The poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote a famous short story about a society that had become so good at making maps, so obsessed with capturing every detail, that its rulers decided the only way to do the job right was to make a lifesize map of its entire empire, which could then be laid out across the actual land from coast to coast. Imagine a map of Britain the exact same size as Britain, showing every branch of Greggs, every nail bar, every vape shop in perfect detail. Only then can we really see what Britain looks like, by standing on a fake Britain laid over the top of actual Britain.
Borges was writing in the 1940s, at a time when people were fascinated by the mechanised future, with its new forms of measuring out the world: the wireless, the 30mph motorcar, the rise of Big Tape Measure. And to be fair, the mega-map is a pretty accurate vision of our own fully networked present, a place where you can snoop around a village in Mozambique from your laptop in Egham, where no one ever stops committing acts of minute self-surveillance, even if they think they’re just searching “What is beetroot?” on the internet. Borges also hated football.
But then Borges also didn’t live to see an episode of Wow Sports Premier League Breakfast at Breakfast with Roger McRoger and a puzzled Lee Trundle. After which, perhaps less of a surprise. But the process he describes is also a good description of what football is doing to itself.
Endless data, endless analysis, no spaces or free air, matches that are just schematised movement. At times it can feel like football is out there laying a lifesize real-time map on top of itself. In Borges’s story, the land soon begins to decay beneath the massive map – which is reassessed by later generations as insane, pointless and stupid – and left to rot in the desert.
We haven’t reached this point. Nobody is de-mapping football. But it does perhaps explain why everyone gets so excited when a talent emerges that seems to be playful and human, to exist outside the grid.
And also why it has felt wrong to gush too soon about Max Dowman, to fear placing the hex on him. Here is a fluffy new thing. Let us heap pressure on his shoulders.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
