of Total Football was the development of players who could change positions in the midst of play, bewildering opponents and creating a constant shift in the spatial configuration of the pitch. Players had long moved laterally, from left to right, on the pitch as they advanced or defended. Sometimes they might switch places with players in their own position—for instance, a defender on the right swapping with a defender on the left. But Total Football developed a “revolutionary” approach where players changed longitudinally, moving from defense to midfield and even to offense rapidly in the course of play. As Cruyff’s Ajax teammate Barry Hulshoff explained, “The player in attack can play in defense.” While the defender “must first think defensively,” he “must also think offensively.” If a defender saw an opening, he could move into it, playing like a striker. In response, strikers might move back into a defensive role in case of a counterattack. Though the players did have positions to which they returned, and where they played best—Cruyff, for instance, was not a very good defender—this fluidity created a riveting and aggressive attacking style of all-consuming play. “Position-switching looked fluid and chaotic and gave opposing defenders a blizzard of movement and hostility to deal with,” explains Winner. The approach was surprising to many other football teams when they first encountered it. As the British manager David Sexton explained, with their “pressing and rotation,” the Dutch teams “created space where there wasn’t any before,” offering a potent alternative to what remained a relatively “rigid” tactical approach in England and elsewhere, which had been built around “straight lines and fixed positions.” In part because more defensive styles of play, including Italian catenaccio, had become common and institutionalized, many spectators were delighted to see the emergence of this more open form of soccer. It had elements of the creative and exciting style of the Brazilian teams of 1958 and 1970, but was played more quickly, and with more movement between positions and players, adding layers of uncertainty and experimentation that thrilled fans.29
Part of the strategy involved using the offside rule strategically to compress the size of the pitch. In the 1974 men’s World Cup, for instance, Holland had to figure out how to play against Brazil. As Holland’s star midfield player, Cruyff understood his team would never defeat skillful Brazilian or Argentinean players if they were playing “on a huge pitch.” But the Dutch players could “reduce the space and put everybody in a thin band” by “squeezing the game” with an offside trap. The key was using the offside rule to create possibilities for offensive play by suddenly moving defensive players up the pitch. By catching a good portion of the opposing team behind the defenders, and therefore unable to receive the ball, the Dutch reduced the number of players they had to beat in order to make a goal. One of Cruyff’s teammates on Barcelona recalled a practice session where he learned the strategy. All of the defenders would move forward so as to catch as many as four or five of the opposing players offside and unable to receive a pass. Then, these defenders charged the player with the ball. If they were able to gain possession, they had a numerical advantage and could rapidly move toward the opponent’s goal. If it was difficult to create a chance, however, the defenders dropped back and could try the maneuver again.30
The Dutch defender Ruud Krol, a key fixture of both the professional club Ajax and the Dutch team during this period, explained that the players “always talked about space in a practical way. When we were defending, the gaps between us had to be very short. When we attacked, we spread out and used the wings.” The tactic of changing positions made it possible to play an aggressive game partly because it diminished the amount of space a player had to run: rather than running up field to attack and then having to run back to return to one’s defensive position, the defender could become a midfielder or forward for a time, because the forwards would have moved back into defense. In a way, no player had a position. As Krol put it, “The immediate position of play itself determined when and where the players moved within the game.” But the preferred posture of the team was one of constant attack. “When we defended,” explained Krol, “we looked to keep the opponent on the halfway line. Our standpoint was that we were not protecting our own goal, we were attacking the halfway line.” In a sense, then, Total Football made all players into midfielders, demanding of them the versatility, vision, and dynamism required of this position.31
The Ajax players had an uncanny ability to adapt to the conditions of a given pitch, on any given day. In an intense showdown played against a Turkish team in Istanbul in 1968, the defender Piet Keizer decided to take advantage of the fact that, under a driving rain, the pitch had turned largely to mud. He lobbed a ball into a thick patch of it. The Turkish defenders had thought the ball would bounce, but because it just landed, stuck there in the mud, they ran past it. Cruyff, meanwhile, had understood that the ball wouldn’t go anywhere, and he glided up to it and streaked forward to score a goal. A Kuwaiti emir who was watching the game approached Keizer afterward, so moved by his performance that he gave him the solid gold watch he was wearing. Similarly, in another rainy game in Greece, the Ajax players kept passing the ball into pools of water on the field, tricking the defenders who had not accounted for the fact that water would slow the ball down.32
