The Relationism Fallacy

The false duality between Positional and Relational

Nowadays, the discussion of relationist football tactics as a reaction to the positional play (or Juego de Posicion) has led us to fight between a dichotomy between these two supposed styles of understanding football. But is it that important? And what’s behind the building of a new emergent theory of football?

In Brazil, the relationist movement came as an intent to rebuild football understanding through the lens of our cultural heritage, yet it has lost itself in its inception. But first, let’s see what led us to this point.

The duality between traditional and modern

Football in Brazil went through a divide during the 2000’s through the 2010’s, especially when brazilians went on to have more access to other leagues, namely the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A. Even though Serie A and La Liga already had some games on open TV since the 80-90’s (and Bundesliga too, but less), their impact on brazilian football culture was somewhat marginal, much more of a “what I heard” and less of a “I saw”. With the influx of brazilian players to these leagues, some games were transmitted and more focused on the best players — or as they call here, the cracks — and less on organized discussion of the games. You’d see comments on foreign cracks like Batistuta — who made a duo with Edmundo at the Fiorentina attack — or the Galacticos at Real Madrid. The discussion were more focused on the players and less on the game on the pitch, organization and so.

In Brazil, the football was fairly balanced — which led to the image that Brazilian football is the most difficult in the world, since it had 12 or 13 big clubs fighting for a title, which was not the case at all. It wasn’t uncommon for some clubs to distance themselves from others in the league table. An example of this was the Brazilian championship won three times by São Paulo, in 2006–07–08. With such a competitive championship, nevertheless, Brazilian football evolved as such through a pragmatic lens: most coaches relied on defensive sturdiness and flashes of creativity in attack. As the popular saying speaks: “attacking football makes you win games, defensive football makes you win titles”. That being said, it was a further development of an already physically demanding, destroying-rather-than-creative brand of football. Set pieces, back three, defensive midfielders focused solely on tackling and intercepting — only to lose the ball in a 1m pass — was the most important thing. Muricy Ramalho, an exponent and 4 times Brazilian champion (3 times with São Paulo and once with Fluminense), became synonymous with his brand of football, dubbed Muricybol:

• Defensive solidity
• Good at set pieces
• Things are tough defensively? Ball to the sideline. (Bola pro mato que o jogo é de campeonato / Ball to the sideline because there’s still time)
• Direct football, with lots of crossing towards a number 9
• Playing it simple

The brazilian pragmatic approach to football during the 00’s gave birth to a generation of football fans who could see other brands of football, especially in Europe, who would play a more expansive type of game. It all summed up in the demanding of a more “modern” type of football. But let’s not see it as a need for to destroy brazilian football, but to reform it in a more attacking minded and less defensive approach. The idea is that the brazilian football was too closed to foreign influences and the same grouping of coaches moving teams each season. Joel Santana, Luxemburgo, Muricy Ramalho, Abel Braga, Celso Roth and others would go from one club to another, leading to a “musical chairs play” (Dança das cadeiras, in portuguese). Nothing really new came at that time, just the recrudescence of pragmatism and hyperdependence on the good players. There were much more players to destroy and stop play than players who had the ability to play football with the ball.

The 2010’s World Cup and defeat of Brazil to the Netherlands at the Quarter-Finals went on to pave the way for a new generation of managers and coaches who were labeled “modern”.

The New Generation never got it going

The new generation of Brazilian managers never got it going. Brazil, different from their neighbors or the Europeans, never managed to compile their training methods or worked towards a historical method of analyzing football through the years. I usually say that “traditional’ brazilian managers and coaches are more bound to “with whom they worked with and learned” and less of a formal type of knowledge.

For that, I feel the need to cite the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth in the text “The guru and the conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia”, as much it may seem weird. Barth spoke about two types of information and knowledge transaction in societies. The first, the guru-type, was made through continued knowledge-acquisition, adaptation and revitalization of this wisdom; the conjurer, in the other hand, was a knower of an unknown wisdom to society, and from that derived his power: only he can pass the knowledge on, but if he does it, he loses its power. That way, the conjurer-type must hide his knowledge to maintain its upper hand upon the non-knowers. Barth speaks:

“If a guru gets himself contradicted, or if his knowledge stock is gone, he’s quickly obfuscated by his rivals or disciples. […] Differently of what happens to the conjurer, the guru can make his performance more powerful:

a) in function only of the mass of knowledge he has;

b) through revitalizing this knowledge with the adding of other resources, taking it borrowed from colleagues or acquiring competences in new areas;

c) through creativity, inventing more complex forms, sophistication and refinements;

d) through the installment of knowledge, distributing it in small portions and making longer and slower the course of the studies;

e) in the end, also are not foreign to the guru the strategies of mystification, complication and interposition of a ceremonial and elaborate language, with lots of technicalities and honorifics. (BARTH, 1990, p. 146–147, author’s translation from Portuguese)

