Football: is professional life actually boring?

The text is an excerpt from the book “We’ll live forever. My unbelievable year with 1. FC Union Berlin” by Christoph Biermann.

When I happened to overhear a conversation that Union strikers Sebastian Andersson and Sebastian Polter were having about their dogs, I asked them: “Why do you all have dogs?” That was an exaggeration because not all Union players had dogs, but a remarkable number. Polter grinned at me and said somewhat guiltily: “Because we have so much time.”

What they did with that time, however, besides keeping their dogs busy, was not that easy to find out. My questions were answered at times emphatically short, at times slightly perplexed. The family fathers did “something with the family”. A popular answer was to go out to eat, often with colleagues. There were players who watched football so much that I was able to talk to them about VfL Bochum’s defensive problems. There were NBA fans and American football fans, and there were the power series watchers, YouTube and Instagram hangouts.

The suitcases that Polter and defender Florian Huebner had with them when they went on a long trip were almost symbolic of the leisure activities. A screen was built into its lid, and the other half of the case contained a game console and control devices. Most of the players gambled, but never told me about it with great enthusiasm or detail. Either they suspected that I would then think they were stupid, or they themselves thought it was a “guilty pleasure”, something that gave them pleasure, but of which they were ashamed. Computer games don’t have a good reputation, and the fact that they spent hours playing soccer simulations or shooting games could come across as immature.

In addition, there was the pronounced ability to sleep a lot. There was something inadequate about that too, because the amount of time people spend sleeping in their lives actually decreases with age. So basically they slept as much as elementary school students, and their time budget at the computer console matched that of teenagers. Their daily routines were also schooled, the plans came via WhatsApp and dictated when they had to be there for training, when there was food or when the bus left for the stadium.

But if so much was given, why didn’t they make more of their free time? There were exceptions in the team, albeit few.

Obviously it wasn’t that easy to make more of your time. Midfielder Grischa Prömel’s friends, for example, studied almost all of them, including his girlfriend. At the beginning of his career he too had started a distance learning course in economics and almost finished it. But when the exams were approaching, he was already a professional at the second division Karlsruhe, he interrupted his studies. “It was no longer related to football,” he told me. Prömel did not come from a family that would be called “educationally distant”, on the contrary: his father was an architect, his mother a movement therapist.

Nevertheless, even Prömel found it difficult to explain to me what kind of life he led beyond football. He was enthusiastic about the city in which he lived for almost two years: “Berlin is a gift.” But he unpacked the present less often than he would have liked. When friends came to visit and wanted to explore Berlin, he might still be there at the beginning of a week, but not after two days before the game. Then he preferred to lie down in the hammock that really existed on his balcony and his girlfriend scoffed: “You lead a life like a 65-year-old.”

The American writer David Foster Wallace, who was a talented tennis player himself, has written some texts about tennis that are among the best that can be read about this sport and about sport in general. In “Federer made of meat and not”, a pamphlet in honor of the Swiss champion, he writes about the “illusion of intimacy” that arises when you watch tennis on television. “The slow-motion repetitions, enlargements and graphics privilege viewers so much that we no longer realize how much is lost in the preparation for television. The pure physicality of top tennis is largely lost, a feeling for the speeds at which the balls move move and the players react. “

A mess with an instantly shrinking space

Foster Wallace explains this loss by the fact that the cameras capture the court in such a way that it is shortened in perspective because they are mostly set up behind the baseline. This shrinks the court and the spectator cannot develop a feeling for the incredible physical energy behind the strokes and how difficult it is to defend the surface of the court.

There is a comparable effect in football, albeit with the opposite sign. In television football, we mostly see the game from the perspective of the guide camera, which makes the playing field seem bigger than it is. In addition, this perspective gives the viewer an overview that no player has down on the court. Every football fan has thought or called out loud: “Why isn’t it playing?” How could a player overlook his colleague?

The physicality of the game is also lost in television football. When I was standing on the training ground, sometimes I couldn’t shut my mouth in amazement. Up close, I was amazed how an approximately structured game could come about. I was amazed that the players even saw one of their colleagues because they had to run back and forth, control the ball or continue playing straight away, and were immediately harassed by an opponent. It was a mess with an instantly shrinking space where the ball was.

You don’t notice it at home on the sofa. Even most of the seats in the stadium give no impression of the infernal intensity with which people run, fight for the ball, flank and shoot. This was intensified on match days by this ninety-minute state of emergency of shouting, chants and cursing, which you have to imagine as if you were doing your office work with the sirens wailing and the lights flashing.

The rarest resource on the field: time

This state of emergency was quantifiable. Athletic trainer Martin Krüger usually had a complete statistical analysis of the game in his inbox on the same day. On the third match day against Borussia Dortmund, for example, it showed that team captain Christopher Trimmel had run 11.6 kilometers, completed 24 sprints over 477 meters and 35 tempo runs over 354 meters. In a total of 101 minutes and 45 seconds including stoppage time, he ran 534 times, i.e. five times a minute.

But even those numbers didn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on on the pitch. Because while he was racing around there (a fan once called him “racing pig”, and he liked that a lot), he was still busy fulfilling a whole lot of tactical requirements. Especially since Trimmel, like all his teammates, never experienced a game in the Bundesliga in which they sometimes managed to make ends meet with reduced strength. They always had to go to their limits.

Such data, some of which are publicly available, also contribute to the illusion that we understand what happens on a football pitch when two professional teams compete there. But they say nothing about the rarest resource on the field: time.

During the winter break, Yunus Malli was loaned from VfL Wolfsburg, a player who earned a lot more than what Union could normally pay. But Malli had hardly played at his old club and really wanted to go to the European Championship with the Turkish national team. So he looked for a club where it was more likely that he would get playing time.

It was immediately obvious what skill Mallis was paying so much for. The chaos on the pitch was less chaotic for him because he gave himself a head start. On the one hand, Malli had very good control of the ball, so he didn’t have to worry about receiving the ball. He also read the game better than most of his peers, so he understood where to move so that the ball could be passed to him without immediate pressure again. This gave him more time, which we are talking about fractions of a second.