Communism and Capitalism of Football - Part 1

The Cold War lasted forty-six years from 1945 to 1991. The war was not a physical one. It was not a financial one. It was not geographical, not religious and not even political. It was a war of ideology. It was a war between two superpower nations who had polar opposite views as to how humans should be organised to live in society. It was a war of theory. It was a war between two nations who disagreed about how a human should live. It was a war about how each of them thought about the universe. To say it was a “cold” war is somewhat misleading. It wasn’t played out because of any legitimate reason. It was played out simply because each of them wanted to prove that they were right. After forty-six years of conflict and verbal squabbling, the Soviet Union fell and with it, the war. Or did it?

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN – JUNE 15: Sergei Yuran of USSR is tackled by Adri van Tiggelen of Netherlands during the UEFA European Championships 1992 Group 2 match between Netherlands and USSR held at the Ullevi Stadium on June 15, 1992 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The essence of communism was that it valued the collective over the individual. Every member in a society was equal to the person next to him. Every member of society had an equal input into the functioning of the society and each one was expected to contribute. The whole philosophy was based on the fact that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole – that if everyone contributed, the whole community would function more efficiently and no person would be left disadvantaged. It wasn’t just a matter of economic or social policy; communism was a matter of principle. It was the correct ideology simply because it was believed that it was.

Capitalism, on the other hand, valued individual freedom; it valued the ability to express the very best that a man could be. Freedom of expression, invention and competition are key values. It goes without saying that capitalism allows the best to rise to the top and the mediocre to sink to the bottom. The disadvantage is that conflict always arises between the top and bottom of society. The people at the top are defensive and seek to hold onto their status while the people at the bottom rebel and seek to displace the men at the top.

The Cold War has of course ended, but in football, it has reached a crescendo. The war between collective football and individual football has peaked. Throughout the history of football, a struggle has existed between those who believe that players should be given the freedom to play, and those who believe that players must work within a system. Two of the greatest national sides were the 1970′s Brazil and the 1970′s Netherlands. These two great teams existed at about the same time and yet had opposite ideas on how the game should be played. If we disregard specific tactics, Brazil represented the individualism of capitalism while the total football of the Netherlands was based on the principles of coordinated teamwork of communism. Brazil scored goals goals through dribbling, the Dutch through passing. Brazil were a team full of excellent players, while the Netherlands were an excellent team. Both national teams will be remembered as two of the greatest teams to have ever played the game, but they were different from each other. The battle of individual vs collective has always marked football and it will continue to do so.

Barcelona

Barcelona is the perfect example of what the Soviet Union had epitomized. It is the gold standard and the philosophical Mount Everest of collectivism/communism. Barcelona display all the trademarks of being a communist club, without quite reaching that state. The resemblance is so close, in fact, that the grey area between imitating, and being, is almost abolished, and the two ideas merge into one.

Barcelona’s system of play relies on the transfer of the ball via the mode of passing. So great is Barca’s reliance on passing the ball that a word is used to describe it – tiki taka. To pass the ball, an individual must be willing to sacrifice possession of the ball in order to give it to someone else. To hold onto it is selfish. It is an admission of weakness of thought, that one cannot rid himself of the temptation to keep the ball for himself. It is an admission that one does not believe in his team-mates and does not trust them. Guardiola once said of his team: “This team will respect a philosophy.” The philosophy is all-encompassing and it filters through every level of the club, right down to the kids and parents.

Guardiola is a smart man and he thought deeply about how to make his team even better. Realizing that he could add more variety in his attack, he bought Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Inter Milan. By bringing in the tall Swedish striker, Guardiola was making a huge statement – he was bringing in a player who was different from the players he already had. The likes of Messi, Xavi, Pedro, Iniesta, Busquets were all brought up – schooled – to follow the doctrine of collective football and sacrifice. In Ibrahimovic, Guardiola was bringing in a man who was the star in every team he had played for and was not the equal of his team mates. Zlatan had been in several clubs and thus was not as receptive to learning a whole new religion from the very beginning. Guardiola had bought an individualist – who believed that he was different – to a club that condemned such personalities – it was why Ronaldinho was booted out as well. Ultimately, this particular transfer would end in failure, but the fact that Guardiola chose to spend such a huge amount of money on a rebel was suggestive of the slight doubt he had in Barca’s philosophy.