Brazilian football, until then, was somewhat of a guild of conjurers, who managed to obtain his wisdom through empirical observation of other conjurers, limited for those who were “initiated” in the ritual. That means, football knowledge was limited to the managers and players, at best a bit of knowledge on the Physical Education on the Universities — but your success would depend on with whom you were a beginner, if you went through an internship with a person already inside the field. You may be able to trace a bit of lineage, like Muricy Ramalho had influences from some managers like Telê Santana, but that is the “know-how”, not the knowledge in itself. The savoir-faire is part of the knowledge in football, but is not all of it.

That differs from other football cultures, like the argentinian football culture of managers, which owes much of its knowledge in compilation of this mass of wisdom that are passed on generations and are possible to most people to learn. As an example, Osvaldo Zubeldia and Geronazzo would write in 1965 the book Tactica y Estrategia del Futbol (Tactics and Strategy of Football) about their ideas, their analysis on the brazilian 4–2–4 that won 2 World Cups in a row. That is unprecedented in comparison to Brazilian football knowledge, which had its knowledge centered on the oral tradition of managers, and maintaining their power (and job). Brazilian football knowledge was much more akin to the conjure-type of knowledge, whilst Argentinian football knowledge was much more of a guru-type of knowledge, where you can trace the lineage of the knowledge, the founding of schools of thought and so.

That being said, when the new generation came — and the old generation of managers had lost part of their power — they haven’t had the access to the type of knowledge the older managers had, having their knowledge molded by other schools of thought — which sometimes would be called “modern-minded”. But don’t think that means they bought ideas from outside and tried to apply it in brazilian football, but more of a reform of tactics. A Brazilian who reads a book from England won’t ever read it as an Englishman, but as a Brazilian who may interpret things in other nuances. The brazilian new generation went on to bring the back four, the 4–2–3–1 with wide attacking players, but adapting to a Brazilian mould: full backs always attacking, a sturdy double pivot, a number 10 playmaking. Not the same interpretation of the 4–2–3–1 other cultures may have had (like playing defensive full backs, no number 5’s but center midfielders, etc…

Nevertheless, the lack of results and know-how to handle the football in a day-to-day basis ultimately made them fail. Also, the high managerial change rate in Brazil — and their lack of power to maintain their jobs, since they were not as powerful as the old conjurers — made their generation never living up to the expectations.

The Relationism as a Reactionary doctrinary

Most of the newer generation of coaches in Brazil applied a somewhat based type of positional or hybrid play, especially as the positional knowledge in academia was much more readily available. It was seen, nevertheless, as a modern approach to football. But the lack of results made them ultimately not living up to the expectations. From this failure and a romantic approach on football — evoking the most lyricism and the Crônica (Chronicles) type of literature where matches are described as heroic battles, which was particularly famous with Nelson Rodrigues and Mario Filho — the relationist movement, which first started being called functionalism, began as a nice try to understand football through a local lens.

From functionalism-relationism, the hypothesis is that football are played by the players and the manager must not interfere with the spontaneous creation and adaptability of players in the games. Like one relationist once said, they believe Latinamerican culture was more of a culture of compensation — “hey, you go further forward here, i’ll cover your back” — and less of a fixed position and roles. At first, the name evoked the idea of players with functions rather than positions, an attempt to distance of the positional. But it had one ultimate flaw at the start of the thought process: it implied that position based football had no functions, like players would only work in limited areas of the pitch, but no function. Well, even a player deployed at the wing will have a function in the field. It may be attacking the opposing full back, it may be cutting inside to shoot or even attacking the last line. Even in position based models, culture is important and moulds players towards certain roles. In Guardiola Confidential, from Martí Perarnau, there is a passage that cites the importance of the different knowledge and adaptation:

“The term “idiom” […] refers to a certain kind of understanding football, in the game of in the training methodology. […]

The idea is the essence of a team and its manager. The synthesis and vocation. In Pep’s case, it can be resumed in the words used by its football father, Johann Cruijff: “the idea is to have the ball”.

The idiom is the method which will allow the idea to be expressed in the pitch. Is the set of systems, activities and principles that, through the training, must be employed in the implementation of the idea.