Reporting on an Ajax game in 1972, one journalist wrote that the team had “proved that creative attack is the lifeblood of the game,” and that a “blanket defense can be outwitted and outmaneuvered.” In so brilliantly deploying a new style, he went on, the team “had made the outlines of the night a little sharper and the shadows a little brighter.” In 1973, during a semifinal European Cup game against Real Madrid, Ajax midfielder Gerrie Mühren found he needed a little time before passing the ball to a teammate, so he stopped on the pitch and juggled the ball until the teammate arrived. It was, as Wilson describes, “a moment of arrogance, of joie de vivre” that “encapsulated” what Ajax stood for. As Mühren recalled, “The balance changed” in that moment in the game. “The Real Madrid players were looking. They nearly applauded. The stadium was standing up. It was the moment Ajax took over.”33
At the center of this swirling storm was always Cruyff, moving, dribbling, making beautiful, curved passes forward. His playing was often breathtaking. The Dutch player Ruud Gullit vividly writes about playing against Cruyff at Ajax, watching him create a goal “as if out of nothing” by eluding one tackle after another and moving unexpectedly from the left side of the pitch to the far-right corner, then lobbing the ball a long distance over the goalie into the net. It was an “extraordinary goal” and even as an opposing player there was only one thing to do: “applaud.”34
Cruyff, however, played an even more important role in the way that he constantly directed other players. As Winner describes, he was “like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra.” The “most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing.” When he began playing for Ajax at seventeen, he already was delivering “running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right.” There was a sense that in his mind he always held a vision of possibility, of space opening up, of beauty unfolding. “It was as if,” writes Winner, “Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.” A poem written in his honor—later turned into a song—placed Cruyff in a venerable genealogy of geniuses who saw the world differently, and so remade it: “And Vincent saw the corn / And Einstein the number / And Zeppelin the Zeppelin / And Johan saw the ball.”35
Cruyff was a cultural phenomenon. He was adored by fans the world over, and many European intellectuals and artists were awed by him. The legendary Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was “fascinated by Cruyff.” As one of his Dutch colleagues, the choreographer and dancer Rudi van Dantzig recalls, Nureyev once declared that Cruyff “should have been a dancer.” There was a “magnetism” about his “perfect control and balance and grace.” Van Dantzig mused, “In a way, I think Cruyff was a better dancer than Nureyev. He was a better mover.” Van Dantzig also compared the footballer’s role to that of Maria Callas’s in opera: “Cruyff was a Callas on the field,” bringing something “very dramatic, like a Greek drama,” to the pitch. Designer Dirk Sijmons, meanwhile, explained that there was something “spiritual” about Cruyff’s playing, as if he were a “grandmaster of chess playing twenty games in his head simultaneously” but also endowed with a kind of “telekinesis.” Sijmons continued, “He seemed to know where everybody would be in the next three seconds,” and as he kicked the ball he was also “making sure his player would appear in that place at exactly the right time.”36
The artist Jeroen Henneman saw a parallel between Cruyff’s play and what painters of his generation were seeking to do in their explorations of abstraction. Henneman also saw “something spiritual going on” at Ajax because of the beauty produced on the pitch. “It is in the grass, but also in the air above it, where balls can curl and curve and drop and move like the planets in heaven.” There were moments of perfection and an occasional miracle, such as the beautiful, arcing, curved passes that Cruyff made in order to allow strikers to get behind a line of defenders. “A pass like that is not hit very hard, but it must be very precise,” Henneman said. “It’s a beautiful thing, a beautiful curved ball, and it is effective. It is also quiet, modest.” Henneman, writes Winner, was “beguiled by the extraordinary shapes unfolding on the pitch, patterns of movement and passing that had never been seen in football before.” The playing was “very artistic,” in part because it was focused on process, on beauty, more than on the goal. It made the center of the field, the space of the midfielder, the center of a swirl of movement and change that was like a dance. “Goalscoring was the possibility, but the real aim was the beauty of football itself,” wrote Henneman. It might not have been so beautiful to fans if it didn’t also lead to stunning victories. But Henneman and other commentators were also suggesting that, ultimately, what drew them to soccer was similar to what might draw them to great art: a desire to be surprised and moved by patterns and motion, to see in a moment of grace on the pitch a hint of something greater, something magisterial, about the human condition.37
