The death of diversity

Technical diversity, the lifeblood of football’s beauties for a hundred years or more, is dying and world trends are conspiring to kill the game as we have known it.

How often have we heard that boring old cliché ‘a clash of styles’ from TV pundits and commentators? Well, fear no more of being bored again.

Football styles of cultural and national distinction are disappearing and the world’s favourite sport is becoming a wash of grey, frontierless homogeneity. Soon the word style will vanish form the language of football forever.

The most alarming signal is coming from South America, the traditional bastion of a certain ‘style’ that was at the centre of that continent’s football’s culture ever since European immigrant workers planted the game’s seeds there in the late 19th Century, and with which the South Americans won half the World Cups of the 18 contested so far.

It was a style of expression, elegance and wit, its soul being the premise that there is no football without panache and poise and that, in any case, those things are ultimate avenues to victory.

There was proof enough after that brand of football, espoused by the early Uruguay and Brazil, delivered South America five of the first nine World Cups.

So the chase for results did not intervene to suggest that beauty should be abandoned and make way for lesser, drearier alternatives in order to achieve them.

Later the Brazilians did flirt intermittently with notions of European-inspired so called modernity, but always with failure.

Mario Zagallo, who governed the magnificent Brazil of 1970, flopped badly four years later when he abandoned the artists and replaced them with artisans.

Claudio Coutinho, as Brazil coach, went on with something similar in 1978, only to fail.

And the worst was Sebestiao Lazaroni in 1990 whose Brazil, a deliberate clone of European methods, didn’t even make the World Cup quarter finals.

Now Dunga, the current Brazil coach, is again on a similar agenda but this time the timing might be right.

Dunga’s Brazil won the Copa America, beating the stylish Argentina 3:0 in the final and his tactical methods, under fire pre-tournament by a Brazilian press yearning for loyalty to the jogo bonito, were forgiven in the wake of victory.

Our South American correspondent, Tim Vickery, wrote about this broader trend in that part of the world recently in an article titled The number 10 disappears.

He referred to Peru, once one of the most watchable teams in the world, abandoning the traditional playmaker as ‘a reflection of international trends [whereby] the physical development of the game, the contemporary emphasis on athleticism, means that teams seek to power their way through the opposing defence rather than playing their way through.’

Worryingly, Tim quotes the former Brazilian great turned commentator Tostao saying: "The idea that Brazilian football is different, lighter, more attractive, full of dribbles and one-twos, needs to be rethought. Football has globalised in terms of the style of play and the physical structure of the players."

"In Brazil and the entire world there is a predominance of strong marking and crosses struck into the penalty area. Football today is a sport for tall, strong players."

Globalisation is indeed the operative word.

Decades ago, before satellite television and the proliferation of cross-coverage of various, particularly European, football genres, technical norms peculiar to countries and cultures existed and grew in isolation from each other.

If you were a European you were always in awe of Brazilian football because you hardly ever saw it, and vice versa. There was very little technical influence across cultures.

All this has now changed.

Today coaches, budding, impressionable players and fans, see just about everything and fall under the spell of what they perceive as the most marvellous and successful teams and leagues. The cultural borders have come down.

Accelerating the process has been the Bosman ruling, which allowed freedom of player movement between countries and largely did away with foreign quotas.

Club teams by and large have lost or are losing their national identity. Some might rejoice at Arsenal not playing typically English football but how could they, given that they are coached by a Frenchman and have hardly any English players?

All this is a great pity.

The core strength of football, the backbone of its power, is that it is universal and that, till now, it has been as diverse in its technical texture as are the world’s peoples, races, cultures, languages and religions.

We always knew how the Germans would play because we expected their style to mirror the German culture. And so it applied to the French, the English, the east Europeans, the South Americans, the Africans and the Asians.

International contests, especially at the national team level, were no more football contests than they were disputes between cultural and racial norms and values.

It is ultimately this that makes the World Cup so wonderful and so gripping. The cultural diversity of the 32-nation finals, especially since a quota of Africans and Asians has been added to it, is a truly wondrous thing.

Fans worldwide flock to the World Cup because they feel part of the experience, most often identifying with one or more of the contestants via an emotional link that is related to their own identity.

But the fear now must be that all this, at some point in the future, will disappear.

A manifestation of this process is the way players carrying non-European genes transform and adapt to European conditions once they face the challenge of Europe’s fiercely competitive club environment. Within a short time, if they are to be successful, their distinct cultural identities are shed.

Didier Drogba is a good case: since joining Chelsea he has become a tower of steel and muscle, an apex of intimidating power at the head of Jose Mourinho’s tactical design. He is in essence a battering ram, just another Tony Hately, the only difference being that Drogba has better technique. And that better technique is where the similarities between Drogba and anything African end.

One has to wonder if Roger Milla, hailed as the greatest African of all time, would have got five minutes of game time with Mourinho, not to mention Abedi Pele, George Weah, Finidi George or Jay Jay Okocha.

Of course some players either cannot or just refuse to adapt, such as Juan Roman Riquelme, who was sent packing back to Buenos Aires from Spain, ultimately because he was unable or unwilling to discard his South American technical values and become sufficiently ‘European’.

He might one day be hailed as a past hero for a cultural cause, something that is now becoming redundant in the needs of modern football.

All this does not necessarily mean that football is worse than before, depending on one’s taste, or that footballers today are not better than their predecessors.

It just means that things are becoming rather the same, which many would read as rather boring.

Where all this will lead is difficult to predict but it is a trend that is surely impossible to reverse.

Globalisation is an irreversible process and even the re-imposition of foreign player quotas may not be enough to put on the brakes.

Much will depend in the future on who the winners are and with what kind of football, given our sad instinct to blindly follow winners and build shrines to results.

What is certain is that football’s rich technical diversity is dying, will soon be dead and there will be no resurrection.

top