GOAL! #2 — Zico, Kashima Antlers vs Tohoku, 1993
“‘Tell me about that goal,’ plead the blind.” — Eduardo Galeano
In 1993, the diminutive Zico, the greatest four-letter mononym in Brazilian football but for one Pele, turned 40. It was also in this year that he scored his greatest goal. Playing long after many would have retired after a career punctuated by injuries, his Japanese swansong cannot be reduced to vanity project or cash-grab — after all, it embedded him in the country he would spend much of his post-playing career coaching in and produced the aforementioned goal, a benevolent gift to fans of beautiful football the world over.
Zico’s goal, like all goals, happened in one place at one time in history. The record books of these football statistics — wheres, whens, and whos — are wholly factual, but so sterile as to be misleading. This goal lives now as an image made up of pixels on a screen. Cameras reproduce goals as they happen, and their reproductions are near simultaneously (near simultaneously as all live broadcasts entail a slight delay — although the stubborn word “live” is yet to be replaced by “very slightly delayed”, and likely never will be) transmitted into homes and venues sometimes all over the world. As such, a one-time historical event takes place multiple times at once, not just as it is reproduced by cameras but as all who see it watch from different eyes at different angles, watch at home in front of televisions, hear and imagine from radios, replicating in their heads their best guesses at the contortions of Zico’s body in the air.
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Transformed from individual act to technological reproduction, any goal can happen again and again at any time, in any place. For some, Zico’s goal happened again near instantaneously after it had been scored: in the replays now ubiquitous to football coverage, concessions to the human attention span and bladder. If, like the goal in question, a goal is lucky enough to be recorded for posterity and accessible thanks to the internet, it can be even further dislocated from its original place in space and time. As it dislocates their work through reproduction, how does the now ubiquitous camera affect footballers themselves? The footballer undertakes a role akin to a hybrid of the stage and screen actors Walter Benjamin discusses in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Their labour “is presented to the audience by the actor in person” like the stage actor, as well as “to the audience via a piece of equipment, a film camera” like the screen counterpart.
To a certain extent, the footballer has always had to be an actor as well as an athlete, when diving or playing up the effects of a harsh challenge to gain an advantage, or perhaps as part of a goal celebration. As professional football became an increasingly reproduced phenomenon, and football associations, owners of clubs, corporations and advertisers saw the money to be made in ready-to-exploit ‘markets’ (Zico’s Kashima Antlers were owned by the Sumitomo banking conglomerate, and the club is now owned by the e-commerce company Mercari), the line between actor and athlete was increasingly blurred. Footballers know that the cameras pointed at them entail only more eyeballs, in the same way Benjamin’s screen actor is conscious that “all the while he is before the camera… in the final analysis he is dealing with the audience.” To deal with or deflect from the pressure brought by such audiences, footballers have been forced to act by adopting public personas, especially as their off-field lives have become acceptable targets of media interest.
The personas of these actor-athletes can also serve to elevate them above the status of mere mortals (Maradona and Ibrahimović spring immediately to mind). As they are still primarily identified as athletes, the captive public knows they are not playing pretend in the same way that performers on the stage and screen are. Footballers may be free of Benjamin’s screen actor’s burden of playing to the camera in order to paradoxically maintain the artifice of “the camera-free aspect of reality”, partly because their careers and lives play out in the now accepted camera-full aspect of reality, but both their larger-than-life characters and sometimes unbelievable feats of sporting prowess still turn these human beings into a spectacle for an audience. In the conclusion of The Work of Art…, Benjamin similarly observed that humanity “has become [a spectacle] for itself”, as the end result of “the different kind of sensory perception brought about by technology”, but he, writing in Germany in 1935, identified in this human “alienation from itself” the means with which mechanised war became acceptable and was defended by its proponents. Football is also being alienated from itself, as those in charge of the game at elite level distance it from the communities that take such joy and stake so much of themselves on it. This alienation will certainly not end in anything as catastrophic as war, but it could, if allowed, rob lives of the moments of inexplicable joy that football creates.
We must tread carefully in this world of spectacle, but it can serve as an inspirational, fully edifying phenomena as opposed to an alienatory one. In his history of Latin American football, Andreas Campomar praises the scorpion kick, the maneuver with which Zico guided the ball to goal in 1993, for its “demonstrat[ion] that the spectacle had not died: that the game, in spite of its many flaws, could provide moments of glory that had little to do with just victory or defeat.” In this spirit, let Zico’s goal play out again one last time. A pass comes at him from the left, played towards him by fellow Brazilian Alcindo Sartori, a man at once balding and long-haired, coiffured with a mullet of circumstance. Zico hops over the ball to dummy, an act of deception that will soon pale in comparison to his final act of the play, although not even he knows this yet. The ball is chipped back in his direction after his feint, Zico so clearly the lynchpin, and he jumps in reciprocity. Two defenders are nullified by the chip, Zico has only the keeper to beat, but now in this brief contradictory moment when the goal looks most certain, it could all fall apart. “I went to header the ball, but the ball was coming from behind me” he tells us years later: “I didn’t know what to do.” Without knowing what to do, he knows he has to do something, he knows the keeper has been coming off his line all game, he knows to improvise as his decades of experience weigh upon him and lift him up in a single moment.
In the few seconds that the ball looks destined to return to the pitch behind Zico, deprived of its passage into the net via the header that was not to be, we see the Brazilian falling. But with the extension of his right heel further into the air, towards the ball, he almost seems to gain altitude and turn falling into flight. The ball is grateful for his audacity, takes Zico’s example and invitation to fly itself, the Tohoku goalkeeper off his line and obsolete. The goal is undeniably spectacular, but it would not have happened without a miscalculation. If it had been headed into the net, this essay would not have been written. At the twilight of his career, Zico advertises redemption by turning an error into something beautiful, and inspires not alienates.
