He was playing some football. Competition of chants and slogans dedicated to the World Cup in Russia

• 14:10 Yura: Tytus, This is the level
  I read it as if I was watching the game again
  You have a talent
• 14:01 Yura: Well, welcome Minamino.
  I hope you bring a lot of benefit to this club
  Blitz-BVB ″...They processed it quickly, well done!...″
  Mark, it’s just that his agent is not Raiola. How he drives Holland back and forth
• 13:53 AXERON: It is necessary, of course, not to spare money, and so on saving over the summer, to spend part of the money on a very good central locking system, for example, like the Coulibaly option. Buying a good forward to compete with Abraham, and he’s young, is hard to play alone the whole season. Buy a good full-back, there is Emerson and Reece James, but both are injured and do not play consistently. There is Alonso, but he is not suitable and will leave in the winter with a 95% probability. We also need to part with such players as Giroud, Batshui, Alonso. Some will say Pedro, but I would leave him until the summer, he is useful on the field and sometimes plays good matches. But Giroud’s time has passed, Batshuia is mediocrity, even with the 3rd coach he can’t show the game, which means it’s not the coaches, but he’s just not up to the task.
• 13:46 AXERON: So why am I all this, now greater opportunities have opened up on the market in the January window than before and you can try to sign top players in January, and they will not be afraid that they will no longer be able to continue playing in the Champions League this season.
• 13:44 AXERON: From this season, UEFA allows players who have played for a club in the Champions League and if they move to another club in the winter, they can now play in the playoffs of the Champions League for another club. And this will have a very good effect on the transfer market. Now the player will be sure that by moving to another club, he will be able to continue playing in this tournament))).
• 13:34 Bogdan Dukhevych: How Arsenal misses him now.. eh
• 13:09 Amadeo: Good [mat]! But not one is worth destroying a family! If there are children, I feel sorry for them most of all.
• 13:08 Tytus: I haven't watched La Liga for a long time. Real Madrid has become much prettier without Krish. Barcelona with Valverde is slowly ceasing to be the team that the Dutch created, and Pep continued. In some parts of the game, Barça reminded me of Arsenal yesterday - the only difference was in the class of the players. Barça's team play against the backdrop of an organized, tactically trained Real Madrid who knew what they were playing at looked, to put it mildly, rather pale. And only when Leo turned on did she resemble her former self. But how long can Messi be a goalscorer and a playmaker at the same time? Suarez????? My God, it was the shadow of Suarez, and if anyone needs Mbapé, it will be Barcelona, ​​not Real. And so that Barça cannot get out of the pressure? I couldn't believe my eyes. For Real, Benzema and Valverde were incomparable, Casemiro burned out the center, Bale butted the Barca defense like a rhinoceros - an old lioness. And yet, one cannot raise one’s hand to write that Barça rebounded. And it should.

Irina Kaliteevskaya: Hello! I’m Irina Kaliteevskaya, editor of Arzamas, and you’re listening to the “Inferiority Complex” podcast, in which we talk to the smartest people to make yourself feel a little smarter.

Lev Gankin: And my name is Lev Gankin, hello. I am a regular contributor to Arzamas, a music journalist by profession, the presenter of several programs on the Silver Rain radio, but for our conversation today, the most important thing is that since childhood I have really, really loved football and been a fan of the Liverpool football club.

I.K.: This time we decided to start preparing in advance for the upcoming World Cup The podcast was released on April 10., and for this, let’s clarify for ourselves what kind of strange cultural phenomenon this is, why interest in it unites such an incredible number of people, and how people who are accustomed to humanitarian, rather than sports, entertainment can learn to enjoy it. In order to understand all this, we called not a historian, anthropologist or sociologist, but football commentator Sergei Krivokharchenko.

L.G.: However, Sergei worked for a long time as the editor of Esquire Russia magazine, where he regularly had to deal with sociological, anthropological, historical, economic and other humanitarian topics, and now he is a commentator on the Match TV channel and, if Honestly, in my opinion, he is one of the most pleasant football commentators not only on this TV channel, but in general in the entire Russian-speaking football commentary industry, and a person who knows how to look at football much more broadly than this is common among members of his profession.

Sergey Krivokharchenko: Hello.

Harald Girsing. Football players. 1917 ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum / Wikimedia Commons

Why is football so popular

I.K.: Seryozha, please tell me, is it true that football is the most popular sport?

S.K.: Yes, and there is a huge amount of different evidence for this. If we just look at TV ratings, if we count how many people watch matches like the World Cup final, we find out that in principle there is no such popular phenomenon in the world - not a single spectacle, not a single activity - that people would indulge in so much or massively. For example, one German broadcasting company noted the final of the World Cup in 2014 as follows: it made a documentary, sending a bunch of cameras to different places, and then edited it in such a way that we understand: this is an hour and a half when the whole planet - some slums in Nairobi, some Brazilian hairdressers, American military personnel, Australian surfers, Japanese businessmen - in this hour and a half he watches one football match. This is very strange, but it is a fact.

L.G.: What do you think is the reason for this and what does football offer that perhaps other sports cannot offer?

S.K.: There are many different explanations. For example, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that football returns to us the opportunity to use hunting instincts, which we abandoned in the process of evolution: when we moved to gathering, to agriculture, we no longer needed hunting instincts. And these ancient atavisms that we have are resurrected as soon as we see what is happening on the lawn - and this feeling of triumph when you hit your prey with some kind of projectile, as Sloterdijk writes, who is trying to defend herself, is unique , in other places it is difficult to experience it. And Sloterdijk writes that it is at this moment, in his opinion, that the game becomes what is called deep play, that is, a complex game.

But, in principle, for some reason, since ancient times, people have experienced a strange predilection for spherical objects. Moreover, not only people: if we look at the reaction of different mammals to the ball - cats, dogs, even dolphins - we will see that it arouses great interest in them, they all play with the ball with great pleasure. Football in this sense, among all other sports and, perhaps, many other human activities, is unique and from some point of view absurd, because in football the ability to use one’s hands was initially abolished. But for us, hands are the main limbs, and a person progressed, learned to do new and new complex things, working with his hands. In football, only goalkeepers can play with their hands. And suddenly it turns out that modern football players have some amazingly diverse functionality of their legs: if ordinary people they only walk, jump or run with their feet, then as soon as you start playing football, you learn that you can hit the ball with the outside of your foot, or with the inside of your foot, spinning the ball, you can kick with an instep, you can kick with your toes, you can stop ball, you can juggle the ball. In all other sports games - hockey, handball, volleyball, and basketball - hands are involved. And, perhaps, it was precisely this fundamental prohibition that led to the fact that football became an ideal game from the point of view of the relationship between regularity and chance. Although, of course, the size of the field and the number of players also affected this.

Moreover, according to Johan Cruyff, the former head coach and great football thinker (he should not be called anything else), and not only in his opinion, football is extremely accessible. It is available to everyone. There are people who run 100 meters in 10 seconds, but we understand that neither you, nor I, nor most other people will ever achieve this. To play basketball, it is advisable to be two meters tall - there are exceptions, but they are absolutely rare. You can play football at any height, any weight, any size and, of course, any gender - women's football is now developing very rapidly. And Johan Cruyff said that if you watch Barcelona play, it is an amazing, beautiful and very difficult game. But even small children can try to repeat this: play passes the same way, combine with each other the same way. And this accessibility of football probably also led to it becoming so popular.

Well, the last point of view to begin with is the point of view of the historian Christiane Eisenberg, who has studied football a lot from a sociological point of view, I will refer to her later. She gave the following versions of why football became so popular. When it arose and was already institutionalized, that is, when the rules appeared, football could not be played with hands; rough, hard contacts were prohibited. It has proven to be a safer pastime than, say, rugby, and therefore more accessible to working people. In addition, in football, different people have different roles: there are central defenders - and there are full-backs, there are defensive and attacking midfielders, there are forwards, there are goalkeepers - and, according to Eisenberg, it is precisely because of this that there are a place for artistry, calculation, and spontaneity. And therefore, athletes have certain roles, that is, as in a drama, at some point individuality is manifested here, at another - the spirit of solidarity, at another - egocentrism, self-sacrifice, movie star manners, heroism... All this is in football There is.

L.G.: There is one point in your speech that I did not fully understand. If possible, I ask you to clarify: about the cause-and-effect relationship between the ban on playing with hands and the presence of patterns and accidents in football.