And, in the end, the people. As elaborate they are, idea and idiom cannot be interpreted correctly if the players are not interested in cooperate. It is not only about having the correct athletes to make the idea work, what is most important: it is necessary that exists between them the predisposition to learn the secrets of the idiom, work them and correct them, without hesitation. (PERARNAU, p. 61, Translated by the Author)

Guardiola, an exponent of the Jogo de Posicion, speaks of idiom/language as a manner to explain its ideas and how one must learn the language of the game to express themselves. But it does not mean that it obliterates the cultural differences of players, but reapproaches them in different manners. For instance, in the same book it is told about Thomas Müller:

“[…] Guardiola sees clearly that he cannot field Müller as a midfielder, because his instincts prevent him from maintaining his position in the center of the field.” (PERARNAU, p. 91)”

Müller, who developed himself as a raumdeuter — a german football function, may be translated as space investigator — learned how the new language with Pep, but as the language, a natural doesn’t speak and understand the same way as a “natural”. For them to understand each other and work with each other, a middleground is found. As in Budapest from Chico Buarque, the Brazilian ghost writer José Costa could not, just by learning hungarian, become a fluent writer in Hungarian as Kósta Zsozé, as he fails to understand meaning, he would write as a Brazilian speaking in Hungarian, never as a Magyar. The distance between possibility and reality also happens in football. The acquisition of a language or idiom doesn’t mean a writer or player may be able be a full master, and even with his mastering of the language, he will create new things as so to be understood/work at its best in the pitch. This way, Müller and the other bavarian teammates would create its new creole language, with what they know and what they newly learned, to foster something new.

That’s the basis of the triad popularized by Hegel: Thesis -> Anti-thesis -> Synthesis. Even in a positional framework, the thesis (idea) is confronted by the anti-thesis (people, reality and difference of idioms) to create a new synthesis (a creole of knowledge).

Getting back to relationist football discussion, what relationists fail to see is the possibility of agency inside the football discussion, and tend to engage in dooming discussions like “football is being pasteurized” “football is being colonized by modernity”. The problem is the solution they bring: a return to the old days.

First question how do they address the cultural question? They use primarily Gilberto Freyre, a brazilian social thinker, who worked upon the idea of racial democracy in Brazil, especially when talking about football. He would speak that football in Brazil was a synthesis of the races brought here, the local cultures, as what he saw as the best Brazil. Arlei Damo speaks of this contradiction in his book “Ah, Eu sou Gaúcho!”:

In first place, one must note that our footballing identity is represented by a set of oppositions having the europeans as a framework; it couldn’t be different. Nevertheless, as he searches a “brazilian authenticity”, Freyre calls the “naughtiness” from Bahia, the “capoeira playing” from Pernambuco, and the malandragem from Rio, excluding the other “regional types” that contributed to the football to its brazilian-ness.

This framing is significant not only due to the “types” it elects/excludes, but because this proceeding means there is an intentionality. One might argue that, by showing only the contribution of the naughtiness, the capoeiragem and the malandragem, Freyre’s analysis is superficial and politically biased, and even wrong.

As a counterpoint, the mention of all the “regional types” would require a more deep study; something that had no meaning for a book preface. As it may be, one must question about how the “genuine” brazilian mould would be with the contributions of the mineiros, gaúchos and paulistas. And, with the actual discussions, why they weren’t remembered yet? (DAMO, 1998, p. 5-6)

Being so attached to the Freyrean narrative lends the discussion towards an essentialist framework, in which cultures have their own essence, and that also happens in football. It creates a dichotomy between modern and traditional that can’t be traspassed: the modernity will delete the traditions and subside the football. As we could see in the last minutes, this assumption could not be farther from truth, as it falls into the old discussion of “acculturation” the neo-evolutionism did in the Anthropology in the 60’s. This way, the relationism falls into the pure conservatism and constructed in opposition of a so called modernity — which does not exist in reality — .

Besides that, the argument of some of the most violent supporters tend to hide its true meaning, using some authors like Benjamin as so to speak about the destruction of culture by a mass culture in football, but in the end what their idea relies the most is a vulgar Heideggerianism, with Dasein as a base for their reactionary thinking. Instead of seeing and constructing the story of football in Brazil, revisiting the history of football in other marginalized regions which also contributed to brazilian football, it relies on a Dasein-lens of viewing culture: brazilian culture — what culture — has a way of being itself, its existence, and the foreigner is a danger that can destroy the world as we know now — or at least what they think the world should be. Such an essencialized view towards the culture taints the possibility of discussion with a relationist framework, which I owe them and their sect leader the Aleksandr Dugin of Football. The construction of relationist football must reconstruct its base and distance itself from the false dichotomies of tradition and modernity, and its essencialized views of football. It may even look forward looking in the beginning, as interested I was when it started, but it ended in full social and cultural conservatism that lacks coherence with reality.

As the image above says, do not accept tradition nor modernity, embrace a secret third thing — which usually is the synthesis of the interaction between cultures.

Help me continue my work so I can bring more of football to you, guys. Be my Patreon at: https://patreon.com/v_maedhros. Any help is welcome.