When Umberto Eco said years ago that the football field was the only field that could not be occupied by revolution, he did not mean that nothing new could emerge in football. Eco was more concerned with establishing that the gravity of the limited, measured field and the structure of eleven against eleven are conditions that determine the game and within which the new must move, whether it wants to or not. And, one could add, that the measured field and eleven against eleven already create a certain equality of means, which was once the goal of revolutionary activities in other regions and areas of society.
Something new in football cannot fall from the sky and suddenly take root; it has to grow into what is already there and find its place there, which still doesn’t happen overnight. And one of the new things at this European Championship has three names: Jamal Musiala, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams. The fact that the three players like to stay on the outside edges of the pitch, are still young and are also fairly fast are not insignificant characteristics of their style of play, but that is not what makes them new.
A different tone, a different attitude
When Jamal Musiala says, for example, that he has already scored all the goals that we see him score in the game many times in training, i.e. he has practiced them, you get closer to the new thing than by looking at certain skills such as skillful ball control. Musiala is not talking about the striker’s gene or goal-scoring instinct that works in him in a mysterious way, but about training.
His goals are the result of practice, learning and the insight into the situational application of certain coordination when the opportunity arises. Musiala not only knows this, he can also articulate it in such a good mood that one can only be amazed. Of course, his good mood is also connected to the fact that things are not only going better than well for him in the tournament so far, which also applies to the two Spaniards Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams.
Hoe, tip, pen: Cord Riechelmann is an author, biologist and philosopher and lives in Berlin.Photo archive, editing FAZ
Nevertheless, there remains an unexplained sense of amazement at the clarity of the articulation. Musiala not only seems to know what his goal to make it 2-0 against Denmark looks like from above, and that doesn’t just seem to be because he was able to see his goal again on the giant stadium screen. It seems as if he can not only assess the course and sequence of his goals and the others involved.
It is not unreasonable to assume that he has also realised the “intellectual” part in his and the others’ goals. And that is not just a different tone, but also a different attitude. Musiala, Yamal and Williams really do have an understanding of the replaceability and finiteness of their physical art in the game, and that does not make them arrogant either in their game or in their speech. Just as Lamine Yamal knows that he can dribble past a few opponents, but often lets it go because it is not about his own enjoyment.
A new generation: Lamine Yamal (l.) and Nico Williams are not only young, but different.Reuters
In general, the way people talk about the relationship between individualization – individual skills and mistakes – and the team at this European Championship is different than it was when “the team” was everything. There is surprisingly little talk about genes and instincts, even though it has certainly not gotten around that genes, just like money, don’t score goals. Which of course doesn’t mean that you can’t buy Yamal or Musiala with money.
It’s just that it’s now a bit embarrassing when every other commentary sentence says that the Spanish team was extremely effective in the game against Croatia, only to then accuse the same Spanish team of being ineffective in the next two games because they wasted a series of great scoring opportunities. Commentators like Christoph Kramer are more pleasant. For example, when there is too much criticism of the French team’s boring, uninspired, tired or uninnovative game, Kramer says as calmly as Musiala that he has liked the French team so far. The best thing about it is that you can see that this is true and that it is also because he not only sees the French team’s games, but also thinks about them.
Learning from the model
It is not unlikely that this European Championship, in contrast to the famous “summer fairytale of 2006”, will one day be seen as an expression of a different enthusiasm for the game, which leads to many things, but certainly not to a homogeneous union of nations united in football fever. In the teams in the quarter-finals, the relationship between extreme individualization and high-tech-supported team service is already too advanced to be described with simple schemes such as “the team is the star”. Players like Virgil van Dijk or Toni Kroos, both extremely individual, are so special precisely because they have the whole game in their heads for every second of the game, even when they are knocking you off your feet.
And unlike in the days of Zindine Zidane, who had to explain to his teammates that the game is made up of combinations that you first have to have in your head before they become reality on the pitch, they are coming up against a whole swarm of young players like Jamal Musiala, Lamine Yamal, Rico Williams and Xavi Simons. Players who have seen Zidane play without being directly impressed by his dominant presence on the pitch. If you like, that is the most positive effect of any evolution: having learned from the model in the next generation or the generation after that without direct physical contact, as the youngsters are showing at this European Championship.