S.K.: Roughly speaking, since initially a person is better with his hands... Now, if acquired traits were inherited, now we would have an interesting subspecies of Homo sapiens - the descendants of football players who can act better with their feet than with their hands. But in reality, our hands are better developed, and, say, in basketball a huge number of points are scored precisely because a good professional basketball player will score 99 out of a hundred shots without interference. A good professional football player can score 99 out of 10 shots from outside the penalty area without interference. if with interference, he will score two or three times. That is, in football moments are created that may not materialize for various reasons. And there are also goalkeepers, there are opponents’ interference...

L.G.: Arbitrators, probably.

S.K.: Yes, there are also referees who intervene in what is happening. This is why the level of randomness in football is higher than in many other team sports. And not only gaming ones. For example, if you play table tennis well, then you know for sure: if you go out to play with a tennis player who is head and shoulders stronger than you - well, just from a different league - you have no chance of winning. You will never win against him in your life unless he accidentally breaks his leg. In football, a team that plays three divisions lower always has a chance to win - even if it plays against a professional, star team. This chance may be small, but it is always there. And, moreover, this happens regularly when an obviously weaker team, thanks to a variety of factors - including the element of chance - defeats a much stronger team.

When did football appear and how were football rules formed?

I.K.: You said that football is a very developed game in which football players have different roles, and this makes the relationship between chance and pattern very specific. Has there always been such a distribution of roles in football? And when did he even appear? Is football an ancient or modern game?

Young man with a ball. Ancient Greece, 400-375 BC. e. National Archaeological Museum, Athens / Wikimedia Commons

S.K.: Initially, football was a rather wild sport, if you can even call it that. It’s interesting here that for some reason ball games appeared independently of each other in any highly developed civilization. Ball is known to have been played by the Mayans; it is known that around the 2nd-3rd centuries BC. e. An exercise for soldiers appeared in China - and there, by the way, it was no longer possible to play with your hands; Somewhere 500-600 years later, the game of kemari appeared in Japan, which still exists today and is also a distant relative of football; in Rome there was a game called harpastum; V Ancient Greece- episkyros. In general, for some reason, ball games appear wherever developed civilization and some kind of leisure time appear. Naturally, the rules can be very different, but all these games are the ancestors of football, because the ball appears everywhere, the task is to send it somewhere, and there is opposition from the opponent everywhere.

In the Middle Ages in Europe (and especially in England, about which there are many historical sources), football was often banned because it was a very wild activity. It was banned because it could cause chaos in the city, because it distracted people from more practical disciplines like archery, and because it caused players to break a lot of windows; The Puritans forbade playing football on Sundays because it was an aggressive activity.

If someone wants to see what football was like in the Middle Ages, it is possible to do so now. There is a town called Ashbourne, it is located 20 kilometers from the city of Derby, and a Maslenitsa match is still held there every year, which lasts two days, from morning to evening. The gates are located five kilometers from each other. The goal of the game is to score the ball into the opponent's goal; The only rule is that killing is prohibited.

I.K.: Do they play with their feet or whatever they want?

S.K.: Whatever they want. Moreover, the number of participants is unlimited.

I.K.: Yes, it becomes clear where the chaos comes from.

S.K.: Yes. Moreover, people start playing, then go to the pub, then return and continue the game. This game is very boring - imagine: several hundred people on one side, several hundred on the other, fighting for one ball; a pile appears that does not dissolve for a very long time.

L.G.: Two days, actually.

S.K.: Yes. That is, the final whistle for the end of the first half sounds in the evening, when the sun has already set, and the match resumes the next day. In fact, the southern part of the city competes with the northern. It is believed that initially, instead of a ball, the severed heads of enemies were used in such games.

This is what football looked like in the Middle Ages. Well, by the way, he was not only in England. In particular, a type of game called calcio appeared in Italy; it was a little better organized - in particular, there was a uniform.

In general, everything was leading to the fact that at some point society would try to institutionalize this activity, because no matter how much it was banned, people still continued to play with round objects, and, probably, it was better at some point replace the severed heads of enemies with leather or rubber balls.

Trailer for the documentary "Wild in the Streets" about Shrovetide football in Ashbourne. year 2012

I.K.: When did this happen and how, in fact, were the football rules formed?

S.K.: Football received a set of rules and the first football association in England. We know when it happened: it was October 26, 1863, when 11 London clubs and schools gathered in a tavern located next to the Masonic lodge - this is, by the way, for lovers of conspiracy theories - and there they drew up a list of football rules. This pub still exists, you can get into it, and there are corresponding artifacts hanging there that prove that indeed, in this very Freemasons tavern - that's what it's called - football rules were drawn up and a football association was organized. Christina Eisenberg , which I have already mentioned, confirms that this was a very important move.Firstly, because the football association immediately not only published the rules, but also began to monitor their compliance, began to license referees, it stimulated the development of football ties , a league system appeared, prizes gradually appeared, the FA Cup appeared, the possibility of indirectly comparing teams with each other appeared. In addition, if we talk from a scientific - sociological, probably - point of view, all these games, which individually were discrete events , gained history: after this, expressions such as “legendary match”, “the era of such and such a club” or “the era of such and such a player” appeared, and football became an element of the culture of the New Age, which is distinguished by the fact that it combines combines the transitory, the accidental with the eternal.

L.G.: Now we usually divide football into club football and national team football, football of national teams. I understand that in England in 1863 this league consisted of clubs, right? And when did football of national teams appear - European and World Championships? At what point and why did this happen?

S.K.: Almost immediately. The first football match between England and Scotland was played in 1872 - even before the English Championship existed. The fact is that football very quickly began to spread throughout the world. In England, it began to gain popularity thanks to industrialization, due to the fact that this initially bourgeois occupation very quickly became popular among the working class. The fact is that it was precisely during this period that workers’ wages grew quite strongly and trade unions, in particular, won the right to a free second half of Saturday in England.

Ticket for the first match between England and Scotland. 1872 The Scottish Football Museum

I.K.: So the only thing you needed for football was free time?

S.K.: Free time and some funds. The industrialization that took place in England helped football spread within the country, even within Great Britain. And the second important invention of this time - the steamboat - allowed football to spread very quickly throughout the world. Firstly, English holidaymakers who traveled to Nice, Cannes, San Remo, Baden-Baden (not only by boat) began to carry balls with them. British sailors who sailed to different countries, to different continents (and then the British Empire still existed), also carried balls with them and persuaded local residents to play with them, because sometimes there simply weren’t enough people, there weren’t enough rivals. Since 1889, football associations have appeared in Holland and Denmark, then New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Switzerland, Belgium and so on. By the way, it happened that football clubs in South America and other countries were founded by the British. The first football match between teams that are not part of the UK took place in 1901, and the national teams of Uruguay and Argentina took part in it.

Christina Eisenberg argues that football became popular only in those countries where this abstract form of the game could be filled with concrete content that would correspond to the specifics of a given society - that is, ethnic subcultures played a very important role. For example, in Austria or overseas, some kind of opposition naturally formed - for example, Bohemians against Croats, Italians against Greeks. And in the USA, this effect also arose, but quickly evaporated, because very successful assimilation took place. That is, football initially developed very actively and became popular thanks to hypertrophied nationalism and great-power fantasies, of which there were a lot before the First World War.

Jaroslav Hasek has a story called “Football Match”. He is very funny, although he is actually sad. It begins with the phrase “There is bitter enmity between the Bavarian cities of Tillingen and Hochstadt on the Danube.” Hasek writes that in the Middle Ages they drove each other, burned one city after another, and then this enmity transferred to a football confrontation. And in the end, teams from the cities of Tillingen and Hochstadt (fictional, of course) play each other. If possible, I will quote a couple of phrases here: “The Gochstadt forwards aroused everyone’s surprise; they chased the ball as quickly as their ancestors chased the fleeing Tillingen men.” And the story ends with the match turning into a massacre, and the next day German newspapers publish the following information: “The interesting competition between Tillingen and Hochstadt is not over. There were 1,200 guests and 850 local fans left on the field. Both clubs have been liquidated. The city is burning."

I.K.: So in football not only an atavistic desire to hunt is manifested, but also an atavistic inter-tribal war, which in the football of national teams is channeled into a civilized channel, turning into a game according to the rules? After all, football matches usually don’t end with everyone lying dead on the battlefield and the city burning.

S.K.: I have come across the point of view of one sociologist that fans who are in the stands watching a football match between friends and foes are like residents of a besieged city: they hope that the football players on the field will protect them from the invading enemy. Well, there is some stretch here, modern football is no longer like that, but nevertheless, before the First World War (and probably after) football became popular where there were some kind of confrontations. These confrontations might not even be very obvious or very important, but football was filled with this content. If there were no such confrontations, say, in Japan, then in Japan they continued to look at football as something strange.

