A Day’s Work: No, really, what even is football?

Andromeda’s a big wide open galaxy,
Nothing in it for me except a heart that’s lazy.

Let’s talk about music. Music is art. The ability to extract emotion out of sound is not unique to music — see also, spoken language — but the way music broadcasts ideas is unique to the sonic dimensions of perception. The ideas are purely an emotional response, nuanced, yes, but primal and based purely in ‘feeling’. There are artists that carry certain feelings and sounds from other artists, being influenced by aspects of existing music in their own efforts.

Vincent Kompany, current head coach of Bayern Munich, plays a style of football reminiscent of Pep Guardiola’s earlier renditions of Manchester City and Bayern Munich, and — oh, sorry, I meant to say that Weyes Blood evokes the sound of church music due to her upbringing featuring it prominently. Wait, did I just?

Football is art. Yes, tactics are data-driven and engineered more than birthed, but the philosophies and fundamental approaches to football differ so wildly in how they approach game situations that it is more several schools of thought akin to an art rather than one singular canon with ‘possible branches’ which would be more akin to science.

The morning of Friday, the 8th: Relations to culture

Why did so many get a rise out of me?
I love the movies.

The recent indie explosion has come as a result of streaming music becoming the norm and making the barrier to entry for making music available to the public non-existent. Hip-hop’s womb was the Bronx in New York where the struggling and marginalised African-American population needed to have their voices heard.

Well, football can’t compare with the intensity of that last one, but music is inherently a more emotionally charged art-form. Football culture was always mainstream, but this has been preserved primarily only in the form of older men in Europe and South America who would watch the games. However, with the advent of social media, football culture went down the demographics, with entire generations of the male population having no connection with each other other than a common interest in the sport. I myself plead guilty of having a bunch of friends who I’ve never bothered to talk to beyond the sport. Footballing styles of play have such unique identities from country to country and league to league, with the break-neck German teams, the vertically adept but defensively structured Italian teams, the game-managing tricky low-block Spanish teams, and so on and so forth. There are economic inequalities, there are different styles of play within the same stratum of the footballing food chain.

Breakfast was good. The air was still fresh when I went back to my room, the dew had barely dried. Highly recommend So Long Forever (2016) by Palace as a sunrise album, it’s use of shifting momentum keeps you on your toes throughout. The band hurtles in a direction with shaky knees and then stops dead before once again hurtling head-first into a different sonic direction. Much like Sergio Busquets would receive the ball, pause to draw in opposition players and then suddenly restart the momentum of the game with a turn and pass.

The evening of Friday, the 8th: Harmony

Picture me better, I finally found the time to write you this letter.
To the stars and moon for you, and it’s coming back soon.

Music and football, like any other two arts, intersect at various points. Particularly at large tournaments such as the World Cup, a festival-like feeling has created these events in history that have their own soundtracks supporting the football, and vice-versa. The advent of curated music thanks to Electronic Arts’ FIFA franchise (now named EA FC) created a whole new niche of musicians in the electronic and house space, as well as brought names to bigger stages in the indie rock and folk spaces. Football gives back what it receives. The two share characteristics, genesis structure, have a symbiotic cultural relationship, and are, at the end of the day, forms of both self-expression as well as social identity.

Lunch and dinner fused into one because my class schedule was awkwardly placed at both meal times. It’s fine though, I went out for tea with a couple friends around sunset. Venus was bright today, and the insects are ready to collect their rations from the brittle plants. It was a very Weyes Blood evening sky. Highly recommend her album pair, TItanic Rising (2019) and And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022). Gorgeous, ethereal, cosmic, oceanic, bioluminescent expanses that swell and twirl in infinite curtains of colour, polished with church-like vocal delivery and acoustics.

The morning of Saturday, November 9th: The full-time whistle

Treat me right, I’m still a good man’s daughter.
Let me in if I break, and be quiet if I shatter.

Tea was, okay, I guess. I really wish buying omelettes every morning wasn’t my only way to get guaranteed protein out here. Listen, I’ve been thinking that you should get to know who I really am. The know-it-all literary referential character is fine and all, but it’s performative. I’m Cyler, but I want to be Rayyan. I’m now curating an art and music page on Instagram that has footballing thoughts mixed in because it’s basically just a ramble space for me. Football analysis is where I want to be, but art analysis is also something that I love to do. BFW has given me license to explore these avenues and I did with the way I structured a lot of my articles along literary trails, but I need to be more engaged with the art in a way that just writing football articles cannot accomplish. I guess this is an informal goodbye? I’m no longer going to be around full-time, but I will definitely be popping my head in for a piece here or there, one that is most likely completely tone deaf to what fan discourse is at that moment in time. Football is machine.

That’s all folks.

Taking hold of our eyes,
Beauty, a machine that’s broken.

Running on a million people burning,
Don’t cry, it’s a wild time to be alive.