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#194 The metaphors football lives by

• Jani Sarajärvi

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Metaphor is the lens through which we actually see the game. Call a player a computer and you start looking for software to upgrade. Call a team a puzzle and you start developing pieces to assemble. The metaphor decides, quietly, what counts as a problem and what counts as a solution.

In this episode: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's foundational argument that metaphors shape how we think, not just how we speak, and what happens when you apply that to football. The reductionist family of metaphors that built modern coaching: the clock, the computer, the house, the pyramid, the toolbox, the puzzle. And the newer family challenging them: the radio, Tim Ingold's lines and meshworks, Bruce Lee's water, Rob Gray's Matrix. A study by Thibodeau and Boroditsky showing how a single metaphor change — beast versus virus — shifts what solutions people reach for. And what it actually means for coaching if skill is a relation rather than a possession.

The thread underneath: the metaphors we inherit are not neutral. They highlight some things and hide others. And the ones football has lived by for decades may be leaking the most important parts of the game away.

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SPEAKER_00

He fermate! This is Dukis Chalki, we talked about the gehallistä, often misunderstood, and komplex skalu football. It's a holistic, skillful, and adaptive journey to better humanity. Welkom back to Drukas Chal. Today's topic is such a topic that the more we look at it, the more it seems to quietly run underneath everything we do in football. What could be that kind of topic? It is metaphors. Not metaphors as kind of decoration or nice language, but metaphors as a lens through which we actually see the game. Specifically the metaphors football lives by. Let's start with what is a metaphor? The reference point for almost any conversation about metaphor is a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, published in 1980 called Metaphors We Live By. Their argument is short and was, at the time and maybe still is quite radical. Metaphors they say are not just a feature of poetry or rhetoric, they are a fundamental part of how we think. They shape how we understand concepts, how we communicate, and also ultimately how we act. Their famous line is that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. And the crucial point is that most of the time we do not notice the metaphors we are using. In fact they become so familiar that they look like plain description or the truth of matter. We stop seeing them as metaphors and start seeing them as the way things simply are. And when that happens the metaphor has become, in Lakoff and Johnson's sense, something we live by. This what's interesting related to Football and Bruchsau is that this is true of science as much as of everyday talk. Nancy Stepan, writing about analogy in science, made the point that metaphors slip into scientific discourse and then quietly direct researchers' attention. They highlight some features of a phenomenon and they hide others. Over time, the metaphor stops being noticed and starts being treated as a truth. That is exactly the situation we are in with a lot of football science and I would argue that with a lot of football practice also. Before we go into football metaphors, I would like to put two quotes next to each other because together they frame the whole question. The first is from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrej Rublev. There is a moment in the film where a priest and icon painter looking at a masterpiece says You can grasp the essence of everything if you name it correctly. I would argue that this is the Western intuition in its purest form. There is an essence to a thing. And if you find the right name, the right concept, the right category, you can grasp it. Naming is mastery and knowing is naming things. And this intuition is at the heart of how the modern West has done science for four hundred years. Identify, categorize, divide, label, define. Once it is named it is known. Now the second quote from a very different tradition from Lao Tsi. The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way. The name that can be named is not the constant name. This is essentially the opposite move from Tarkovsky and Western idea. Lao Tsi is saying that whatever we can name is, by definition, not the full reality. Words are cutting instruments. They divide the seamless flow of experience into chunks so that we can talk about them. And this is useful yes. We could not function otherwise probably. But the chunks are not the thing. The map is not the territory. A dot and a few labels on a map may help you reach the destination, but the living destination itself, the experience of being there, is nothing like the dot. This contrast is useful because both intuitions live inside us. The Tarkovsky intuition says give the thing the right name and you have understood it. The Lao C intuition says as soon as you name it, you have already lost something of it. And the question for us in football is how aware are we of which intuition our metaphors are operating from? For most of the last few centuries, Western football science