For example, in Russia one of the first football matches took place on September 12, 1893, not far from the Tsarskoye Selo station in St. Petersburg - during a break between cyclist competitions, which is interesting. And the Petersburg Leaflet wrote about it as follows:

“An intermission was announced. At this time, the audience was entertained by gentlemen sportsmen playing football (Football). About 20 people signed up, the essence of the game is that one party of players tries to drive the ball - tossing it with their feet, heads, anything else, just not with their hands - into the goal of the opposing party.<…>Gentlemen athletes in white suits ran through the mud, every now and then splashing with all their might into the mud, and soon turned into chimney sweeps. There was constant laughter in the audience the entire time.”

That is, initially football, which the British brought to different countries, was a wild, strange and, probably, even comic spectacle. But in Russia, football very quickly gained popularity, because in Russia there were also meanings that somehow further filled it.

Football and the history of the 20th century

L.G.: It turns out that, accompanied by football, we went through the 20th century with all its vicissitudes, and although I don’t know anything specific about this, I would venture to suggest that football, one way or another, also participated in them - it did not remain indifferent least.

S.K.: If we talk about the First World War, then, together with industrialization, it played a fundamentally important role in the development and even popularization of sports; some scientists even use the phrase “sports promotion.” The fact is that World War I involved huge armies in terms of numbers of people. And in the troops of different countries participating in the First World War, a system of training and various competitions very quickly arose - sports games were actively introduced in order to maintain morale, in order to maintain discipline, so that the soldiers simply had something to do . And they were played very actively. One Prussian general wrote that football had a greater influence on the military life of individual units than reasonable service with weapons. That is, during the First World War, so to speak, the sports socialization of soldiers took place. And already in peacetime, when they returned after the First World War, many of them went to sports clubs and went to play football. They took off their uniforms, but they continued to play sports and went to the stands. And it was at this moment that sports competitions finally lost their elitist character.

Officers and soldiers of the British army play football. Thessaloniki, Christmas 1916 Imperial War Museum (Q 31574)

In European cities, many clubs were initially identified with certain ethnic, religious or social cultures. The simplest example is the two oldest clubs in Glasgow, Glasgow Rangers and Celtic. One of these clubs is Protestant, the other is Catholic; Here, please, is the essence that fills the matches between these teams with additional conflict. Or, for example, the Schalke club, which initially arose as a miners’ club, because coal was being actively mined in the Ruhr at that time: in general, symbolic conflicts arose between it and other clubs, which sometimes were inflated with the help of football .

And then the clubs began to receive income from ticket sales, and then large stadiums began to appear. Foreign teams began to be invited to tour in order to lure spectators - or, on the contrary, to go on tour to earn money. For example, in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the Basque team traveled throughout Europe on a tour, raising money for the children of fallen soldiers. This was the main task, but, in addition, they, of course, faced a propaganda task - they tried to attract interest in the war in Spain in a variety of ways. This team also visited the Soviet Union and played several friendly matches with different teams. One of these matches, however, almost ended in a scandal, because the guests, dissatisfied with the referee’s decision, left the field in the middle of the second half and returned only after the personal intervention of Comrade Molotov.

At the same time, international tournaments began to appear. The World Championship, first held in 1930, provided an additional incentive for expressions of sporting nationalism. Sloterdijk, the philosopher we have already talked about, believes that modern nations, as it were, delegate their essence to the national team. It turns out that national team matches are national simulators that remind a certain population of people that it can continue to identify itself as a real nation. There is an opinion that now people no longer need this, but the same Harari, for example, in the book “Sapiens” Yuval Noah Harari. “Sapiens.” Short story humanity." M., 2016. claims the opposite.

I.K.: Did totalitarian states use football in any way?

S.K.: Yes, very active. First of all, it's beautiful. Secondly, we know that Germany before World War II was simply obsessed with physical education and sports. In the USSR, in Germany, in fascist Italy, dictators built stadiums, provided clubs with state funds for training, and mobilized large numbers of spectators. It is very interesting that after the Anschluss, the Austrian team "Rapid" from Vienna began to participate in the German championship - and, imagine, on June 22, 1941, when the war with the USSR had already begun, in Berlin at a stadium attended by a hundred thousands of fans, Rapid won the final of the German championship and became the champion of Germany. This is quite a unique achievement.

German Football Championship Final, 22 June 1941 ullstein bild/Getty Images

In the Soviet Union, departmental clubs developed very actively, such as the current CSKA, which was always an army club - and this, in particular, meant that it could try to take the best players by simply conscripting them into the army.

L.G.: The best players of other clubs, do you mean?

S.K.: Yes Yes. Or, for example, the numerous Dynamo societies that existed in the Soviet Union - in Kiev, Minsk, Tbilisi, Moscow - and there was also the Berlin Dynamo. These were teams that were somehow related to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and, say, Dynamo Berlin was a Stasi team Stasi- abbreviated name of the Ministry of Internal Security of the GDR., and now she certainly gathered the best players throughout the GDR and, thanks to this, became the champion of the GDR ten times in a row.

Naturally, there was a reaction. In particular, the current popularity of Spartak, it seems to me, is largely explained by the fact that in Soviet times it was more of a protest club: it did not belong to the army, like CSKA, or to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, like Dynamo. It was a club that was against it, and, accordingly, that part of society that did not really like what was happening around them supported Spar-tak. There is also such a club in Berlin, it is called “Union”. He is very small, now plays in the second Bundesliga 2nd Bundesliga is a German professional league for football clubs, the second highest level in the German football league system., and everyone who didn’t like the regime, everyone who didn’t like the Stasi, supported this club. Therefore, he has a very diverse army of fans: from ordinary workers to university professors, who still go to the matches of this protest club.

L.G.: Do I understand correctly that in the middle of the 20th century, not only Spartak, but football in general as such - or at least the image of football - was somewhat more intelligent than today? I just remember, for example, my own grandmother, for whom going to the stadium and going to the theater were phenomena of absolutely the same order, they were cultural entertainment.

S.K.: Football fan culture has developed very differently in different countries. In the Soviet Union, indeed, firstly, a huge number of people went to football and the stadiums were full. Even Andrei Sinyavsky - more precisely, Abram Tertz - in the text “The Trial is Coming” described his feelings about football, which probably somehow explain the attractiveness of football for a very wide range of spectators with completely different education and intellectual levels. He wrote that “a football match—in the sharpest seconds of the game—is like possessing a woman. You don't notice anything around. There is only one goal, fiercely attracting: there! At any cost. Let it be death, let it be anything. If only I could break through and achieve. If only I could send the destined goal into the goal.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the championship of the now independent Russia and championships of other countries emerged, attendance suddenly fell, and everyone wondered - why? One of the answers to this question was given by Sergei Gandlevsky, who said that in Soviet times stadiums came to see poets. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became clear that there was a limited amount of entertainment in the Soviet Union. And when it turned out that there were many other interesting things, there weren’t as many real literature lovers as there seemed to be if you came to Luzhniki to see Yevtushenko. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union with football. But still, the Soviet Union developed somewhat in its own way, including from the point of view of football.

And in England, for example, football became a problem for the state and for society when it was chosen by real football fans - people for whom the main goal of going to a football match was not only to support their team and see goals scored, but also to prove their physical superiority over opponent's fans. In Italy, absolutely terrible events took place in the 1980s and 90s: people were killed, there were cases of the use of knives. Not long ago there was even a story when fans of one team brought a motorcycle to the stadium and threw it from the upper tier to the lower one. This should have occurred to them!

Riots following the Birmingham City v Leeds United match at St Andrews Stadium. Birmingham, 1985 Mirrorpix/Getty Images

But overall, football is now returning to a much more civilized state and perhaps even becoming more civilized than before. This is due both to globalization and to the fact that the owners of football clubs realized that they needed to rely on a slightly different audience. And now, in principle, the circle of football fans is no longer very similar to those who went to football in Germany and England, say, in the 1980s.

I.K.: Are there any examples of when football became an important player in big politics and big history?

S.K.: There are several very striking examples. Probably the first one is famous story about the Christmas Truce during the First World War, in 1914, when soldiers of two opposing armies simply played football on the front line - although not all historians are sure that this really took place: some say that there is enough evidence, someone says that there is not enough evidence. There is some documentary evidence of this - letters, postcards - but we cannot be one hundred percent sure that this happened.

