Time Beyond the Ball

The Game at the End of the World: Villainous Referees, Communist Bakers, the Secret Women's World Cup, and a Goalkeeper's Last Stand

Juan Villoro (author); Francisco Cantú (translator)

A commonplace of sports writing is to use sports as symbols, analogies, or metaphors for other aspects of life. Generational team fandom stands in for and absolves generational family trauma. High-cost youth leagues are justified as opportunities for children to learn positive character traits of perseverance, fairness, and of course, teamwork. Ostensibly, these skills transfer to other contexts, like school, work, and interpersonal relationships, at once situating sports as culpable for teaching us how to be human while also training us how to be employees and citizens. Pay-to-play teams and recruitment services do less to muddle these objectives as they do to reify how they actually function outside of sports.

Books about football are often about other things, my favorites being space (Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics, by Jonathan Wilson) and national identification (Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, by David Winner). In The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup (edited by Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey), the sport is a more a loose framing device than it is a consistent subject.

Across The Game at the End of the World, Mexican journalist Juan Villoro emulates Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues, whom he discusses and quotes at length, by encouraging us to see the game "beyond the ball" (p. 219). Within the game, this refers to seeing the other aspects of play that matter: space and positioning, technique and style, effort and strategy. Outside the game, this can mean appreciating literature, art, and the fact that we get a chance to play this game for conviviality and leisure.

Early on, Villoro introduces the idea of of time. On the strategy the stalling at the end of a match until the referee—the only one who, like Atropos, knows how much time actually remains—he observes, "to possess the ball is the possess time itself" (p. 13). From this perspective, the thing that outside the game we have the least control over becomes something we can have and own within the game.

The ephemeral nature of football has long appealed to me, the notion that we only given a relatively brief period to determine the victor before accepting balance or, in the high-stakes knockout rounds, letting the universe decide. A match is intentionally concise, with a mere 90 minutes of gameplay. It is more than a regulation basketball or American football game, yet typically takes up less real time than either. And once the game is over, the game is over (unless it's not). Some use this restriction to justify deception, notably attempts to fool the arbitrator into awarding a penalty. This is the cowardly interpretation, in my opinion, precisely because it mostly ends up just wasting our time.

But even in writing mostly of what football means beyond the games, Villoro does not lose site of how the game itself matters: for players, fans, collectors, administrators, writers. This, too, is symbolic, a meta-acknowledgement that the games we play, the things we do, matter on their own terms because we choose to use our time on them. 

In the low-stakes Sunday pick-up games I have been frequenting for over a decade now, gol gana signals that time has come. It also absolves all prior sins, fouls, and insults. The conversations of our group of players, who range in ages by decades and places of origin by time zones, switch to the World Cup, to travel, to art and film, and to our families. Outside of the game time, other things return to mattering. We have a limited time here, but fates willing, we will have a next time.