Background
Sartre is a byword for an entire philosophical school one of the leading voices in the Existentialist movement wondering what is the purpose of life and can our freedom ever be truly purely experienced. Born and raised in Paris, he used the city of lights as his home base as he dove head long into the serious questions of the day. His award was given “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age,” a big phrase that in this case, might just be an understatement.
Works
“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
Sartre’s best known quote about soccer
“Every movement of a [teammate]…is decoded in the very movement which it occasions in another fellow member….Mediation for a given goalkeeper or center-forward is the pitch itself in so far as their common praxis has made it a common practical reality…As soon as [a player] takes up [one position] the common situation of the whole team is also modified.”
–Critique of Pure Reason, page 473 (This is the real idea, the other one is just a footnote)
Message
I mean, there’s a tonnage of them. Existentialism concerned itself with the nature of life itself, so there was…plenty of ground to cover. In reading his plays again though, the thought that came back to me again and again is how control is power, power is control. Humans simultaneously want it and fear it. No Exit plays with the question of how much anyone can control the (after)lives of others. The Respectful Prostitute considers how the “immoral” individual is at once dependent on the powerful authorities, and yet also able to overwhelm the authorities with their own powers (be they sex or truth). Dirty Hands covers the power of idealism and the power of compromise–both how people wield them, and how they are slaves to them. With all this in mind I’m putting Sartre at the heart of the team.
Position: #10 Attacking Midfielder
Sartre was a football fan (how much of a fan seems to be up unclear), but when you consider the fantasy of him lacing up a pair of boots and heading on to the field himself, you have to reckon with the fact that he clearly had more creativity, ideas and invention than anyone else. He could do more with power and control than anyone else I’ve read for this project, so it makes sense to put him at the center of the offense (and in the role with the greatest history of being a diva) the #10 job.
Think about his soccer quotes (given above). In Sartre’s eyes a team is made up of where all the players are in a moment, but every moment a player moves (which is pretty much all the time) it is changing. There’s no absolute reality or permanence, it’s always something new and different. So you have to focus on existing in the moment rather than worrying about the past or the future.
I genuinely think this would make him a superb attacking midfielder: creative, inventive, able to dismiss past hurts or future worries and just make the play he thinks is right in the moment. But I suppose others might see it as a limitation–he might have a hard time anticipating challenges, or be impossible to coach…(after all, he is the only Literature laureate to refuse to turn up for his award) so while I rate him highly, I don’t know what others would say.
What do you think? Is Sartre the free-wheeling creative force that this team has been waiting for? Or are would he have been so indifferent and apathetic that any moments of brilliance would have been undone by him announcing that he’d rather ponder a dandelion on the field than receive a pass from TS Eliot?.
MacKenzie's Boot Room 