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Richard Whittall

Future Tense

The “quartet of El Clasicos” (which made it sound like a PBS series) might be over, but they showed us the hyperreal future of big-money football — in which the swirl of discourse and self-devouring media coverage detaches from the event itself and becomes the event. “El Clasico now has no end, temporally and teleogically. It now exists merely to be covered.” (Richard Whittall/The Footy Blog)

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Read of the Day: Blinding Ourselves to Blind Luck

A goal like Dejan Stankovic’s volley from midfield against Schalke 04 Tuesday obscures the crazy luck it takes to pull off such a shot — we end up drooling over the replay and celebrating the player’s astonishing skill. Yet Stankovic had…a bad game overall. “If football is merely a series of attempts at the same thing, with a precious few coming off while the rest are forgotten, why do we celebrate the lucky one-offs as if they were always meant to be?” (Richard Whittall/The Footy Blog)

Read of the Day: The Wardens Take Back the Asylum

Maradona’s Argentina squad will be the one to watch in South Africa — because it’s managed by the only man left in football who believes that talent outside of systems can carry the day. Even the 100-year reign of the player at Real Madrid has acceded to Mourinho’s “shit on a stick” approach, which takes advantage of the rigidity of youth academies and reserve systems and concentrates decision-making in the hands of the manager. “Real’s decision to acquire Mourinho is an admission of defeat.” (Richard Whittall/Pitch Invasion)

Toward a New Idea of Soccer Journalism

North of the Rio Grande, we all pine for more soccer journalism — but do we really want our own Buster Olneys or Peter Kings? More Steves, Iveses or Grants? The names standing a decade hence aren’t going to be imitators of dead-tree sportswriting — they’ll be “writers willing to step outside the stadium with eyes wide open, observant to what’s happening outside the field of play.” And the model that supports them will have to follow that ethos. (Richard Whittall/Pitch Invasion) (Full disclosure: The post has nice words for Must Read Soccer.)

The Incredible Explosion of Great Soccer Writing Explained

An stunning amount of quality soccer writing is going on — just look at this site. But why is that? And why more so for this sport than others? One reason: The dearth of soccer statistics, which encourages the blooming of 1,000 different styles and interpretations for any game, any issue. The second reason: Very few of us are getting paid for it. While “traditional sportswriting is all about diversion” — this, this my friends, is all about love. (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

Read of the Day: Is it OK to Miss the Big Game?

You scheduled an unbreakable appointment for the day of the big match — so you work like hell to avoid finding out what happened until you can watch the tape. In the case of Liverpool-AC Milan in 2005, Richard Whittall inadvertently saw a photo on a newspaper, assumed Liverpool had lost, and so missed one of the greatest comebacks ever. So why does he still think he wouldn’t have watched it all live…and that he came away with something far richer? (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

80 Percent of Success is Just Showing Up

How can professional soccer succeed in America? Several theories have been advanced — buy European talent, market to Hispanics, build soccer-specific stadia, cultivate supporters groups. But what about just sticking around? After all, MLS is only 14 years old, and Man Utd, Liverpool and Real Madrid each took about 50 years to become popular. (Richard Whittall/Pitch Invasion)

Read of the Weekend: Stranger than Fiction — Maradona and Messi

Stranger Than Fiction Say you’re a novelist “on the verge of completing a daring, epic novel spanning thirty years” with two protagonists — “Maradona, the Virgin mother,” anything but innocent but vitally alive, and “Lionel Messi, the Lion, the Messiah,” who’s won nearly everything but plays as if programmed by a video game, leaving “no lingering aura”…but who wakes from a dream to find the old man his national team manager in the World Cup. Does Messi fail and learn from Diego that life is more than mere skill? Or does he win and risk your narrative’s credibility? How does it end? (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

Radio, Radio

Fulham-Juventus second leg — why would anyone have chosen to listen to the match of the year on radio? Because the inanity of the announcers and the visual blanks keep you argumentative and focused, your imagination filling it all in – the challenges, the pleadings, the impossibly cinematic victory celebrations. (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

Football in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

The globalization of soccer information makes what we considered sophisticated fandom 15 years ago look medieval. But what changes will Football 2.0 bring next? How about a hyperlocal, “ultra fan” culture — a fetishization of the live match worthy of Walter Benjamin? (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

Read of the Day: Against Player Profiles

No More Profiles: Is there a more execrable sportswriting genre than the player profile? One imagines the poor journalist, pounding out yet another indistinguishable Torres or Messi hagiography, “itching to write that [the player] confessed to being a chronic masturbator and to recreational LSD use while on international duty.” (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)

Why the Left Doesn’t Get Sports

Sport is like one of Wittgenstein’s self-contained language games: life and death on the inside, meaningless from without. But it’s still socially vital, and (like nationalism) it resists the easy reductionism of the left — it’s “a contradiction, or what the theologians used to call a ‘mystery.’” Even in Canada. (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)