Smooth Shifting Dunes - 1
I really love football, not the bastardized American version they call soccer. Read this next part in your best blue-collar inner voice. I grew up playing football barefoot and going to the local stadium packed with 75,000 people. The air was electric, smelled of fireworks, and filled with booming percussion, not the stale smell of Budlite and popcorn. Anyway, football has changed a lot in the last 4 years. Messi and Ronaldo are waltzing to the end of their careers, and more clubs are being bought by the Saudis and Emirates. One of the less notable things that caught my eye is the retirement of 34-year-old German playmaker Mesut Ozil last week. About 4 years ago, World Cup winner Ozil was one of the best playmakers in the world, but the way the game has shifted has made Ozil obsolete.
Mesut Özil is one of those classic playmakers characterized by high game intelligence and low work rate. These are players who pick the right moment to spring into action. Their contributions are small in numbers but high in impact. The player who has perfected this is Lionel Messi. Here is an excellent Twitter thread on how he does this. Ozil has become obsolete because there has been a big strategic shift in recent years in club football. More football managers at a club level have adopted complex pressing systems1 that require all players to do more work when they don't have the ball. A press is a coordinated set of actions that players take to win the ball back when they have lost it. Most of the 2010s were characterized by a lower tempo of pressing - teams would sit back and wait for the other team to make a mistake to win the ball back. There were some exceptions, such as Jurgen Klopp's Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, but by and large, players like Messi and Ozil benefited from this lower tempo of pressing that suited their lower work rates.
These days all the top club2 teams employ complex pressing systems, and the teams who don't are left behind. Lionel Messi's PSG team of superstars failed to make it to the quarter-finals of the UEFA champions league partly because it is a team of superstars who have lower work rates. The goal of fast, complex pressing when a team losses the ball is to win it back immediately in an area that is favorable to them. The big reason for this shift is a rule change in 2019 that lifted restrictions on goalkeepers passing the ball within the penalty box when taking a goal kick. The downstream effect of this rule change was that more teams started taking shorter goal kicks and building from the back instead of long hopeful goal kicks. Shorter goal kicks meant that if the opposition team employed a high-octane complex pressing system, they could win the ball back in a really advantageous position. On the flip side, if they don't execute the press really well, they are exposed to attacks in behind their defensive lines through long balls. Another reason for this shift is that with advanced sports analytics, teams have much more detailed information on their opposition, so they can design pressing systems specifically tailored to the team they are playing.
These types of equilibrium shifts in sports are really interesting and humbling to me because when it happens, world-class athletes with a specific set of skills become relics of another era in the span of a few years. This new equilibrium shift in football has affected other types of players too - Defenders and midfielders who take too much time to pass the ball and goalkeepers who are not good at handling the ball with their feet. One small rule change and two years later world-class elite professionals are jobless.
These shifts are easier to notice in finite games such as football or basketball but harder to see in everyday life even though we are subject to them faster than ever in the last decade or so. Take the case of the big internet platforms. Cory Doctorow wrote about the lifecycle internet platforms go through in Enshittification of TikTok:
"HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
He then details how this shook out in the case of Facebook, Amazon and now TikTok. I recommend reading the whole piece.
The downstream effect of platforms becoming hostile to users is that more and more people choose to exit the platform and then have conversations within more private spheres. The last few years have seen the burgeoning of Discords, decentralized online communities in the web3 sphere, Telegram groups and group chats. In fact, there is a case to be made that being in a group chat with a Twitter main character is the new coveted status marker on the internet and even off of it.
The difference between these private networks and the public platforms is that the platforms determined the rules (the equivalent of the goalkeeper rule change), affecting and striating users' behavior downstream of it. Platforms took the load of enforcing user management and to an extend, determining social protocols. When this activity moves to more private networks, the role of implementing social protocols and management is back on humans primarily. To continue the football analogy, once the rule changes came into effect, it was the stewardship of smart football managers that made the equilibrium shift happen in football. For every Mesut Ozil, there are several players who have been trained to adapt to the new complex pressing strategies they were not used to before. Players have changed techniques or learned new ones. In effect, the managers have made this transition easier. As former Bayern Munich coach Julien Nagelsman says, "management is 30% strategy and 70% social skills".
In the case of private networks, the last couple of years has perhaps led us to think that any form of structure is tyranny. We are suspicious of any kind of management or moderation and think of them as an attack on free speech or attempt by a party to take control of the network.
In Jo Freeman's excellent essay titled Tyranny of Structurelessness, she talks about how attempts at structurelessness played out in the women's movements in the 1970s:
"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group"
The difference now is that instead of one or two organizations experimenting with structurelessness, all of us are part of several groups trying to coordinate toward specific tasks or merely trying to co-exist. In the next part of this essay, we will dive into a few defaults that organizations fall back on when structurelessness is the norm.
I emphasize club teams because national teams have not started employing these tactics and likely never will - players at a national level don't train together as much as players at a club level which make these tactics that require a lot training hard to implement at the national level.