There was also a war that probably started not only because of football, but football became the catalyst and the last straw. In the late 1960s, the two countries, El Salvador and Honduras, had a difficult relationship because large numbers of Salvadorans lived and worked in Honduras, and this created tension. In qualifying for the 1970 World Cup, these teams unfortunately faced each other. Honduras won the first match 1:0. One Salvadoran fan committed suicide. Naturally, the Salvadorans took this as a reason for even greater tension. The return match was won by El Salvador against Honduras 3:0, and Honduras returned to the airport in armored personnel carriers. After the decisive match, Honduras simply broke off diplomatic relations, and a full-scale war began between the countries: Salvadoran aircraft bombed an oil products warehouse and base, then there was an armed clash between ground forces. This war is still called “football”, or “hundred-hour war”. It is interesting that El Salvador, which thus qualified for the World Cup (and because of which, in general, the war began), lost to everyone at the World Cup, including the USSR national team with a score of 0:2. These countries signed a peace treaty only in 1980. In this war, according to various estimates, from two to six thousand people died.

Separatist sentiments in Yugoslavia were also closely connected with football, because the Serbian clubs Red Star and Partizan actively opposed the Croatian Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split. At the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb there is a memorial plaque with the inscription that “our heroes went to the front from here” - because many ardent football fans, indeed, went to fight during the civil war. In general, there were many contacts between football and big history.

How to love football

I.K.: I don’t know anything about football. I don’t feel any serious hunting instincts, no need to channel somewhere I also don’t see my aggression and especially nationalistic feelings in myself. And I would like to understand: why should I watch football? How can I love him? For example, today there was already a comparison between football and theater. I would like to understand: how should I look at the very development of football action as something interesting?

S.K.: In my opinion, football is not even so similar to theater - and the same Sloterdijk, who is apparently critical of modern theater, writes that in a modern theater the stage is filled with only losers who talk about their problems, but in modern arenas, as before, you experience with delight the primordial fateful choice that is about to take place, and you expect victory or defeat. We have already said that football is probably the ideal balance between the natural and the random. Football in this sense is a model of life, where within the framework of a match, within a season, within a career, for example, one bump can undo a year’s work or, on the contrary, someone can undeservedly achieve victory. Therefore, from my point of view, football is most similar to modern TV series. For example, in the series "Dr. House" - and many series are structured this way - there is one storyline that develops throughout the season, from the first episode to the last, and, in addition, in each episode there is its own storyline, where Dr. tries to detect lupus, gets an MRI, and in the end triumphantly wins or loses. This is exactly what happens in modern football. As soon as you become a spectator, a fan of one of the teams, you begin not only to watch the series - you begin to live in it a little. Therefore, football is very easy to compare with TV series, and I once did material where I anticipated the championships that were about to begin, comparing them with different TV series. For example, now everything is very easy to compare with “Game of Thrones”: the King of the Night (that is, Paris Saint-Germain, a club with huge money) threatens all of modern football. Barcelona had a trio of dragons, one of them - Neymar - was mortally wounded by a spear poisoned by huge money, and ended up on the side of PSG. And now this Army of the Night is approaching the entire European football. Now PSG, fortunately - from my point of view - is still losing to Real Madrid.

I.K.: Wait a second. For people who don’t know anything about this, could you tell us what really happened in football?

S.K.: There is a football club, Paris Saint-Germain, which at some point received huge investments from new owners from the Middle East and began to buy football players for incredible money, luring players like Neymar, thereby destroying the existing system. Therefore, many people dislike this club, believing that it can break the modern football system in general. And that is why the defeat of Paris Saint-Germain causes a feeling of joy among many neutral fans.

Moreover, such stories happen in football that, if we watched them in the movies, we would say: “Ugh, Hollywood!”; cinema can no longer afford this. For example, a few years ago, the unremarkable Leicester team, which consisted of only losers, former alcoholics and whose coach had, in general, given up on everything, suddenly began to win in the richest championship in England - and became champion. If we saw such a film, we would say that it is as primitive and flat as possible, because the team of losers in the end defeats everyone - how can this be filmed in 2018? But in football we cannot make claims that the situation is artificial or unnatural: this is reality.

Leicester City players celebrate their victory in the English Premier League. 2016 Michael Regan/Getty Images

In fact, what a commentator is needed for now, in my opinion, is to create this context and help the viewer follow the story, tell what happened in previous episodes, what can happen in this episode, comment on what is happening, introduce the characters .

We talked about how football is similar to theater, how it is similar to TV series and, one might say, to literature, because there is a plot in both. But at the same time, unlike viewers of TV series, a fan in the stadium feels like a full participant in the events. The fans sincerely believe - and this belief is periodically confirmed - that it also depends on them how the football match ends. And there really were such stories, when fans managed to get their team in such a mood that it pulled out a completely hopeless game.

There is a truism that the losers in life like to identify themselves with teams that win, and thus feel like winners too - at least for 90 minutes. But this truism is very easily destroyed by pointing to those teams - there are many of them - for which fans root much more sincerely and become much more loyal when their team does not win championships. When a team loses, it is relegated from the top division - and the entire stadium stands behind its own. This, apparently, is precisely the ability to empathize with something, to sympathize. Sloterdijk writes that the obsession with the feeling that you belong to some community of people is a thing of the past, that we no longer want to belong to any community - but, apparently, we do; Apparently, this need for group behavior or group experience has remained with modern man.

Gerhard Schulze, a German sociologist who coined the term “society of impressions”, or “society of experiences”, writes that the consumer society is becoming a thing of the past: there are already too many objects, and the modern generation is not so interested consumption and is ready to invest money in some vivid experiences: travel, go to concerts and spend money on it. Schulze writes about why mass events have become so popular. It would seem, why should I go somewhere if I can watch a concert, a football match, or anything else in the comfort of my home on a big TV? But Schulze shows that this togetherness intensifies the experience, intensifies the emotions. Apparently, empathy has something to do with it: it is precisely this that enhances the experiences that we get at the stadium, and not at the TV. People are looking for this direct contact instead of the Internet and television. In addition, Schulze writes that people come together to experience events that will allow them to later tell stories - and humans love to tell stories. And, accordingly, football, like some other phenomena, creates a space for the joint experience of very vivid emotions.

Who is a genius coach?

I.K.: It’s clear about the emotional part. They also often say that football is a very intellectual sport. What is the calculation and, in general, the intellectual power of the players or other participants in this game?

S.K.: Probably, many football players cannot be called intellectuals in the usual sense for Arzamas listeners. But modern football has turned into a very difficult activity, where an athlete must not only be very physically prepared, very resilient, he must not only be very good at technique, that is, stop the ball, shoot at goal, make passes. Modern football has become very fast. A modern football player must interpret space very well, this is a large football field - playing on a large football field is much more difficult than on a small one, you need to make decisions very quickly, at the same time you need to remember and carry out the tactical tasks that the coach has set for you. It’s not for nothing that some people call it, say, chess. At the same time, you need to improvise, because in football it is impossible, as in theater or music, to practice difficult parts a million times. In football, you can only create episodes in training that may be similar to those that will occur in the game, but they will not correspond one hundred percent to them. Therefore, for a player, football is a combination of both tactical training and the ability to quickly analyze and interpret the situation.

But football, of course, becomes even more difficult for coaches. Because a modern football coach is a person who, on the one hand, must know how to prepare the team physically so that it is able to run the entire match and follow his instructions. On the other hand, a modern football coach deals with twenty-five grown men, each of whom considers himself the best...

I.K.: Or aunts.

S.K.: Yes of course. It’s just that things are simpler with women in this regard. I have never coached women, so I don’t know and I’m talking about men’s football. Men's football is a very strange group: in the locker room everyone considers themselves the best, everyone wants to play. This is a competition of some incredible egos. And the head coach must be an excellent psychologist, because the tasks and needs of the team - and the individual - collide all the time. On the third hand, the head coach must know how to prepare his own game - and the game based on who you will be playing against. Modern coaches always analyze the opponent, look for weaknesses, and try to understand how they can beat this particular team. But at the same time, of course, we must not forget about our own game. The head coach must figure out - or choose from the available options - how the team should act collectively: who, where and why runs after losing the ball; how everyone acts after tackling the ball; how to open the opponent's defense; how to act on corners and free kicks; how to deal with outs. And the coach must get his players to transfer everything that they played in training as accurately as possible onto the football field. This is a huge, complex and very difficult, in my opinion, job, where you have to be a manager, a psychologist, a tactician, a teacher, and sometimes even a primary school teacher, because not all football players are, as we have already said, intellectuals .

L.G.: Of course, I’m wondering if it’s even possible to tell the history of football as a history of the main revolutionary coaching ideas that changed our understanding of the game and, in fact, the game itself?

