Soccer styles and national identity

As side-reading for the World Cup, I’ve been reading Inverting the Pyramid, by the UK journalist Jonathan Wilson. It is simply the best book on the evolution of strategy in sport that I’ve ever read. It is a tremendous corrective to one of the biggest failings of sports journalism, which is that lack of strategic insight into what is happening on the field. (Hockey journalism in Canada is the absolute worst at this – see my friend Wayne’s post at his sports blog for the grim details of what is wrong).

What Wilson does is tell the history of soccer through the changes in the strategic deployment of players, or what he calls “shape”. It’s the tale of the transition from the 2-3-5 system we were all taught as children, to the fully inverted 4-4-2 (and its many variations).

What I’ve found fascinating is the way both shape and the “style” a team adopts within a given shape was from the start caught up in political questions and anxieties of national identity. More interesting still is that the early styles adopted at the international level by different countries are the same stereotypical traits that we attribute to their teams today. The British are suspicious of technique, preferring a more direct boot-and-run game. The Germans are clinical, the Italians defensive, the Brazilians obsessed with individual flair. That’s how they are, and how they’ve always been.

It is easy to see why distinct national styles would have emerged a hundred years ago, when countries were isolated and the games evolved according to local conditions. But today’s game is thoroughly global, the players cross-pollinating the top national leagues throughout Europe. Why, when they go back to play for their national side, do they fall into decades-old manners of play? I can think of a few explanations:

1. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe the idea of national styles or characteristics is something that is subject to huge confirmation bias. We project onto the Brazilians more flair than they are actually showing, or when we watch the Germans we automatically start looking for evidence of cold-hearted, clinical play.

I think there is something to this. The variations of play have certainly converged over the decades, there is far less variation between countries than there was even a few decades ago. If you think of the comparison with political ideologies: Once upon a time there was a great deal of variation and “live” options. But just as the West reached something like the end of history ideologically, we’ve reached something similar with soccer. The differences between countries are on the margins, reflected less in overall strategy than in slight differences in style and – perhaps most noticeably – in attitudes toward sportsmanship.

2. National playing styles endure because of some version of what the philosopher Ian Hacking calls the “looping effect”: agents often find themselves internalizing and acting out the traits and characteristics of the social “kind” or category in which they find themselves slotted. Hacking has explored how this works in various psychological pathologies, but you can see how it would work in soccer: the fans, the media, even the coaches have a sense of what it means to be, say, an “Italian” soccer player, and the players themselves take pride in that, and start to play according to that stereotype. This loops back on itself and becomes remarkably self-preserving.

3. In a moment of crazy serendipity, as I was thinking about this yesterday, via the excellent The Browser I came across a blog post from the economist Rajiv Sethi, in which he asks virtually the same question, but he comes at it from the angle of asking why diving remains so prevalent in soccer. Borrowing some ideas from a paper on organizational behaviour by Jean Tirole, he argues that once an organization has an established “collective” identity, it becomes rational for new entrants to adopt and sustain that identity. With respect to diving, he writes:

Groups consist of overlapping cohorts, with older members mixed in with newer ones. Those older members who have behaved "badly" in the past and thus ruined their reputations have no incentive to behave "well" currently. But suspicion also falls on the newer members, who cannot be perfectly distinguished from the older ones. This suspicion alters incentives in such a manner as to make it self-fulfilling. Even if the entire group would benefit from a change in reputation, this may be impossible to accomplish.