In an increasingly frenetic society, football seems to be going in the opposite direction.
We live in the century of the rejection of Boredom. We are constantly bombarded with notifications, news, memes and visual stimuli of all kinds. Boredom now takes on the characteristics of a luxury that we are no longer able to allow ourselves. The suffocating pressure of capitalist society requires us to sacrifice every day, hour or minute on the altar of the only modern god: profit.
As soon as we stop, as soon as we stop fulfilling our function as productive machines, emptiness takes over. Boredom, which for Giacomo Leopardi represented “the noblest of human feelings”, is today greeted with anxiety; indeed, she is forcefully chased away, mistaken for a laziness that triggers a sense of biblical guilt in us. The football match is one of the few dimensions of contemporary living in which let’s establish a relationship with Boredom. We’ll confront her. We accept it, without feeling its existential emptiness. Let’s think about it: for how many of our passions are we willing to welcome such a high percentage of empty moments? In football, the final objective is to score goals: the entertainment offered by a match is measurable by the number of chances produced within it. But every time we go to the stadium, in our hearts, we are aware that there is the possibility of witnessing a pale 0-0 with no chances produced (0xg, we would say today). Yet this doesn’t bother us.
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It doesn’t dissuade us from going to the stadium or watching an entire match on television. We accept the possibility of encountering Boredom, therefore making those ninety minutes more recovery time not productive in our day. A time that the Latins would have defined leisure, as it is not tied to the yoke of profit. How many other times does a similar experience happen to us? We study per the exam grade, let’s do the shopping per eat, let’s watch a series per get excited, we fall in love per complete us, we order futile things on Amazon per fill an internal void. There is always an end. Every action, every gesture is oriented towards something else; it must be useful.
If we also refer to other sports such as basketball or tennis, given thehigh score, whether the match is aesthetically satisfying or not, we are certain that the points will be awarded continuously, therefore the sport in question will achieve its objective, and we, with each point scored, will experience the dopamine release typical of the passage from the middle (the action in basketball, exchange in tennis) to the end (the point). This is not the case in football: a match can end 0-0. It may happen that the final objective of the sport in question, i.e. scoring, is not achieved, thus betraying the principle of profit. There is no final satisfaction, but only a intercourse interrupted which lasts for ninety minutes.
Even a game with 31 goals can be very boring.
It’s as if the machines in a paper mill, despite working in all their gears, stopped producing paper. We could admire all the production steps, feeling satisfaction when faced with the preparation of the fibers or the pressing, but the final result would be missing: the paper. What makes the whole operation useful would be missing. In the same way, witnessing a 0-0 without opportunities, we are witnesses of the anxiety of two teams who, often with well-oiled game mechanisms, try in every way to produce opportunities to score, to complete the meaning of football , but they can’t. They phrase things, they exchange the ball, they implement the schemes tested in training, but they miss the appointment with the usefulness, like a student who after a month of intense study doesn’t show up for the exam. It’s true, even other sources of entertainment such as cinema, especially arthouse cinema, go through slower and more boring story phases, but they always do so to achieve a goal.
A film often takes pauses to introduce its characters, to subtly immerse us in its atmosphere, and then make us jump out of our seats or writhe with emotion in the final act. It is not boredom as an end in itself, but rather utilitarian boredom, built around the table with a view to achieving profit. In the boredom of a Verona-Empoli 0-0 on a Monday in October, however, nothing is planned – no screenwriter would be so sadistic. We sit on the couch, and make the decision to dedicate ninety minutes to a show that may offer nothing.
If they asked us Rationally why we are doing it, perhaps, we wouldn’t even be able to answer. When our mother passes through the room we almost pretend to change the channel, as if we were unable to justify having invested that time in a – boring – football match. As if we were ashamed of it. What is paradoxical is that we often do it after a whole day spent chasing deadlines, duties and consensus dictated by profit. We work hard all day to do everything, incorporate everything, devour everything, and once the time of duty is over, we dedicate ourselves to a show that could offer nothing. It is perhaps precisely this suspension between the everything of a 5-5 full of chances and reversals and the nothingness of an apathetic 0-0 that electrifies us.