S.K.: Yes. Initially, football was probably a rather chaotic form of entertainment, and, apparently, at first teams played like small children play in the yard: if you throw a ball at them, we will see that they will run after the ball in a crowd and try to score it at the gate. It is interesting that now, after about a hundred years of modern football history, some coaches believe that children should be trained in this way - but this is not important for our discussion.

The first fundamental question that football coaches, football thinkers, have faced since the very beginning was what formation the team should play. You have 11 people. Unlike chess, they can be placed in any order - or not; you can ask them to stand in one place - or run all over the field. And initially, apparently, the teams played something like this: one goalkeeper, one defender, about two people closer to the opponent’s penalty area and seven attackers; and everyone tried to score each other a goal in this way. It quickly became clear that this was not a very effective way of playing the game, in particular because you also need to be able to defend yourself. And, to simplify, for some time football was developing towards, firstly, an increase in the number of defensive players and, secondly, the emergence of clear and rigid roles for players. If children run in a crowd after each other, not knowing which of them is a defender, which is a midfielder, then in football at first (and for quite a long time) they tried to make football players masters of a certain profession. The 2-3-5 tactics appeared - these are two defenders, three midfielders, five attackers.

I.K.: Excuse me, please, but the midfielder is the one who does what?

S.K.: Which is between attack and defense.

I.K.: I see.

S.K.: To put it simply, he is in the center of the field, connects defense and attack and can be at the opponents’ goal or at his own goal.

Then such a coach Herbert Chapman at Arsenal came up with a tactic called “W”, that is, three defenders, two people in front of them, two more in front of them and three strikers. Then the famous Brazilian national team appeared, which played according to the 4-2-4 formation - as Vysotsky sang:

They play, the bastards, according to the double-ve system,
But we don’t care - we have four-two-four.

This tactic from the Brazilian national team was later adopted by some Soviet teams, but Brazil conquered the world with this tactic in 1958 and won the championship. They, the Brazilians, showed everyone the tactics of four defenders, three midfielders and three strikers in 1962.

In general, at first the development was rather schematic: the coaches fought with each other, trying to outplay another formation with the help of one formation.

But then visionaries began to appear in football who began to think not only about the formation and scheme, but also about the style of their actions. At first it was quite simple - or rather, it seems simple now. In Italy, Helenio Herrera, coach of Inter, came up with a style called "catenaccio", which translated means "a door that cannot be passed through." The Italians began to play defensively, defending themselves with almost the entire team and thinking that by running into the other half of the field two or three times, they would score one goal, not concede a single one, and thus win. Then it became clear that this tactic could also be fought, and, let’s say, the very attacking Scots beat the Italians, despite this catenaccio tactic.

Then coaches such as the Dutch Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff and our own Valery Lobanovsky began to think that the roles of football players on the field could be interpreted a little more complexly. And the concept of “total football” appeared. Michels, Cruyff and Lobanovsky themselves implemented this in different ways, but the general idea was that strictly tying players to certain positions is not very good. For example, if in a certain area of ​​the field there are one more of your players than the opposing players, your chance of winning the ball and outplaying your opponents will be much higher. Coaches began to prepare their teams so that a defender could play in attack, and a striker could play in defense, and teams began to use pressure, that is, to take the ball away in the opposing half of the field.

Dynamo Kyiv players and their coach Valery Lobanovsky celebrate their victory in the USSR Cup. 1987 TASS

The story with Lobanovsky developed very interestingly. He really thought a lot about football and began to attract assistants from science, because football, which he tried to organize in Dynamo Kiev, was possible only if the players were incredibly physically prepared. Lobanovsky said that the individual skill of one player is, of course, important, but it is not the most important thing. Any great football player can be outplayed through teamwork. Relatively speaking, Maradona will beat two, but he won’t beat three or four. But you have to make sure that you have four people in time to attack Maradona. Accordingly, the football players of Dynamo Kyiv and the USSR national team had to run much more than their rivals. Therefore, Lobanovsky, with the help of physiologists and biologists, came up with new training regimes that would make football players more resilient. This allowed Dynamo Kyiv and the USSR national team to achieve a number of truly impressive victories. This included the legendary game of 1988, when the USSR national team beat the Italian national team, pressing throughout the match in all parts of the field - the Italians simply could not raise their heads, because only after receiving the ball did the Italian understand that there were two or more three rivals. Ralf Rangnick, who has now also become a famous football visionary, watched Lobanovsky's training and even played in a friendly match against his team, and he admitted that when the ball first flew out of the field in the eighth minute, he stopped and counted the players of the opposing team, because I was convinced that there were at least 14-15 of them there. However, over time it became clear that these new training loads have their own problems, and they lead to rather bad, complex consequences.

Modern football coaches understand that from a tactical point of view it is already difficult to come up with something completely new, and they begin to resort to the help of modern technologies: in the training process some fantastic futuristic simulators appear that allow football players to work on their reaction speed to the ball and at the opponent, above the field of view, and so on. At the same time, coaches understand that now everyone knows how to train and prepare, so they need to pay more attention to psychology - although this is not mathematics, and various difficulties arise here. Some trainers pay increased attention to nutrition. And as a result, football, developing from simple schemes through the complication of the roles of football players in the team, thanks to those coaches who thought a lot about it and tried to find some new unexpected moves, has now turned, firstly, into a very expensive, and secondly , a very diverse industry that includes absolutely everything you can imagine.

I.K.: Before the interview, you told me about coaches’ games with players in peak form. Can you explain again what's going on there?

S.K.: Many modern football coaches say that peak form is not an illusory concept, but unnecessary for a team that plays a long season from September to May. Over such a long period of time, you can maintain a football player at a fairly good level of physical fitness, but trying to bring him to peak form in this case is completely unnecessary and even harmful - simply because after that there will inevitably be failure.

I.K.: That is, peak form is a certain ideal state to which a person can be trained, but some kind limited period of time?

S.K.: Yes. National teams hold short-term tournaments - they last four weeks, and in such a short period of time, coaches quite easily calculate how to give the team such loads so that by a certain date it is in ideal condition. But at the same time you understand that later there may be failure. And, in fact, Valery Lobanovsky, who coached not only Dynamo Kiev, but also the USSR national team, had a very unpleasant story happen in 1990. In preparation for the World Cup, he, following the example of the 1988 European Championship and the 1986 World Championship, distributed the load in such a way that the players began the championship not being in the best condition. This is now done really quite simply, and any physical training trainers know how to do it. For example, you put quite a lot of stress on the players before the first matches. Under these loads, they are, as they say, on heavy legs: they are not able to play as quickly and are not as resilient as they will be later. And then you gradually reduce the load - and your form begins to grow. And in 1990, Valery Lobanovsky bet that the team, having not played the first three matches very well, would still leave the group, and then, when the playoffs began, that is, the knockout game, it would begin to gain, gain, gain shape - and will be able to reach the semi-finals or even the final. But, unlike in 1988, when the team reached the final in this way, this time it did not work and the team did not leave the group.

What are the national football schools?

L.G.: Can we say that in different territories - in Russia, in England, in Italy, in South America - specific national schools of football have developed and the game itself is not similar in different parts of the world? Or is it just a stereotype? And if this is so, then have such schools developed everywhere? And in 2018, when everyone freely moves to clubs from one country to another, is it still legitimate to talk about national schools?

S.K.: This probably exists to a lesser extent now, although at first, of course, football was played very differently in different countries. Once upon a time it was quite possible to say, for example, that English football is about long passes, clearances, fighting for the ball with heads at the top, passes from the flanks into the penalty area... English football was known as being so stupid, but very combative. Attempts have often been made to draw parallels between national character and football style. And in the case, for example, with the German national team, these parallels worked, because the German national team and German football in general have been such a working football for a long time. The German team was called a machine and was even compared to a tank, because, while not playing very beautifully, not playing brightly, not effectively, it again and again achieved resounding victories. Probably, the way we imagine Brazil is quite consistent with the way football was played in Brazil for a long time (and even now, in general, it is often played): it is a lot of artistry, it is a technique that is practiced on the beaches of Copacabana, this is the love of juggling a ball, beating several opponents. True, if you watch the Brazilian championship, you will see that Brazilian football is quite dirty: for some reason there are a lot of rule violations. And the Italian national team became known as a team that in no way corresponds to stereotypes about the national character of Italians. Italians are lively, gesticulating, loud talking people, and the Italian national team for many years was a very reserved, dry, defensive team. But this happened precisely because in Italy at some point there was a tactical revolution: one person appeared who came up with a slightly different approach to football, and this approach began to produce results.

