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Perspectives: is an essay series and interviews dedicated to bring sociological, political, economical and cultural thoughts on the game by experts, local actors, thinkers, and researchers. These essays are designed to start conversations, understand the new issues and give policy-oriented takeaways.

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Alejandro Gutiérrez Mora

Praise for Emptiness

Harlem Lamine

Friday, February 28, 2025

I keep coming back to this image.
It captivates me. Intrigues me. Moves me.
Something holds me, but I don't know why.

I don't know his face or his name. He is sitting down.
Picking herbs one by one.
I remember watching him as the guide gave us a tour of the stadium.
I was following his explanations. Distracted.
I was constantly staring at the gardener.
I walk down a few rows,extricate myself from the guide's talk.
I took out my camera.
Sitting in the corner of the field.
He's sorting every blade of grass with his bare hands.
Head down. Meticulous.
He stops. Looks away. Continues.

It's complicated to understand what touches us.
You have to allow things time to reveal themselves.
You have to allow yourself time to understand them.
You have to be patient before the image emerges. Before the subject appears.

Ethan White

The empty stadium makes the little hands visible. The invisible ones.
The match is a magical spectacle that doesn't reveal all its mechanisms.

I think back to Antonioni's phrase: ‘often to understand, we need to look into emptiness’.
When we were kids, the coach gave us the same instructions. The game is in the empty space.
That's where you have to be if you don't have the ball. And if you do have possession, that's where you have to play.
But what is played in the empty space of the stadium, if it is nothing?
And that's precisely what we need to understand.
The match is based on emptiness.

The void is filled with anonymous faces. Unknown names.
Shadows holding the show at arms length.

So I decided to study the counterpoint to everything that was said in February. Mbappé's hat- trick, the Champions League draw, Kai Havertz's injury. And to relegate these comments to the peripheral. I wanted to put the foundations back at the centre of the discourse. Starting with emptiness. Emptiness to understand as the space of the invisible. To understand as what we hide or what is unseen. Emptiness as the act of emptying to secure the spectacle.

In short, to sketch out lines of thought on two fundamental logics on which football is based: the invisible faces and emptying the players' bodies.

In emptiness, the faces of the invisible.

The spectacle is based on the unknown. Without faces. Without names.
The match happens by magic.
The stewards facing the crowd. With their backs to the match.
Gardeners watering the pitch at half-time.
Stewards classifying shoes.
Scouts travelling the world.
The cameramen, photographers, translators and interpreters.

Thinking our sport beyond goals and tactical compositions.
Going behind the scenes. Watching the sidelines.
Those who are everywhere but have their backs turned to the action on match day.
Those who make the match possible.

Football has no end credits.
We don't give any credit to the people behind the scenes.
After a film, you know the cast.

We know who the actors, producers, mixer, director, stewards, and make-up artists were.
Football is an industry of many corporations who are often invisible and don't always get the recognition they deserve.

Scott Groult

During transfers, the figure of the agent is often the most promoted.
We never talk about the recruiters and their teams of scouts who have done all the work beforehand.
We never talk about who taught Myles Lewis-Skelly, Lamine Yamal or Kenan Yildiz.
And yet they are the figures responsible for the education of these talents and their transition into the professional world.

Proper journalistic work is essential when it comes to naming things.
Arteta did not discover Myles Lewis-Skelly. He gave him a chance.
If the film industry celebrates diﬀerent corporations at ceremonies, why not football?
The players hog all the spotlight. It's perfectly normal. They are the main actors. The ones who make us dream. The ones who make us love this sport.

But by focusing solely on that, we overlook numerous dimensions.
Dimensions that can inspire.
Create vocations.
Every little boy dreams of becoming a footballer, but we all have our own way of being an actor in our passion.
That means recognising and celebrating the people who build football oﬀ the pitch.

And football happens everywhere.
The fans who follow their clubs but never go to the stadium.
Who are too far away. Who lack the means. Who don't have the time.

Taxis listening to the match on the radio.
Firefighters watching the match at the fire station.
Supporters watching their teams' matches in the middle of the night.

Bringing those in the shadows into the public eye restores their dignity. It's about making people exist. It's giving meaning back to workers who are often at the bottom of the pyramid, to fans who are often forgotten, to the little hands at the other end of the world.

The empty space is often the answer to our questions.
It is often from there that we can foster critical thinking.
To look at the shadows of what we bring to light.
Looking at what we don't place in the frame.

This text is a tribute to all the corporations that make the football industry what it is today and who are often invisible.
But it is by no means a statement of resignation.

Alejandro Gutiérrez Mora

Quite the opposite, in fact. It's up to us to choose our words carefully, to know who gets the credit, and to continue to assert our place in the industry.

