The Death of Joga Bonito

Everybody talks about it, at least everybody who remembers that 1982 Brazil squad led by Falcao, Toninho Cerezo, the great Socrates and the incomparable Zico. It's the first time I had heard the words Joga Bonito, the beautiful game; an expression of style and nerve and brilliance, a genius of play that comes from feeling the game as an individual and expressing it as much as any true artist in history. The fact that it failed to win is secondary, or at least to the lovers of the game it is, but the game isn't run by the likes of me. It's run by agents and shoe companies, directors of football and leaders of federations, and they all agree that there is no prize for the elegant loser and that´s what they were in the end.

Since then they have been pushed aside by the pragmatists of the footballing world. Every side it seems, every country, has been taken over by the heirs of Helenio Herrera. Greece won the Euros in 2004 playing the most mind-numbingly boring football I have ever seen and they did it against the Golden generation of Portuguese soccer led by Luis Figo, Nuno Gomes and Rui Costa. By the middle of the last decade teams were spending 200 million euros on squads, the best players in the world, and playing tentative and probing football, handicapping their individual brilliance to maintain some semblance of tactical shape: Chelsea, Inter Milan, Manchester City, and even the great Dutch sides of the past were lamenting what the pragmatists had done to their national footballing identity at the last World Cup. Total Football was dead, and even though Spain's brilliant football put it in its place, just two years on it seems that was just a blip.

Barcelona have been displaced, and their successors both in Spain and in Europe have entrenched themselves with utilitarian football. It seems as if joga bonito is dead and we're just coming around to that idea. Someone asked European footballing pundit Andy Brassell of the BBC's World Football Phone-In that very same question; if he thought that expansive football was dead and he answered that football was cyclical and we were in a circle of play that was very dour but that it would turn again. To a certain extent I agree with him, Barcelona will return to form, and they will play majestically but other than them, who will? Better yet, who will play that way and also win convincingly on the world stage? Spain?

Spain will have to do something no other country has ever done. Even Zidane and Henry's France couldn't win three consecutive cups in a row. The odds are highly against them. What club then? Manchester City have the players to do so, as do Chelsea, Real Madrid, Manchester United and a dozen other top-sides, but when results turn the brakes go on and the bus gets parked.  People see what has happened to sides recently who try to play attractively, AS Roma, Villarreal, Arsenal and the like, and there are very few successes. It is easier to play close to the vest, absorb pressure and wait for the opponent to make the mistake.

It is much easier to teach to the middle; live comfortably on the bulge in the bell-curve. That´s why so many clubs play the same: why English clubs play with the sort of tentativeness that Italian teams were known for, why more and more Spanish squads are playing the quick pass into space, lumping it like their British cousins taught them 130 years ago, and why Italian squads are fiddling with a bit more expansive Spanish style.

It´s as if for some reason the footballing world forgot that the difference is always in the players and not in the coaches. It is easier to quantify tactics, easier to teach what we all have a capacity to learn, but talent is ephemeral. We try to find what makes Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo tick, what even they have to say about their own gifts, and no one can do it; it´s too difficult to identify and too difficult to teach.

No, I don't think this is cyclical. I think this is the game we have. I think Joga Bonito is dead or at least is dying. I think the pressure of money, glory or power has been killing it for a very long time. Some will say that it is inevitable and that the game will change and grow with the times. I agree with that, I am not saying the sport is dead, but stop calling Football the Beautiful Game because with a few rare exceptions that just doesn't exist anymore.