The influence of Total Football was vast. It moved with Cruyff, who brought its approach to Barcelona—a team that in many ways still embodies the style of play he helped envision and develop—and it persisted in various iterations of Ajax and the Dutch national team. Since Total Football and the approaches it inspired emphasized pressing and faster movement, the fitness and speed of players became an increasing focus of training routines. In time, this generated an increasingly scientific approach toward the development of players to make sure that they would be physically ready for the demands of this kind of soccer. One study concluded that the amount of distance traveled during games by players doubled between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Soccer since the 1970s, then, has become a faster and more fluctuating game than that played by the Brazilians in the middle of the century. Players are moving up and down the pitch at increasing speed, and the game is changing direction more frequently too.38
Midfielders, however, remain as central to the flow of the game as they did in the time of Gérson and the 1970 Brazilian victory. The greatest midfield players are still able to create a sense of calm and pace at the center of the storm. The man considered one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, Zinedine Zidane, was a midfielder who led France to their only World Cup victory in 1998, playing alongside Lilian Thuram, and had a storied professional career in France, Italy, and Spain.39
By 2005, Zidane had become legendary enough that he became the subject of a remarkable experimental film: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. The filmmakers placed seventeen cameras in different parts of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid and filmed Zidane during an entire game. The film focuses on him whether he is on the ball or not, and it captures one of the most curious things about being a player, which is that you almost never touch the ball. The film offers a rich portrait, too, of what it means to be a midfielder, for much of what we watch is Zidane’s work positioning himself, ready to create an opening for him to arc forward. During much of the game, he is walking slowly. At one point, the camera focuses on him sliding his cleats across the turf, and the microphones capture this tender sound.40
Most of the film is accompanied by a variety of sounds generated in the stadium, carefully mixed together—the chants and cheers and moans and drums of the crowd, but also sounds emanating from Zidane and other players, including words, breathing, grunts and groans when someone is fouled, and the swift brushing of running, along with the thud of kicking the ball. This is layered over with a soundtrack by the band Mogwai that comes and goes in organic relationship with what is happening on the pitch. The film gives us a feeling that we are inside the game, and perhaps even inside Zidane’s mind as he plays. In fact, the filmmakers offer a few lines taken from interviews with Zidane, which scroll over the screen at certain key moments. In one of them, Zidane describes what it sounds like on the pitch: “When you step onto the field, you can hear and feel the presence of the crowd. There is sound. The sound of noise.” But, Zidane goes on, “when you are immersed in the game, you don’t really hear the crowd. You can almost decide for yourself what you want to hear. You are never alone.”
In 2002, Zidane scored what many consider to be his greatest goal, helping Real Madrid defeat Bayer Leverkusen in the final of the Champions League. The Spanish writer Javier Marías, a devoted Real Madrid fan, celebrated the goal in the Madrid newspaper El País. “Among memorable goals,” he began, “there are great ones, there are wonderful ones, and there are supernatural ones.” Zidane’s fell into the last category. “Supernatural goals have an air of gratuity, of the unthinkable, of gift,” Marías writes. “They seem like gifts fallen from the sky.”41
It was supernatural in part, writes Marías, because it was “unexpected by everyone, including Zidane.” The game had been tied since early in the first half, and Real had been mostly chasing the ball. The Spanish commentators were distracted, talking about other things, as Zidane’s teammate, the Brazilian player Roberto Carlos, ran toward a pass sent to the far-right corner of the pitch. Carlos seemed intent on simply not losing the ball to the defenders, when he popped it up backward—a high volley, seeming uncontrolled, streaking up into the air, that looked to Marías like a “clearance-balloon.” He writes:
It never occurred to anyone that it might end in a goal. Not to the goalie or Leverkusen’s defense, who didn’t have time to be alarmed. And not to Roberto Carlos, or even Zidane. He didn’t look for the ball, as I said, nor did he go to the spot where he anticipated it was going to fall. No, he circled the edge of the penalty zone, and while the clearance-balloon went up and up, very high, the idea of a goal still didn’t enter his mind. When did it come? When did it finally become intentional? Exactly when the ball stopped rising and hovered in the air. It was then that Zidane, who knows gravity and speed, understood that there was no other route in the air than the vertical toward the ground. And he saw that it would fall exactly where he was. Only then did it occur to him, only then did he decide it (if the last verb can be applied to what was never meditated—not by the German players or the Madridistas). Only then did Zidane understand the chance, the improvised, the unexpected nature of the ball: it was supernatural, a gift fallen from the sky. He did the rest. At times he also seems to have fallen from the sky. That’s how he recognized it, and the gift became flesh, and then verb.42
As the ball descended, Zidane was at the edge of the penalty box. He swiveled with his left leg out and, with perfect timing, sent the ball looping past the defenders and just below the crossbar, the goalie still far away as the ball streaked into the top of the net.
