longer.blue

Can Lamine Yamal become the greatest of all-time? Does it even matter? He’s already the game’s greatest joy and perhaps that’s enough. More than enough. He is utterly unpredictable. Show him down the wing, he’ll burn past you, dribble through two more players, and rifle home a firing solution that follows a trajectory no one expected him to find. Show him inside, and he can hurt you with a booming shot at range, or dance through a defensive line like an octopus squeezing through the draught excluder designed to make a doorway airtight. Yamal haunts teams in ways that nightmares haven’t even thought to dream up yet. Watching him play, the grand claims of the day can seem absurd. Football as we’ve known it could well be dying. Maybe there is no place for the player-artists we used to live in a game where the system has triumphed over the individual. Yet with the ball at Yamal’s feet, football can never feel more alive. Whatever tactical straitjackets have been foisted upon him have been repurposed into his own line of signature designs to wear down the catwalk. Yamal is a singular talent, of course. He may well be the generational exception that proves the rule, that football is otherwise being flattened into an equation on the page that can be solved like a puzzle. But what if that’s not the case? What if the great sterilisation has merely set the scene for the artists to return, ready to deconstruct and build upon the tactical foundations that have raised the level in so many other ways? For all his individual brilliance and moments of unique, personal wonder, I would argue that Lionel Messi was best appreciated like a piece of process music, or an abstract landscape painting. He was the sublime texture, the transcendent note, to a multi-part composition he would often string together and finish, enabled rather than enfeebled by the system. Messi seeks to be the ghost in the machine. Meanwhile, the game itself has become more standardised, homogenised and, arguably, better understood. Set piece goals blossom at football’s own reckoning with the end of history as all discoveries have already been made, only to be repeated in the search to uncover what will provide the edge in the next ever-shortening cycle. Yet at this rate, that flywheel will accelerate to such speeds that it’ll rip itself apart before too long. What will stand in its place? Players like Yamal, we hope. And then will come the calls to save football again, this time from the tyranny of the soloists and with them the new craze for defenders to sit deep to try and stop them. Then the answer will again be the choreography of the team as a hive mind to push up and play as one. The artists will fade away as the space they need to express themselves is denied, only for the greatest of their number to find a way anyway. And on it goes.