In 2018, taking into account globalization and all the processes that are taking place in the world, one can only catch certain elements, say, in Brazilian football: there are many technical football players left there, more technical than many European players. It’s the same with the Spanish football leagues: it’s also warm there, there’s a good climate. And, for example, the German national team was completely reborn and turned into one of the most beautiful and playing teams in the world. Well, this happened for objective reasons.

In England, a real cultural revolution took place. Economists Simon Cooper and Stefan Szymanski, who wrote the book “Soccernomics” (they look at various problems from an economic and mathematical point of view - not in the sense of who spends and earns how much and how), are trying to answer the global football question, why England, The birthplace of football, the country with the longest football history, constantly loses at the World and European Championships, although everyone thinks it should win. So, armed with economic tools, they say that in fact England should not win. England has long been a rather closed country in terms of football. And with the help of a variety of statistics, they show that as a result of many years of English football being closed to innovation, England is performing as it should be performing: it should be eliminated around the quarter-finals. And this is supported by certain evidence.

I.K.: In the sense that traditionalism bothers her the most?

S.K.: Rather, it is a legacy of former traditionalism. That is, being closed to innovation had a very negative impact on the development of English football, while Italy, France, Spain and Germany, which are nearby and where there was a real network where football ideas were very quickly exchanged, on the contrary, won much more often .

They also write, for example, about why big football cannot be a business, but should be something like museums, and they also back this up with facts: profitable football clubs, for example German clubs or Lyon, are now performing unsuccessfully in European cups. In order to perform successfully in European competition, you have to spend almost everything you earn on new players - this is now an economic reality.

Football and philosophers

L.G.: Considering the variety of contexts in which football is relevant and in demand - and we have already mentioned literature, theater, sociology, economics, and anything else - it is difficult to imagine that the science of philosophy would not take up it in any way. Tell us, if possible, a little about this.

S.K.: Philosophy may not have paid as much attention to football as it could have, but it certainly did. And it’s not for nothing that Monty Python has a wonderful sketch called “Football of Philosophers,” where the German national team (consisting of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, captain Schopenhauer, etc.) plays with the national team Greece (consisting of Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Aristotle, etc.). There, Nietzsche initially receives a yellow card because he tells Judge Confucius that he has no free will. For 89 minutes the players just walk around the field and think - they don’t know what to do. At the 89th minute, Archimedes shouts: “Eureka!” - passes the ball to Socrates, and Greece scores the winning goal, after which, naturally, disputes arise: Kant says that the whole match exists only in the imagination, Marx, with his characteristic materialism, says that there was an offside (which is true). But in the end the match ends with the score 1:0.

"Philosopher's Football" from Monty Python's Flying Circus. 1972

The same Heidegger, who mentioned football in his works, played football in his youth, and there are wonderful stories about how, already an elderly man, he went to his neighbors to watch football matches of the European Championship: he did not have his own TV. Or how the intendant of the Freiburg theater met him on the train and tried to engage him in a conversation about literature, while Heidegger went off to talk about Franz Beckenbauer, a player of the German national team, whom he then admired.

The modern philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, starting, among other things, from some things described by Heidegger, tried to formulate an answer to the question that we have been trying to answer all the time: why is football so attractive to very large quantity of people? Gumbrecht creates such a concept as a “phenomenon”, that is, the appearance of something as an event - for example, a very successful goalkeeper's maneuver, which you have never seen in your entire life. Spectators and athletes are in the highest tension throughout the match, because they are waiting for this phenomenon out of nothing. A football match, on the one hand, has a completely concrete form, and on the other hand, it is completely ephemeral, because there will never be an absolutely identical episode: it will happen now - and this will never happen again in life. And the phenomenon, writes Gumbrecht, is the emergence of this previously unknown form, which brings football fans the highest degree of pleasure. For Gumbrecht, this comes close to what Heidegger described as art: for Heidegger, art is “the becoming and accomplishment of truth,” and for Gumbrecht, in fact, football appears and manifests itself in exactly the same way.

***

L.G.: It is on this philosophical note that we end the “Inferiority Complex” podcast, thanks to which we were able to make sure that football is not just 22 people mindlessly kicking a ball on a large green lawn, but an important part of world culture. Lev Gankin and Irina Kaliteevskaya struggled with an inferiority complex.

I.K.: We thank Sergei Krivokharchenko, as well as sound engineer Nikolai Antonov and the Suitcase Production studio. The podcast featured – and continues to feature – George Frideric Handel’s anthem “Zadok the Priest,” which formed the basis of the UEFA Champions League anthem. Here you hear another version of it - this is an arrangement by Julian Galan, Jeff Meegan, David Tobin and Rob Kelly. Goodbye!

Other episodes of the podcast« Inferiority complex» , as well as listen to our other podcasts, courses and audio versions of materials in the “” application.

Football(from English foot- sole, ball- ball) is the most popular team sport in the world, in which the goal is to score the ball into the opponent's goal more times than the opposing team can do in a set time. The ball can be kicked into the goal with your feet or any other parts of the body (except hands).

History of the emergence and development of football (briefly)

The exact date of the origin of football is not known, but it is safe to say that the history of football goes back more than one century and has affected many countries. Ball games were popular on all continents, as evidenced by widespread archaeological finds.

In ancient China, there was a game known as "Tsuju", references to which date back to the second century BC. According to FIFA in 2004, it is considered the most ancient of the predecessors of modern football.

In Japan, a similar game was called “Kemari” (in some sources “Kenatt”). The first mention of Kemari occurs in 644 AD. Kemari is still played today at Shinto shrines during festivals.

In Australia, balls were made from rat skins, bladder large animals, from twisted hair. Unfortunately, the rules of the game have not been preserved.

IN North America was also the ancestor of football, the game was called "pasuckuakohowog", which means "they gathered to play the ball with their feet." Usually the games took place on the beaches, they tried to kick the ball into a goal about half a mile wide, but the field itself was twice as long. The number of participants in the game reached 1000 people.

Who invented football?

Modern football was invented in England in the 1860s.

Basic rules of football (briefly)

The first rules of the game of football were introduced on December 7, 1863 by the Football Association of England. Today, the rules of football are set by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which includes FIFA (4 votes), as well as representatives of the English, Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh football associations. The latest edition of the official football rules is dated June 1, 2013 and consists of 17 rules, here is a summary:

• Rule 1: Judge
• Rule 2: Assistant referees
• Rule 3: Duration of the game
• Rule 4: Start and resumption of play
• Rule 5: Ball in and out of play
• Law 6: Definition of a goal
• Law 11: Offside
• Law 12: Player violations and unruly behavior
• Law 13: Penalty and free kicks
• Law 14: Penalty kick
• Law 15: Throwing out the ball
• Law 16: Goal kick
• Law 17: Corner kick

Each football team must consist of a maximum of eleven players (that is how many can be on the field at one time), one of whom is the goalkeeper and he is the only player who is allowed to play with his hands within the penalty area at his goal.

How many players are on the team?

The team consists of 11 players: ten field players and one goalkeeper.

A football match consists of two halves of 45 minutes each. Between halves there is a 15-minute rest break, after which the teams change goals. This is done to ensure that the teams are on an equal footing.

The football game is won by the team that scores the most goals against the opponent.

If the teams finish the match with the same goal score, then a draw is recorded, or two additional halves of 15 minutes are assigned. If extra time ends in a draw, a penalty shoot-out is awarded.

Penalty rules in football

A penalty kick or penalty kick is the most serious penalty in football and is taken from the appropriate mark. When taking a penalty kick, there must be a goalkeeper in the goal.

Taking post-match penalties in football takes place according to the following rules: teams take 5 shots at the opponent’s goal from a distance of 11 meters, all shots must be carried out by different players. If after 5 kicks the score in penalties is equal, then the teams continue to take one pair of penalties until a winner is determined.

Offside in football

A player is considered to be in an offside or offside position if he is closer to the opponent's goal line than the ball and the second-to-last opponent player, including the goalkeeper.

To avoid being offside, players must adhere to the following rules:

• it is prohibited to interfere with the game (touching the ball that was passed to him or that touched a teammate);
• it is forbidden to interfere with an opponent;
• It is prohibited to gain an advantage due to one's position (touching a ball that bounces off a goal post or crossbar or from an opponent).

Handball in football

Football rules allow field players to touch the ball with any part of their body except their hands. For handball, the team is awarded a penalty kick or a penalty kick, which is taken by a player from the opposing team.

The rules of handball in football include two more very important points:

• accidentally hitting the ball in your hand is not a violation of the rules;
• instinctively defending the ball is not a violation of the rules.