This was not Zidane’s only miraculous goal, however, not by far. In 1995, Zidane was playing with Girondins de Bordeaux against the Spanish team Real Betis, when he scored from the midfield. Zidane recounted the goal, which he considers one of the three or four best in his career, in an interview and suggested there was something mystical about the whole sequence. The goalie had lobbed the ball up to the midfield, where it glanced off another player’s head and landed right in front of Zidane. At halftime, other players had pointed out the opposing goalie was often positioned far up outside of goal. Zidane raised his eyes for a second and saw that this was indeed the case. He thought, “There’s only one thing to do.” Of course, there wasn’t only one thing to do: most players in the situation would have just tried to control the ball and start building from the midfield. As Zidane admitted, it happened so fast that he wasn’t sure if “I’d scored the goal or if I got help.” He continued, “You do ask yourself, how is this possible? So I say to myself: maybe I got help, from somewhere—from who?” As he said this, he looked up, enigmatically, a small, mysterious smile on his lips. From the middle of the field, having taken just two steps, he sent the ball on a beautiful arc all the way across the field and into the back of the net.43
For a midfielder, this kind of supernatural goal scored from the halfway line both captures the essence of the position and surpasses it. His focus is almost always about working up through the midfield, painstakingly passing and dribbling forward to open up space ahead, or battling for the ball to stop an advance. He tries to control the midfield so that, ultimately, he or other forwards can score from in or around the penalty box. Midfielders like Zidane clearly harbor a dream, though, that they could skip all that once in a while and score from where they are, in the midfield, making a clean, unstoppable shot through the sky. This is the version of the Hail Mary shots sometimes made at critical moments in football or basketball. In soccer, these goals appear as moments of delightful madness, sudden and impulsive decisions on the part of players who, for an instant, let go and think: Why not?
For goalkeepers, of course, the idea of being scored on in this way is terrifying, and it is one of the reasons some hesitate to move up the field, outside their box. Such goals scored from the midfield are rare, of course, but when they do happen they leave the goalie looking particularly silly. One of the most shocking such goals was scored by the Spanish striker Mohammed Alí Amar, also known as Nayim, during a match between Real Zaragoza and Arsenal. Nayim unexpectedly scored a game-winning goal from just in front of the halfway line in the final seconds of extra time. Arsenal goalkeeper David Seaman dove backward and touched the ball, but ended up sitting in his net. He was, as Wilson writes, “ridiculed for the rest of his career” for letting the ball in from such a distance.44
In international games, such goals have been very rare. In the 1970 men’s World Cup, during Brazil’s first game against Czechoslovakia, Pelé tried to lob the ball toward the goal from the halfway line. It arced beautifully through the air, but it didn’t go in. Pelé was applauded, though, just for trying to make such a crazy and ebullient goal. Afterward, asked whether his shot had been “an attempt to realise a lifelong ambition,” he smiled and nodded happily. Forty-five years later, another player tried the same thing in a World Cup tournament—this time in the final match—and succeeded. Her name was Carli Lloyd.45
As she recounts in her autobiography, Lloyd always had a thing for making goals from the midfield. At the end of practice, she would line up a few balls on the midfield line. “I look towards the empty goal, about fifty yards away,” she remembers. “I take a few steps back, sprint up to the first ball, plant my left foot beside it, and swing my right leg into it as if it were a sledge-hammer, pounding it as far as I can.” She would do this again and again, trying to reach the faraway goal, and sometimes making it.46
Lloyd grew up in Delran, New Jersey, and was recruited to play on the US under-twenty-one team when she was a student at Rutgers University. Then, at the age of twenty-three, she joined the US Women’s National Team, which competes in the World Cup. April Heinrichs, the coach of the national team, had been impressed with the way Lloyd struck the ball, “dead center,” making it fly “in a way that is very difficult for a goal-keeper to handle.” Lloyd had earned a reputation in college for being a tough and physical player, a “one-man wrecking crew” in the words of one coach whose team faced her. With a powerful ability to help shape the space and movement on the pitch, she is always a few steps ahead, positioning herself and placing her passes perfectly. The outcome of a game can often depend, Lloyd writes, on “the smallest of events—a tackle in midfield, a high pressure run that forces a sloppy pass, a sprint to keep the ball in bounds”—which means pushing herself, “finding gears I don’t know I have.” Lloyd’s tactical sense is accompanied by a strongly physical form of play. “I always make a point to have a crunching tackle early in the game,” she declares. “It’s a part of my game plan.” The goal is not to be “dirty,” but just to “let my opponents know what they are going to be up against when they are pressing the attack in midfield.” Doing this can “set the tone for an entire game.”47