For ninety minutes we pause not only the external world, but even the first principle on which it is based today. We dive into one parallel existential dimension, and for large stretches, unless our favorite team is playing (in this case, the emotional involvement undermines the boredom), we feel like those many characters in the films of the 70s and 80s, in the summer, staring at the ceiling bored, without the possibility of distracting oneself from boredom with other distractions at hand. Often, it is precisely in those moments of break from duty that the characters in the films had the most enlightening ideas. This is because boredom has its own underlying nobility: it makes us feel – said Pascal – “our nothingness, our abandonment, our insufficiency, our emptiness”.
To climb this wall of melancholy, we are forced to invent something. We are forced to be creative. Pick up your cell phone and ask for three hours TikTok or reels for fifteen seconds each the task of defeating boredom for us is not only a convenient solution, but it is also a missed opportunity. Once the glut of distracting content, the fleeting drug of our century, is over, we feel empty again, just like when boredom itself takes over. If instead we welcome Boredom, exploiting it because it is more seductive than itself, we can make it leisure: time for self-care, for pleasure as an end in itself. A uniquein a society where we work for 10/12 hours a day, often for someone else’s benefit.
Thus, faced with a 0-0 marked by horizontal and sloping passes at random rejected by the opposing defence, each spectator finds his own personal, creative solution to boredom; who decides to focus on the movements of a single player, perhaps a number ten with elegant movements, a Griezmann, alone a source of entertainment worth the price of the ticket: we admire him for his calculated short passes, for the way in which, before receive the ball, turns his head several times, left and right, to memorize the space around him. As with a painting at an exhibition, in this case he cuts out the frame and we focus on a single detail that catches our attention: Grizou he becomes a Degas dancer in the corner of the painting. We don’t even look at the rest of the painting, that detail is enough for us to justify our interest, to make us feel alive.
Genoa (0.58) 0-0 (0.31) Turin
— SerieA xG (@xGSerieA) January 13, 2024
We may not have seen goals scored or chances, but it was aaesthetic experience to all effects; then there are those who stare at the match with a blank look, but in reality it is as if he were staring at the ceiling while lying on the bed at home: he thinks back to the last words said by his girlfriend, he has read about the resentment, perhaps their relationship is in a stagnant phase, the passionate flame of the early days has now faded. The match becomes a background, a soundtrack that acts as a backdrop to the flow of our thoughts, like a jazz solo; finally there are those who, faced with the most boring of matches, have a more analytical approach to the game, and entertain themselves by sifting through the teams’ tactical choices: from the construction phase to the first pressure. At the end of the match he is often mocked by his companions in the stadium, because while the others were thinking about their girlfriend or Griezmann’s vaults, he is the only one who found a match captivating. strategic battle between two great minds (the coaches) which produced the beauty of zero opportunities. Beauty hides in the most mysterious glimpses, also and above all in football.
The approaches are endless. Human creativity is such a vast ocean that even algorithms struggle to reproduce it. But each of these approaches responds to an atavistic need of the human being: take time for yourself, escaping the role of production machine that the contemporary world would like to assign to it. Football, every now and then, gives us the opportunity to deal with a feeling that we have deprived of its original noble nature. Every now and then for twenty, thirty or even ninety minutes it leaves us high and dry, without allowing us any extraordinary event, asking us to fill those holes that leave room for our imagination. But doesn’t the same happen in life too?
Boredom reminds us what it means to be human: to feel a sense of emptiness in the face of our finiteness, and to try to overcome it with the most powerful means we have available, beauty. The beauty that lies in a touch of Griezmann’s sole or in a well-orchestrated triangulation. Whether he scores or not, it doesn’t matter. Profit at all costs, let’s leave it to other dimensions of life. There’s already enough of that around. It is this beauty, that end in itself, that saves us.
2024-01-17 15:00:00
#football #accept #boredom
