Søren Frank

David Beckham’s re-invention of the winger

It seems David Beckham is destined to be judged more according to his celebrity status than to his soccer skills. Even as a soccer player occupying one of the most mythic positions on the pitch, the winger, Beckham has constantly fallen short to the inevitable (but also unfair) comparisons with Cristiano Ronaldo, Ryan Giggs, Luis Figo and even earlier prototypes such as George Best or Raymond Kopa, whose basic qualities consisted in dribbling, speed and goal line crosses. The problem with these comparisons is that Beckham, at the outset, is categorized as a winger when he in fact was, initially, a central midfielder. However, because Beckham brings along some of the virtues as a central midfielder – passing skills and combative tackling – when he migrates from the centre of the field to the right, he is able to invent a completely new type of winger. Overall speaking, Beckham fuses a Bergsonian epic quality of durée and accumulating presence with a Nietzschean lyric quality of unexpectedness and abruptness. More specifically, what sets Beckham apart and secures him a seat in the Pantheon of soccer’s great innovators are timing (‘early on and unexpectedly’), sense of spacing (‘halfway’) and the fusion of Euclid and Einstein (‘curled crosses with extreme precision’).

The aesthetic of elephantiasis: Rushdie's Midnight's Children as an encyclopaedic novel

Drawing on Northrop Frye, Edward Mendelson and Franco Moretti, this article discusses encyclopaedic features in Rushdies novel Midnights Children and argues that the novelists ambition to incorporate the whole of life is simultaneously a serious and ironic enterprise carried out on the level of discourse. The former attitude stands revealed in metaphorical modes of connection, analogy and fusion, whereby the manifold variations of life are made to resonate in meaningful patterns, whereas irony pertains primarily to metonymical modes of dispersion, fragmentation and fission, in which the processes of life are allowed to proliferate randomly. The encyclopaedic impulse of the novel takes the form of two complementary strategies, that of completeness and that of eternal continuation.

Laudrup or Ibrahimović: who is the best Scandinavian soccer player of all time?

The essay does not provide a final answer to the question of its subtitle, but it juxtaposes the profiles of Michael Laudrup and Zlatan Ibrahimović in terms of soccer abilities, career statistics and social backgrounds. While arguing that comparisons between soccer players are in principle meaningless, the essay nevertheless employs comparison heuristically in order to outline each player’s uniqueness through differences and similarities. If Laudrup and Ibrahimović are considered to be the best ever soccer players of Scandinavia, sharing traits of technical brilliance and postmodern nomadism, they are also conspicuously contrasting characters and players, partly as a result of their different backgrounds. Common for both of them, though, is their symbolic value in the contexts of their social and national backgrounds.

The importance of being benched: soccer, contingency and re-enchantment.

This essay argues that soccer still possesses the capacity to re-enchant the world. First, it delineates an evolutionary model of soccer history – a wave model – different to the nostalgics’ linear version of soccer history. Second, it argues that soccer can be considered a secular strategy of re-enchantment due to four reasons: soccer is not only agon (competition) but also arete (striving for excellence and beauty); the mental zone of both player and spectator is related to Kant’s idea of aesthetic experience as presupposing what he calls ‘disinterestedness’; soccer stadiums are places of secular sacrality; and soccer is determined by its high degree of contingency, but since instrumental reason and reduction of contingency are part and parcel of modern day soccer, it shall further be argued that the bench – due to it being the very embodiment of contingency – embodies a potentially enchanting countermove to the scientification of soccer.