By the time of the 2011 World Cup, Lloyd had become central to the US team. She was their most precious midfield player. In the team’s showdown with Brazil, she played a pivotal role, in the final seconds, by setting up one of the greatest goals in the history of the sport. With the US behind 2–1, in the last minute of extra time, she received a pass in the middle of the field. She took three quick touches, and then passed it with perfect timing to Megan Rapinoe, who was running up the left wing. “Quick, Pinoe, let it fly,” Lloyd thought as she sent the ball forward, she recalls. Pinoe did, sending a long beautifully curved pass that arced perfectly in front of the goal. Abby Wambach was right there, and headed it into the net.48
Though it was Wambach’s goal, it was the brilliant play of Lloyd and Rapinoe in the midfield that made it possible. They provided the vision, timing, and execution that allowed the team to score the latest goal in the history of the Women’s World Cup. It was pure beauty. As journalist Alicia Rodriguez wrote at the time, “Rapinoe’s Cross” was one of those that “players practice their whole lives and never hit quite right.… I am tempted to change my name to ‘Rapinoe’s Cross,’ so that years from now, when non-soccer fans ask me how I got such a strange name, I can tell them to watch the clip. And they will watch, and they will be astounded.” She concluded, “I will be dreaming of that cross in my sleep for weeks.”49
The US team won on penalties against Brazil and went on to defeat France, earning a place in the final against Japan. The team’s run electrified audiences back home. More people in the United States watched the final than any other soccer game before it in history. It was a riveting match against a tactically brilliant Japanese team—“masters of the one-touch pass,” as Lloyd puts it—led by attacking midfielder Homare Sawa. Just as the US team had against Brazil, Japan drew even with the US after a goal scored by Sawa in the waning seconds of the game. This time, however, the US lost on penalty kicks, in part because Lloyd missed her shot.50
At the 2013 Olympics, Lloyd shone once again. US coach Pia Sundhage had benched her at the beginning of the tournament, but soon realized she was vital to the team. In the final against Japan, played in Wembley Stadium in London, she received a pass from Rapinoe in midfield, and saw a “stretch of space.” With a few touches she managed to keep finding room, pulling the defense with her, and then, as she writes, “let it rip, across my body, across the grain.” She sent the ball flying just inside the left post, putting the US up 2–0. Although Japan came back with a goal, a brilliant save by Hope Solo delivered the win for the US team. Sundhage admitted graciously that she had been wrong to doubt Lloyd. “I am really happy that she is more clever than I am,” Sundhage said, smiling, in an interview.51
The next challenge for the team was the 2015 Women’s World Cup, to be held in Canada. Under the stewardship of a new coach, Jill Ellis, Lloyd affirmed her role as the team’s central midfielder and was pivotal during the competition. Battling through a few shaky games early on, the team made it to the semifinal. There, they faced a strong Germany, which had just defeated France. I was in the stadium in Montreal that day. It was packed with US fans who had traveled to Canada for the match. We were all talking to each other, on the subway, on the way to the stadium, outside, waiting in line for food: “Where are you from?” I met three women from California traveling together, a referee from Iowa, people who told me tales of going to the 1995 Women’s World Cup in Sweden. A mother and her ten-year-old daughter marched through the tunnel from the subway, the mom smiling and saying, “I really can’t believe we’re here. We made it.” That was, in a way, the feeling that infused everyone. In the stadium, the sound was different than that of most soccer matches. It was the sound of voices of many different ages, of children and elders, but most of all of both men and women, boys and girls. Many young women had come with their teams, wearing their own club jerseys, looking on with a mix of admiration and ambition. Young girls lined the stands, leaning down and high-fiving everyone as they walked past, cheering, jubilant, completely at home. That day, the US Supreme Court had issued its decision on gay marriage, an issue important to many of the players on the women’s team, and many fans. Some had come ready to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality as they rooted for the team. One fan was draped in an American flag with the white stars on the blue background but the bars in the color of a rainbow. People kept wanting to take a picture of her, or with her, and she happily obliged. Later, in the stands, one woman held up a sign: “Rapinoe Marry Me—In All 50 States!”
