Ken Early: World Cup feats by Messi and Mbappé go against efforts to break players’ flow

A minor amusement of the TV presentation of the World Cup has been the live player and coach intro-videos. As the teamsheets are being displayed before the game, we get a little clip of each individual player mugging for the camera. They point to their badge, or point at the sky, or fold their arms and pout, or pump their fists in celebration, or say “Vamos”, etc.

The coaches are usually more reserved in their clips, typically smiling awkwardly while they wait for it to be over.

Marcelo Bielsa is different. In his intro clip the Uruguay coach stands motionless, head bowed, staring at the ground, like a political prisoner refusing to engage with a court whose jurisdiction he does not recognise.

Bielsa is going along with the nonsense because he has no choice, but he won’t pretend to like it. Two years ago, when the Copa America was held in the United States, he ranted memorably about the poor sporting facilities and shambolic security.

There are promising signs that we could be treated to another explosion before Uruguay go home from this tournament, with the first rumblings coming on Saturday when Bielsa addressed the issue of Fifa’s new “hydration breaks”.

“Playing four times instead of two alters the conception of what had been culturally built to interpret football,” Bielsa said. “This change of culture does ⁠not add anything and takes away a lot. Obviously when they divided it into four, they did not think about the repercussions for the sport.

“Instead, they thought about other types of repercussions that I will not discuss or analyse. I will just say that before this decision, football had one characteristic, now it has another. People fell in love with the game because of its characteristics.”

Bielsa is talking about something that should be obvious to Fifa, but which they have either failed to notice or, more likely, decided to ignore. The defining characteristic of football compared with every other field sport is flow. It’s a test of stamina and of continuous concentration, a game of subtle rhythms that great players understand how to read and control.

This is the very element of the game that football’s authorities seem determined to destroy. They are turning it into a contest made up of short bursts of frenetic activity, whose rhythms are dictated more by enforced pauses than by the decisions of the players.

All of the big rule changes in the 10-year reign of Gianni Infantino have had the effect of breaking the game down into smaller and smaller segments, and giving people outside the field of play more and more influence over what happens out on the grass.

The biggest change, of course, was VAR, which immediately broke up the flow of the game by introducing VAR delays, but also had downstream effects on refereeing that have led to the rise of hyper-choreographed set pieces that teams can take a minute or more to set up.

We also now have five substitutes, six if it goes to extra-time. That change was initially an emergency response to the pandemic and, like so many emergency responses, remained in place after the emergency was over.

The idea was to ease the physical load on players, but the fact that coaches can introduce half a team’s worth of fresh outfield players has had the unsurprising effect of making the game ever more physical and more intense. For the players who tend to play all 90 minutes, it’s become harder and more demanding than ever. Football is now a sport of – in the phrase Mikel Arteta borrowed from rugby – “finishers and starters”; each individual player has less control while the coach has more.

Most coaches, obviously, enjoy this. Arsenal’s co-chairman Josh Kroenke recently told the story of taking Arteta to watch an NFL game. The fascinated Arsenal manager told Kroenke: “Every single play is a set-piece. Every play is choreographed.” Arteta was in paradise.

The hydration breaks are yet another step in this direction. Watching Thomas Tuchel screaming at his England players during the first-half drinks break in Dallas, or Julian Nagelsmann soothing his Germany team just after they’d conceded an equaliser against Curaçao in Houston, you could see how busy coaches have been given yet another opportunity to stick their oars in.

It’s natural for coaches to try to control as much as they can, but the fact is that the more they control, the less room they leave for players to surprise us. At some point the game plan becomes so detailed that to try something unexpected or improvisational is almost a faux pas.

In Philadelphia last Friday evening, Carlo Ancelotti told the media he saw this being a World Cup of high-intensity football, in which hard-running underdog teams would have the capacity to shock teams of superior quality: “I think the stars are not going to determine this World Cup.”

Ancelotti perhaps picked a strange moment to say that, given the fantastic displays by the World Cup’s biggest stars last week. Lionel Messi opened with a hat-trick, while Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane all scored two. Lamine Yamal has since scored within 10 minutes of his first World cup start, against Saudi Arabia, while Brazil’s current top star, Vinícius Júnior, made two and scored one in the first half against Haiti.

We’ll see over the coming weeks if Ancelotti’s prediction is borne out, or whether the very best players can continue to succeed in spite of the rulemakers’ efforts to stack the odds against them.

Click here to read article