The Barcelona Complex by Simon Kuper

Author:Simon Kuper [Kuper, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

An opponent is coming at you . . . the ball is bouncing or there’s a curve on it, and you have to pass it into the wind to somebody who has a certain running speed and has to receive it ready to play. A computer can’t do in two minutes what that top footballer has to do in hundredths of a second. So those brains have to function superbly. I think that’s intelligence. But people often confuse it with knowledge.1

Playing top-class football is something like playing chess with your feet at the speed of Formula One. It demands an extraordinary mastery of geometry in motion. Just watch Valverde on Barcelona’s training field before a game against Espanyol, showing his defenders which spaces they must occupy depending on which opposing player has the ball, and in which directions they should force Espanyol to pass.2

Yet the best footballers can register the frenzied movement around them in an almost leisurely manner. The Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz told writer John Carlin, “Imagine two cars colliding. For us it happens at normal speed. They [the greats] see it in slow motion, they catch a lot more details in the same time as us. They can compute in their minds more details than you and I can see. Therefore they have more time.”3

Rapid pattern recognition may be the most important quality in football, said the longtime director of AC Milan’s Milan Lab, Belgian doctor Jean-Pierre Meersseman. When I asked which players had it, he named the Brazilian Ronaldo.

A club cannot do much to teach this quality, certainly not to adult players. Barça’s data analysts couldn’t teach Busquets how to draw an opponent toward him and then at the last moment pass the ball into the space behind the man’s back. In fact, it’s the reverse: in order to understand how football works, Barça’s analysts studied what Busquets and Messi did. When the analysts began using computer modeling to identify high-value spaces on the field, they were surprised to discover how often Barcelona’s players were already accessing those spaces with runs or passes.

“I have to say that the great players analyze the game better than I do,” Valverde told me, adding:

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