Football should worry about the product, not the packaging

Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.

>> Rory SmithThe New York Times
Published : 9 April 2022, 06:28 AM
Updated : 9 April 2022, 06:38 PM

That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of football analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.

The answer was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all the other players combined. The best way to win in football, Jeandupeux discovered, was to ensure that as little football as possible was played.

He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action.

His timing was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International football Association Board — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organisation, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.

A few months after that World Cup, Blatter created what he called Task Force 2000, precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of making the game more dynamic and dramatic.

Jeandupeux’s letter crystallised many of their thoughts. Jeandupeux suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a football cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.

The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.

Everything in modern football flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.

It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at football’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.

But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of football itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The football that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.

It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European football’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”

Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chair of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris Saint-Germain or chair of beIN Sports or chair of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.

They range from the rather vague — amounting essentially to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFTs” — to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes it is worth exploring the idea of an expanded European Super Cup, turning a semi-serious showpiece into a tournament in its own right, one that may be played outside Europe. He would consider a Final Four-style tournament for the Champions League. He would, reading between the lines, contemplate changing kickoff times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.

Despite the very obvious self-interest of their source, despite the fact that not all of these ideas are his, and despite the circumstance — almost exactly a year since the sudden launch and swift death of the European Super League project — these ideas should not be rejected out of hand.

They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect. Nor are they entirely devoid of merit. football would do well to remember that, at first, it was assumed that the backpass law would simply encourage goalkeepers to launch the ball at every given opportunity; nobody imagined that its ultimate consequence would be Éderson.

Expanding the Super Cup is, on the face of it, a reasonable idea. It is possible that the benefits of staging the semifinals and final of the Champions League in a single location — the sense of occasion, the drama of a one-and-done knockout — would outweigh the undoubted complications in security, logistics and the loss of revenue and, crucially, atmosphere generated by semifinals on a club’s home turf.

Even the concept of teams’ being given a pass into the Champions League despite not qualifying domestically is not quite as absurd as has been presented: Though such a proposal would, doubtlessly, increase the inequality that remains the game’s greatest challenge, there is at least some logic in the idea that how you perform in the tournament itself should be rewarded.

There is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, then, simply because they represent change. The problem, in fact, is the opposite; these ideas do not represent change enough.

It was striking, for example, that Al-Khelaifi should cite the Super Bowl as an example of the sort of things football should be doing. Nobody, anywhere, is quite so obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run Europe’s football teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, or the reality that football is more popular by an order of magnitude worldwide than the NFL, and that it has achieved all of that despite not having a halftime show.

Football’s power brokers propose these things — fireworks, dance troupes, rebranded competitions, format changes and all the rest of it — because, while the changes that would have the most effect are far simpler, they are very much not in their interests.

The way to make every game “an event,” as Al-Khelaifi put it, is not to invite Maroon 5. It is to increase the competitive balance between the two competing teams so that the result does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stages are not “compelling” is not because there is no Jean-Michel Jarre-style light show before kickoff; it is because it is a group stage, so there is no genuine sense of jeopardy.

Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of football — of sports — understands that: Memories only need to stretch as far back as last week, and the playoffs for the World Cup, to realise that drama is not generated by the staging of a game or even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.

Al-Khelaifi, of course, is not going to propose any change that radical. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit PSG or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues to dominate UEFA’s thinking. Instead, he and his peers will continue to believe — and to insist — that football’s route to growth lies in improving the packaging, rather than the product.

©2022 The New York Times Company