Yellow and red cards

Yellow and red cards are signs that the referee shows to players for breaking the rules and unsportsmanlike behavior.

A yellow card is of a warning nature and is given to a player in the following cases:

• for deliberate handball;
• for delaying time;
• for disrupting the attack;
• for a kick before the whistle / leaving the wall (penalty kick);
• for a kick after the whistle;
• for rough play;
• for unsportsmanlike conduct;
• for disputes with the arbitrator;
• for simulation;
• for leaving or entering the game without the permission of the referee.

A red card in football is shown by the referee for particularly serious violations or unsportsmanlike behavior. A player who receives a red card must leave the field for the remainder of the match.

Football field size and marking lines

A standard field for big football is a rectangular area in which the goal lines (end lines) are necessarily shorter than the side lines. Next we will look at the parameters of a football field.

The size of a football field in meters is not clearly regulated, but there are certain boundary indicators. For national-level matches, the standard length of a football field from goal to goal should be between 90-120 meters and a width of 45-90 meters. The area of ​​a football field ranges from 4050 m2 to 10800 m2. For comparison, 1 hectare = 10,000 m2. For international matches, the length of the side lines should not extend beyond the interval of 100-110 meters, and the goal lines beyond the range of 64-75 meters. There are FIFA recommended dimensions for a football field of 105 by 68 meters (area 7140 square meters).

How long is a football field?

The length of the football field from goal to goal should be between 90-120 meters.

The field markings are made with identical lines; the width of the markings should not exceed 12 centimeters (the lines are included in the areas that they limit). The side line or edge of the football field is usually called the “edge”.

Football field markings

• The middle line is the line that divides the field into two equal halves. In the middle of the center line is the center of the field with a diameter of 0.3 meters. The circumference around the center of the field is 9.15 meters. A kick or pass from the center of the field begins both halves of the match, as well as extra time. After each goal scored, the ball is also placed in the center of the field.
• The goal line in football is drawn on the lawn parallel to the crossbar.
• The football goal area is a line drawn at a distance of 5.5 meters from the outside of the goal post. Two strips 5.5 meters long are drawn perpendicular to the goal line, directed deep into the field. Their end points are connected by a line parallel to the goal line.
• Penalty area - from points at a distance of 16.5 m from the inside of each goal post, at right angles to the goal line, two lines are drawn deep into the field. At a distance of 16.5 m these lines are connected by another line parallel to the goal line. A penalty mark is placed in the center of the goal line and at a distance of 11 meters from it, and it is marked with a solid circle with a diameter of 0.3 meters. Within the penalty area, the goalkeeper can play with his hands.
• Corner sectors are arcs with a radius of 1 meter centered on the corners of a football field. This line forms a limited area for corner kicks. Flags with a height of at least 1.5 meters and a banner size of 35x45 centimeters are installed in the corners of the field.

The field is marked using lines, the width of which must be the same and not exceed 12 centimeters. The image below shows the layout of a football field.

Football goal

The goal is located exactly in the middle of the goal line. The standard goal size in football is as follows:

• the length or width of the goal in big football is the distance between the vertical posts (bars) - 7.73 meters;
• goal height - distance from the lawn to the crossbar - 2.44 meters.

The diameter of the posts and crossbars should not exceed 12 centimeters. The gates are made of wood or metal and painted white, and also have a cross-sectional shape of a rectangle, ellipse, square or circle.

A soccer goal net must fit the size of the goal and must be durable. It is customary to use football nets of the following size: 2.50 x 7.50 x 1.00 x 2.00 m.

Football field design

The design standard for a football field looks like this:

• Grass lawn.
• Substrate made of sand and crushed stone.
• Heating pipes.
• Drainage pipes.
• Aeration pipes.

The surface for a football field can be natural or artificial. Grass requires additional care, namely watering and fertilizing. The grass surface does not allow more than two games per week. Grass is brought to the field in special rolls of turf. Very often on a football field you can see grass of two colors (striped field), this happens due to the peculiarities of lawn care. When mowing a lawn, the machine first moves in one direction and then in the other, and the grass falls in different directions (multi-directional lawn mowing). This is done for the convenience of determining distances and offsides, as well as for beauty. The height of the grass on a football field is usually 2.5 - 3.5 cm. The maximum speed of the ball in football at the moment is 214 km/h.

Artificial turf for a football field is a carpet made of synthetic material. Each blade of grass is not just a strip of plastic, but a product of complex shape. In order for the artificial turf to be suitable for play, it is covered with a filler of sand and rubber crumbs.

Soccer ball

What kind of ball is used to play football? A professional soccer ball consists of three main components: a tube, a liner and a tire. The chamber is usually made of synthetic butyl or natural latex. The lining is the inner layer between the tire and the tube. The lining directly affects the quality of the ball. The thicker it is, the better the quality of the ball. Typically the lining is made of polyester or compressed cotton. The tire consists of 32 synthetic waterproof pieces, 12 of which are pentagonal in shape, 20 are hexagonal.

Soccer ball size:

• circumference - 68-70 cm;
• weight - no more than 450 g.

The speed of a ball in football reaches 200 km/h.

Football uniform

Mandatory elements of a player's sports football kit are:

• Shirt or T-shirt with sleeves.
• Underpants. If underpants are used, they should be the same color.
• Gaiters.
• Shields. Must be completely covered with gaiters and provide the proper level of protection.
• Boots.

Why do football players need socks?

Leg warmers perform protective function, supporting the leg and protecting against minor injuries. Thanks to them, the shields hold on.

The goalkeeper's football uniform must be different in color from the uniform of other players and referees.

Players may not wear any equipment that could be dangerous to themselves or other players, such as jewelry and wristwatches.

What do football players wear under their shorts?

Underpants are tight-fitting compression panties. The color and length of underpants should not differ from the color and length of panties.

Set pieces in football

• Kickoff kick. The ball is played in football in three cases: at the beginning of the match, at the beginning of the second half and after a goal is scored. All players of the team taking the kick-off must be in their own half of the field, and their opponents must be at least nine meters away from the ball. The player taking the kick-off does not have the right to touch the ball again before other players do so.
• A goal kick and the ball being put into play by the goalkeeper. Putting the ball into play after it has gone beyond the goal line (on the side of the post or over the crossbar), due to the fault of a player of the attacking team.
• Throwing the ball in from the sideline. Made by a field player after the ball has crossed the side line and left the field. The ball must be thrown in from the place where it was “out”. The player making the catch must face the field on or behind the sideline. At the moment of the throw, both feet of the player must touch the ground. The ball is put into play without a signal from the referee.
• Corner kick. Putting the ball into play from the corner sector. This is a penalty for players on the defending team who kick the ball over the goal line.
• Free kick and free kick. Penalty for deliberately touching the ball with your hand or using rough handling against players of the opposing team.
• Eleven meter kick (penalty kick).
• Offside position.

Football refereeing

Referees monitor compliance with the established rules on the football field. For each match, a main referee and two assistants are appointed.

The duties of a judge include:

• Timing of the match.
• Recording match events.
• Ensuring the ball meets the requirements.
• Ensuring that players are equipped as required.
• Ensuring that there are no unauthorized persons on the field.
• Ensuring that injured players are cared for/carried off the field.
• Providing the relevant authorities with a match report, including information on all disciplinary measures taken against players and/or officials teams, as well as for all other incidents that occurred before, during or after the match.

Judge's rights:

• Stop, temporarily interrupt or terminate the match in case of any violation of the rules, outside interference, or injury to players;
• Take action against team officials who behave inappropriately;
• Continue play until the ball is out of play if the player, in his opinion, has received only a minor injury;
• Continue play when the offended team benefits from the advantage (remains in possession of the ball), and penalize the original offense if the intended advantage is not taken advantage of by the team;
• Punish a player for a more serious violation of the Rules in the event that he simultaneously commits more than one violation;
• Act based on the recommendations of your assistants and the reserve judge.

Competitions

Competitions are organized by the federation; each tournament draws up its own regulations, which usually prescribe the composition of participants, the tournament layout, and the rules for determining the winners.

FIFA

National teams

• The World Cup is the main international football competition. The championship is held once every four years; men's national teams of FIFA member countries from all continents can take part in the tournament.
• The Confederations Cup is a football competition among national teams, which is held a year before the World Cup. It is held in the host country of the World Championship. 8 teams take part in the championship: the winners of the continental championships, the winner of the World Championships and the team of the organizing country.
• Olympic Games

• The FIFA Club World Cup is an annual competition between the strongest representatives of the six continental confederations.

UEFA

National teams

• The European Championship is the main competition of national teams under the leadership of UEFA. The championship is held every four years.