and practice, I would say, has operated almost entirely on the Tarkovsky side. We have named, categorized, divided, we have split skill into technical, tactic, physical, mental. We have built taxonomies, tests, batteries, components, and the names became truths. And then Laosi's side asks a different question. What is the metaphor not showing us? What did we lose when he named it? So why metaphors matter practically? One more idea before we go into football metaphors. And there is a beautiful, beautiful study by Paul Tipodo and Lara Poroditsky about metaphors. They asked people how they would address crime in a fictional city. Half the participants were told crime was a beast spraying on the town, the other half were told crime was a virus infecting the town. So basically the same thing that is happening in the city but different metaphor. The result The people who had been given the beast metaphor mostly proposed catching criminals, enforcing laws, building more prisons, you know you have to be hard for the criminal because it's a beast. The people who had been given the virus metaphor mostly proposed investigating causes, reforming the community, treating the underlying conditions. Most of them did not even realize the metaphor had influenced their answer. They thought they were reasoning from the facts. So this is the practical force of metaphor. So change the metaphor, change what counts as a sensible solution. That's why metaphors are so important when we are describing football skill. So let's look at the metaphors we have inherited in football. Most of them descend from a longer Western lineage, traceable back through Hobbes, Descartes, and the 17th century mechanistic worldview where the world was understood as a great machine made of parts, and where understanding meant taking the parts apart and seeing how they connect. As Whitehead pointed out, this became so dominant that it stopped being a worldview and started being treated as the structure of reality itself. And a few of these metaphors show up everywhere in football. The clock. The clock is the classic mechanistic metaphor, reducible to parts, analyzable through the parts, governed by clear cause and effect linkages. Wind it up it ticks when something goes wrong, you open it and fix the broken piece. The computer. The computer metaphor for the mind is probably the single most influential metaphor in modern psychology. Cognition becomes information processing, inputs, simple manipulation, outputs. In football we hear this constantly. His mind is working like a computer. Ralph Rangnick, during his time at Man United, talked about the need for specialized brain coaches. The implicit metaphor is that the player is a body with a central processor inside and the job of coaching is to upgrade the software. The house. Arsen Wenger has spoken of the metaphor of player development as building a house. The foundation, completed by around 12 years old, is technical skill. The second floor 12 to 16 is physical and relational development. The third floor 17 to 20 is tactical understanding. And the roof finally is the mental side. This metaphor is clear. It also smuggles in some very strong assumptions that skill develops in discrete sequential layers, that the mental side comes last, that you cannot build the roof before the walls. The pyramid, closely related to the house metaphor, used in coaching education in many countries, including many federations, at the base fundamental motor skills on top of those football-specific techniques, on top of those game skills, each layer is a prerequisite for the next. The pyramid imagery is so embedded that it is almost invisible. It's just how skill is described. Let's take one more metaphor, which is the puzzle. A favorite in scouting and analysis. The player is a puzzle made of pieces physical, technical, tactical mental, psychological, social and such pieces. Develop each piece, then put them together at the end and you get the complete player. What do all of these metaphors have in common? They share a deep assumption. The whole is the sum of the parts. To understand the whole, take it apart, to build the whole, assemble the parts. To develop a player, develop the components and add them up. This is the Western intuition at full volume. Name the parts correctly, you have grasped the player. The trouble is that on the pitch, a player is not the sum of those parts. When a great act happens on the pitch, the parts kind of vanish. You cannot point to where technique ends and the tactic begins. You cannot separate the physical from the psychological, from the perceptual. There is one act, one player, one game, and our reductionist metaphors are leaking that essence away. So then we have to think, do we have some other ways of seeing skill? Over the last couple of decades, our different family of metaphors has indeed been entering football, and they come mostly from holistic ideas, from ecological psychology, from systems thinking, from anthropology and such areas, and they share a different basic assumption. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. So properties emerge in the whole that do not exist in any of the parts. Let's check a few of these metaphors. Lines and mesh works. This one is from ecological anthropologist Tim Ingold. He spent years looking at how indigenous peoples lasso wave baskets tell stories, and what he noticed is that none of these activities are well described as a discrete acting on a discrete object. They are better described as lines. So the lasso is a line, the waver's hand is a line, the story is a line, and these lines do not just exist in parallel, they cross, they respond to each other, they flow together, and Ingol calls the whole tangle a mesh work. And for football, this is a powerful image. So a player is not a dot on a pitch. A player is a line, a trajectory unfolding over time. So is the ball, so is the teammates, opponents, etc. And the game is not arrows between dots. The game is many lines waving, responding, corresponding. And Ingall's word for this is actually correspondence. The player and the game co-create each other in motion. Water. Bruce Lee's famous Be Water, my friend, more recently picked up in the sports science literature by Miskan colleagues. The image is that skill is not a fixed shape. Skill takes the shape of the situation it is poured into. The same player in a different context becomes a different shape. Water can flow or it can crash. The deepest version of this metaphor is older actually than Li. So already Lao Tsi wrote that water is the softest substance, yet nothing overcomes the hard and rigid like water does. So we come full circle and the eastern intuition returns here. Skill as something formless that takes on form in response to its environment. One more interesting metaphor is the matrix. This is borrowed by Rob Grey. The scene where Neo, who used to see only the surface, should suddenly see the underlying code. Gray uses this to talk about higher order information. So the novice perceives surface features, the expert perceives the deeper invariants that actually specify what is happening and what is possible. Skill in this metaphor is not building a bigger toolbox, skill is learning to see what was always there more clearly. So these metaphors are not about parts, they are about flows, fields, attunements, correspondences, the player and the environment as one system organizing itself in motion. And where the old metaphors were static, modular, sequential later, these ecological metaphors are dynamic, relational, continuous. What all this means in practice in coaching, does it really affect coaching or not? Under the old metaphors, skill is a possession. The player has it. It lives inside the body, especially inside the head, and the body executes it. Under the new metaphors, skill is a relation. Skill lives in the way the player and the environment correspond. You cannot point to skill in the player alone. You also cannot point to it in the environment alone. It is in the coupling. It is possible that when we change the metaphors we start to see the player differently. Old metaphors, the player is a sum of components. New metaphors the player is a continuously unfolding line embedded in an environment attuned to information. So also coaching is then different. Old metaphors, the coach installs skill into the player piece by piece, drill the technique, drill the tactic, put them together. New metaphors, the coach designs environments that carry the right information at the right affordances and trusts that the player given enough exposure will tune to them. It's less installing, more cultivating. So then the practice also will look different. A toolbox view skill produces drills that isolate one tool at a time. A water view produces practice that confronts the player with the dynamic, situation-shaped problems they will actually face. Representative learning design, which we talked about earlier, follows almost directly from this metaphorical shift. Also, the player development looks different. Under the Haus and Pyramid metaphors, one builds from the foundation upwards in sequence. Mental side is the last technique first. New metaphors, all of these are co-developing all the time because they are aspects of the same coupled system. There is no roof to build last. The roof is present in the youngest beginner already in the way they attend to the game. So we could end this episode from where we started with Tarkovsky and Low Tsi. Tarkovsky believed that the essence of cinema was constantly at risk of being lost when cinema borrowed too heavily from theater, from literature, from music. He thought cinema had to find its own foundations. And I think football is in a similar situation. The essence of football skill keeps getting borrowed away into the language of mechanics, of computing, of building, of testing. Each borrowed metaphor takes a real piece of skill and renames it into something else. And pretty soon the lift act on the pitch disappears under heap of names. Susan Sontag, writing about art, said Our task is not to find more and more content in the work, but to cut back content so that we can actually see the thing at all. And I think this applies to football. Our task may not be to name skill more and more precisely, it may be to clear away some of the metaphors that are blocking our view of it. So a small invitation before we go. Next time you watch a match, notice the metaphors you reach for to describe what you saw. Is the player a computer, system tuning to information, network of dots, meshwork, corresponse, corresponding lines, tool from the toolbox, water taking the shape of the moment. The metaphor you choose will guide your mind.