Some people say soccer is the philosopher’s sport. Soccer players seem especially good at abstract reasoning: figuring out how a group of running bodies will reorganize in space in order to make a good pass. They are also psychologists who intuit other people’s intentions. They can seem meditative in their calm: able to stop a ball midfield to reorganize their thoughts.
Indeed, a new book, Soccer and Philosophy: Beautiful Thoughts on the Beautiful Game, follows a recent trend of books that recognize depth in soccer. (For others, see Soccernomics, Football and Philosophy, Brilliant Orange, and Inverting the Pyramid.)
Chapters in Soccer and Philosophy, each one written by a scholar who’s also a player, see philosophy living inside the game: Kierkegaard's anxiety at the heart of penalty shots, Camus’ morality cohabiting with teamwork, and Plato’s Forms underlying Ronaldo’s footwork. One chapter in particular, Jonathan Crowe’s "The Loneliness of the Referee," uses Jean-Paul Sartre’s picture of human anxiety to offer sympathy to the referee.
The referee, after all, lives a dramatic example of what Sartre called the human condition. The referee’s decisions are important, and he bears total responsibility for them. Sartre argued that what makes human life interesting is that our freedom gives us everything but also feels like a burden. There is no God, and so we’re free, without any higher authority to do anything we dream; but we can never enjoy the light heart of the idea that “anything goes.”
That’s because everything we do feels really important, to us and to people around us. Think about how important the referee’s decisions are: Players train for a lifetime for the game; fans bet their lives on the outcome; people bank on the referee’s trustworthiness. And it all matters not because of God, but because people are passionately attached to the game. In Sartre’s philosophy, people are intense and earnest about getting things right, even though no higher power keeps score.
Crowe finished his essay on Sartre and soccer before last month, which is a shame, because on June 2, there was a great real-world example of these Sartrian ideas. June 2 was when Jim Joyce, that umpire who called a batter “safe” when he was really “out,” pulled the plug on what would have been the 21st perfect game ever pitched in baseball’s history.
Joyce made a thinking man’s error with real implications: The pitcher that day, Armando Galarraga, was robbed of bragging rights to the perfect game. When Joyce watched the instant replay, he felt the nearly divine problem with his error in the call. But baseball honors both the umpire’s responsibility and his fallibility, and what he says sticks. Joyce cried a bit. Then he rose to what Sartre would call dignity. He owned full responsibility for his decisions: "I had a great angle on it,” he said to the press. “I had great positioning on it. I just missed the damn call.” He calmly registered a fellow human being’s justifiable anger: “I just cost that kid a perfect game," he said. "I would've been the first person in my face, and he never said a word to me."
It was a moment in which Sartre would have said that all parties involved recognized that the game in which they invest feels terribly important but rides on merely human perspectives. There’s no deity hovering above the playing field to rate, reward, or remember. Only the players and fans make the game matter and later discuss its statistics.
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