Just like the people of the Soviet Union, during weak economic times, with lack of infrastructural development, food shortages and lack of progress, people start to question how their country is being run and whether communism is working. When the United States became the number one country in the world under Ronald Reagan, surpassing the Soviet Union, the Russian people started to doubt their own country and sought prosperity like the Americans. It was this shift in attitude which led to uprisings against the Soviet government and ultimately brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The difference between the Soviet Union and Barcelona is that the latter is currently prospering and all is harmonious within its walls. However, the Soviet Union also prospered before it collapsed.

There were signs last season when Real Madrid overpowered all opposition towards winning the league, while Barcelona were struggling to beat opponents who had become used to their patterns of play. Some observers criticised Barca’s reliance on the collective, remarking that they were passing it for the sake of passing it and that their tiki taka philosophy had become a cult-like religion, instead of a mere philosophy. People had started to grow tired of possession and some called for flair and dribbling to be brought back to the team for the sake of results. To quash the uprisings, Barcelona changed the leader – a common practice to give a renewed sense of hope back to the people.

It was a smart move too as Vilanova brought enthusiasm and motivation back to the team and the people who grew tired of hearing one message over and over. Vilanova preached the same message, yet he inspired the doubters that possession was still the best answer to football. Communist football had remained and had resurged under a fresh leader. To this day, Barcelona are as deeply entrenched in the philosophy of collective football as they have ever been. Until the next day arrives when people start to grow jealous of another more successful philosophy, Barcelona will remain a communist club.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi

Even more so than Barcelona, Soviet football in the 1970s and 1980s paralleled the political climate of the time. During a time of forced technological advances during the space race, Soviet football was also heading in the direction of the scientific and the methodical. One coach of this era epitomised and symbolised communist philosophy - the legendary Ukranian Valeriy Lobanovskyi. As a player, he was a dashing winger, full of trickery and invention, but his coaching would contradict his style as a player. As a coach, he revolutionized how sports science and statistics were to be used to maximize the talents of the players.

In him was acted out the great struggle between individuality and system: the player in him wanted to dribble, to invent tricks and to embarrass his opponents, and yet, as he later admitted, his training at the Polytechnic Institute drove him to a systematic approach, to break down football into its component tasks. Football, he explained, eventually became for him a system of twenty-two elements – two sub-systems of eleven elements – moving within a defined area (the pitch) and subject to a series of restrictions (the laws of the game). If the two sub-systems were equal, the outcome would be a draw. If one were stronger, it would win.

- Jonathan Wilson in Inverting the Pyramid

Lobanovskyi was fascinated that these sub-systems had the characteristic of being greater than the sum of the individuals. In other words, smaller but more number of factions of players working together could outperform bigger but less number of factions of players. When all of the factions were operating at optimal efficiency, the product (the team) would perform at maximum efficiency, and would theoretically win 100% of games.

Communist Soviet Union had similar factions of communities organised into what were called kolkhoz or communes. These were communities of farmers who would work together to farm crops on a large scale and subsequently donate all that was grown to the state for redistribution. The theory was that communities working together would create economies of scale. An economic term, economies of scale basically states that as operations of production increase in scale, the cost per unit decreases due to the greater efficiency of producing a single unit. In other words, the larger the scale of operation, the less it costs to produce a single unit, which reduces costs overall. Subsequently, a business can produce more products at the same cost as before or even lower.

For Lobanovskyi, the result of the economies of scale within his team would be – as he termed it – universality. The notion that defenders would attack, and attackers defend - to create eleven efficient players who all contribute equally no matter where they played on the pitch – was at the core of his footballing philosophy. Now opponents had to deal with eleven players to defend against, and eleven players stopping them from scoring. In Lobanovskyi’s mind, this was much better than having only the defenders defending and the forwards attacking.

For the remainder of this story, click here: Part 2