• The UEFA Champions League is the most prestigious annual European club football tournament.
• The UEFA Europa League is the second most important tournament for European football clubs belonging to UEFA.
• The UEFA Super Cup is a one-match championship in which the winners of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League of the previous season meet.

CONMEBOL

National teams

• The America's Cup is a championship held under the auspices of CONMEBOL among national teams of countries in the region.

• Copa Libertadores - The cup is named after the historical leaders of the War of Independence of the Spanish colonies in America. It is held among the best clubs in the countries of the region.
• The Copa Sudamericana is the second most important club tournament in South America after the Copa Libertadores.
• The South American Recopa is the equivalent of the continental Super Cup. The tournament involves the winners of the two most important club tournaments - the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana of the previous season.

CONCACAF

National teams

• The CONCACAF Gold Cup is a football tournament for the countries of North, Central America and the Caribbean.

• The CONCACAF Champions League is an annual football championship among the best clubs in North and Central America and the Caribbean.

Football structures

The main football body is FIFA (Fédération internationale de football association), located in Zurich, Switzerland. She organizes international tournaments on a global scale.

Continental organizations:

• CONCACAF (Сonfederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) - football confederation of North and Central America and the Caribbean countries,
• CONMEFBOL (CONfederacion sudaMEricana de FutBOL) - South American Football Confederation,
• UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) is a union of European football associations,

IN FOOTBALL WE ARE WORKERS AND PEASANTS. WE NEED TO PLOW AND PLOW

P The successor of the great Yashin in goal for the national team and Dynamo Moscow came to the press bar of Novaya Gazeta two hours after the end of the Russia-Tunisia match, asking us to record this game on a video recorder. Having already settled down at the table, he admitted his obvious mistake. The former goalkeeper, now a businessman, remains true to his principles: precision and reliability. “I scheduled this business meeting ahead of time - and missed. Without looking at the schedule of the World Cup games, as the gatekeepers say, he “let go of a butterfly” (note, to the detriment of himself, but not of his current team. - Ed.) Without hiding his joy from the first victory of our team, Vladimir Pilguy immediately uttered the phrase, which we put in the title. So how far can the “workers and peasants” of the Russian national team go on the football fields of Japan and South Korea? Talk about this over a pint of beer with Pilguy...

At first, I admit, there were certain doubts about the success of our team. Especially against the backdrop of the Russian national team’s performance in the LG Cup. But already somewhere in the middle of the first half it became clear: our team is two heads higher in class.
Valera Karpin looked very good, performing a colossal amount of work. Nikiforov Yura and Viktor Onopko also performed quite well. Romantsev got the replacement right on time - he brought in fresh blood. And the team ran. I was pleasantly surprised by the very young Dmitry Sychev, who essentially scored both goals against the Tunisians.
- How would you evaluate the performance of our team’s goalkeeper Ruslan Nigmatullin?
- Ruslan had very little work to do in that match, so it’s difficult to judge his current capabilities. To be honest, I don’t really like Nigmatullin. Yes, his jumps are good, but if you look at the recordings of his previous matches, there was no need to jump at all. You could pick up the ball from your seat with your arms outstretched.
In general, this is my personal opinion, but the first number of the Russian team should have been Sergei Ovchinnikov. He is a very experienced, reliable goalkeeper, and unlike Ruslan, the current goalkeeper of Lokomotiv did not have a long break in playing practice.
The second number should be Stanislav Cherchesov: despite his age, he is a reliable goalkeeper in not the weakest club in Europe. But the invitation to the national team of Alexander Filimonov is still incomprehensible to me, because for a long time even a non-specialist could see that he had broken down. He broke down in that same ill-fated match with the Ukrainian national team. And now he is being taken to a tournament of the highest level again. Imagine how he feels psychologically...
- In your opinion, why did Romantsev refuse Ovchinnikov’s services?
- I think solely because of personal reasons. The same goes for Rolan Gusev, who could look much more convincing than some of the current national team players. But Romantsev should not be accused of bias. He is the head coach of the team. And he forms the team at his own discretion. After all, it is he who bears responsibility for defeat and reaps the glory for victories.
- What can you say about current goalkeepers in general?
- In my opinion, the class of goalkeepers has decreased. Previously, if you take the USSR championship, any team had at least two great goalkeepers. Even in “Kairat”, for example, two wonderful goalkeepers played - Ordybaev and Pshenichnikov. Yes, there were different ways of playing. Bannikov, for example, or Kavazashvili played for effect. Yashin, Rudakov, Astapovsky, on the contrary, played in a low-key manner. But they were all reliable. And each had its own characteristics. The same Bannikov, by the way, jumped two meters high.
One day we came to a training camp in Sochi. We trained. Meanwhile, the USSR youth athletics team is training. They jump over a bar installed somewhere at the level of 180-190 centimeters. It must be said that they are trying to take this height with difficulty. And as Bannikov walked, tired after training, covered in mud, he easily took this bar and moved on. When the athletes saw this, they simply packed up and left.
Yashin, since he was short-sighted, always shouted to the defenders: “Let the attacker get closer!” He just couldn't see the blows from a distance well.
- By the way, about the peculiarities: all football players are superstitious. Nigmatullin, for example, always prays before matches. Sychov, they say, got a tattoo on his right leg: “Forget it, dear.” How do you feel about this?
- Fine. I myself was very superstitious. I only put on my shoes on my left foot. If the lace breaks, at least don’t go anywhere. By the way, the habits remain - I still start putting on my shoes with my left foot. But this does not mean that the goalkeeper should engage in eccentricities on the field. The goalkeeper has no right to feint at all, as, for example, Chelovert did. Imagine a defender who has miracles happening behind his back. After all, he simply won’t know what to do. Yashin never allowed himself to do this, and that’s why he stood reliably.
A goalkeeper is a team player, but at the same time a lonely one. Yashin, for example, even played for the forwards: the team was in the opposing half of the field, and he was already looking at who took what position. If the ball is taken away from the attacker, then the midfielder must move towards the opponent, providing backup. Yashin rebuilt the entire team. They believed him. After all, the football players were playing, their eyes were sparkling, they were happy to go forward, but it was hard to drag back - they had to be forced. But the goalkeeper is responsible for the missed goal. A thousand times it’s not even your fault, but you missed it – that means that’s it!
- But defenders exist for a reason. Tell me: if you were playing for our national team now, behind whose backs would you feel calmer?
- It's hard to say, watching from the outside. The goalkeeper and the defender must have some kind of invisible connection. I even knew that the player could make a mistake in a certain element of the game. Our defender was Sergei Nikulin. He had a very “valuable” quality: he scored into his own goal at least five times a season. I already knew what to expect from him. One day during the game, the enemy crosses into the penalty area, and Seryoga, with all his might, closes this same cross exactly to the nine. I didn't even have time to react. As I stood, I still stand. And Seryoga indignantly begins to scold me: “Volodya, why aren’t you helping out!”
- In the match with Tunisia, didn’t you think that Yuri Kovtun looked somehow unconvincing? The flank for which he was responsible looked more like a passing yard. Maybe it was worth replacing him with Sennikov?
- I doubt. Still, Sennikov is too young a player. And Kovtun, despite everything, has a very solid experience of performing on the international stage.
- We are meeting a few days before the Japan-Russia match. The outcome of the meeting is difficult to predict. After all, the level of Japanese and Korean football has grown significantly recently...
- Yes, it will be difficult for our team to play against the fast and technical Japanese. Especially under the scorching sun and unimaginable pressure from local fans. But we must win. As for the progress of football in Japan and Korea, this is an absolutely natural result of the state approach to a particular sport. They criticized the Soviet system, but then a lot was done in the field of high sporting achievements. From yard football and competitions of rural teams to the national championship. It was a flow, there was selection. And today, for the fact that a person hits the ball every other time, he is paid unimaginable money and they make a star out of him.
- Hence the statements from our national team about the grass being too high and the ball being too fast?
- The ball is really very fast. It’s a bit difficult for goalkeepers to deal with him. I can’t say anything about tall grass. Let me just note: a high-quality field is always a benefit – or rather, a benefit – to technical football players.
- In your opinion, who will become the champion? The previous guest of our pub, Eduard Mudrik, suggested that one of the eight teams could become him.
- There are significantly fewer applicants. Personally, I really liked the German team. It gives the impression of that same German machine that crushed opponents into its own better times.
- What about the Russian team?
- Now, if you were told before the World Hockey Championship or even after the qualifying games that Mikhailov’s team would win silver, would you believe it? That's it. So we'll see.