Emptying the Bodies

I'm back from my Sunday evening run. The run is my reset. I evacuate. I restart my brain, my thoughts. Everything has to go: frustrations, desires, aspirations. Clear my head. Accumulate metres. I talk to myself when things get hard. When I have to hold on. When the next step becomes heavy. When it burns. When it's heavy. I finish the last few metres. Satisfied of sweating. Satisfied I've kept up the pace.

The exertion reminds me of the pitch.
To come back. Cover. Tackle. Recover the ball. Go forward again.

Every match stretches your body to the limit.

You tell yourself you can still hold out. Sometimes your legs betray you.
At 31, Raphaël Varane has announced his retirement.
‘Psychological and physical fatigue’, he confesses.
The last powerful image of him I remember was during the 2022 World Cup Final.
In a final defensive intervention, at the end of his run, he fell. He caught himself with his hands in the advertising hoardings.

The first World Cup in the Middle East was also unprecedented because it was played in the middle of the season. Yet European calendars were inflexible. As soon as they were eliminated players went back to their clubs. You get knocked out in the group, the quarter-finals, the semi- finals, the final. Whatever. The season starts again.

Japan fell to Croatia in the Round of 16.
“I need time to forget about football” says Tomiyasu after his elimination. He doesn't want to return to football directly after his national duties.

After the tournament, some footballers had just one objective: to finish the season. Finish the season if your body allows you to.

The question of too many matches is not that of the spectator but that of the player's body. How many matches can the players' bodies cope with the pace that the broadcasters impose on them?

Guardiola, Klopp and Postecoglou repeat it.
And so do the players.
We play too much. No time to recover.
The schedules only meet the demands of the broadcasters.

Football is based on the players' bodies. They ensure the spectacle. Their bodies are depleted. And we're devoting less and less time to their recovery.

So we're boosting the medical departments of every club to maintain the pace.

Andrea Vílchez

The growing development of technologies to improve the care of players' bodies is symptomatic of the exponential accumulation of matches.
Massages. Cryotherapy. Compression garments. Active recovery.
Whatever it takes to regenerate the body faster and more eﬀectively.
But next to the multiplication of technology, can we rethink our relationship to the body without demanding repeated performances with short recovery periods?

The accumulation of matches goes beyond mere television overdose.
It's a question of how we see the athlete's body as an inexhaustible resource that can be used to feed our appetite for greatness and more stories.

It's about how we see the athlete's body as an inexhaustible resource on which an economy of football is based on, in a never-ending quest for more matches. The integrity of the athlete's body is subsidiary. We use. We harm. Bodies are discarded. Bodies are replaced. The number 14 replaces the number 16. And all at the expense of our sport's attractiveness. The game is being sold oﬀ. We liquidate the bodies. And We ignore it. The show must go on.

Thinking football diﬀerently means caring about the actors who make us dream.
Thinking football diﬀerently means thinking about its rhythm and the breath we ought to give it.

‘What needs to be questioned, based on the horizon of knowledge thus opened up, are all the discourses (insensitive if there are any) of performance, perfection and total adaptation to the economic standards of our time. These discourses, which form part of a culture of success and results, are falsifiers. Aiming for maximum profitability, ‘optimisation’ as we say today of ‘human resources’, they are reluctant to contemplate error, wandering and clumsiness They are also driven by an obscene logic, the ideal of a standardised, perfect body-object, performing feats (sporting, sexual, economic), a fetishised body that is always beautiful, always in shape and eternally youthful. One of the criteria of performance is the obligation to submit to an increasingly accelerated speed’.

In this excerpt from Penser le sensible (The life of the Sense) by François Laplantine, the question that arises is the ability to understand what is at stake with the body, and in our case the sporting body, as it responds to a commercial logic of assuring the spectacle to the detriment of the physical and psychological well-being of the athletes. We continue to empty bodies. Without giving them time to heal and recover. This leaves lasting after-eﬀects for the athletes.

Football needs to be cultivated intelligently. Understand that resting the game is key to its fertility and reproduction.

Rely on emptiness to give the body time to regenerate. Allow your emotions to subside. Rediscover the sense of renewal, of a new way of looking at things. Only emptiness allows us to see more clearly and better tame ourselves. When do we take the time to let emptiness fill us?

The body is one of the main issue in our societies in terms of how we observe, think, optimise, abuse, and use it. Yet it is not at the centre of any serious debate in our sport. Players‘ bodies are wrung out, pregnant players’ bodies are sold oﬀ. We replace. We scrap. Injuries pile up. The pace quickens. To the breaking point? — HL

Nicolas Polo Sanchez

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