The US played confidently from the first. There was a paced serenity about the team as it kept creating its own space, its own openings, showing that mastery that turns the pitch into a place of possibility. A kind of seriousness, but also a quiet pleasure in the small victories that began to pile up, one after another. When the US earned a penalty kick against Germany, it was Lloyd who stepped up to take it. In goal was Nadine Angerer, one of the greatest goalies in the game. Yet there was a sureness, and an intensity, in Lloyd’s posture and eyes that was amazing to watch. Her eyes focused on the goal, she stood behind the ball for what seemed like forever. “I have already visualized the PK the night before,” she recalls. She knew where she was going to place it. “I am leaning forward, slightly bent at the waist, eyes fixed on the ball, nothing else.” She sent it billowing into the net. There followed a humorous moment of brief panic in the stands. The giant screens announced “GOAL” followed by the word “BUT,” and people breathed in all at once as if someone was about to take it all back. The French-speakers in the stands had to reassure them. Montreal is a bilingual city, and but is how you say goal in French.52
With their win over Germany, the US was once again in the final of the Women’s World Cup, and once again facing Japan, four years later. Many of the same players were on the pitch on both sides, and the respect between the teams was palpable. But the beginning minutes of the game were among the most remarkable in any World Cup final, a festival of goals that harkened back to some of Brazil’s games in the 1958 tournament. Except in this case, three goals came from Lloyd, and she accomplished each in a different way. The first one came after just three minutes, when Lloyd sprinted into the box on a diagonal run, coming in from the midfield, catching a beautiful pass from Rapinoe and powering it into the net. Two minutes later, when the US was given a free kick, Lloyd flew into the penalty box again and knocked the ball into the goal. “Who can even believe this is happening?” she recalls thinking. “It is almost an out-of-body experience,” the “greatest start to a game the US has ever had.” It got even better: in the fourteenth minute, the midfielder Lauren Holiday scored, making it 3–0.53
The Japanese players huddled and then restarted the game, moving the ball quickly, connecting ten passes. But Lloyd was pressing and managed to intercept one of the passes at the middle of the pitch. She looked up to see who to pass to, and noticed something, far down the pitch. The Japanese goalkeeper was way off the goal line, very far up. Lloyd decided to try for the goal. She had, after all, practiced just such midfield scoring for a long time. “It’s worth a shot,” she told herself. She pushed the ball far enough to “take a full swing at it.” As she sent it up, she knew it had “just the right trajectory, high enough to carry but low enough” that there was no time for the goalie to skitter back and catch it. Lloyd, furthermore, was “shooting from the shadows” and the goalie was “looking straight into the sun.” The goalie reached and touched the ball, but couldn’t stop it and it swept into the net. “We have entered the realm of the surreal,” Lloyd recalls thinking. She was “running and laughing,” and Solo ran across the field to hug her and asked: “Are you even human?” And there was, in that moment, something of the beyond at work, a bit of God, perhaps, in the work of this solid midfielder.54