One of the biggest problems football-critical anarchists seem to have with the game (and most sports in general) is the competitiveness that’s allegedly intrinsic to it; you have two sides that are trying “to beat” each other, and you end up with winners and losers. And true, in general, there lies nothing too anarchistic in such an endeavour, we suppose. But we think that there are possible solutions to this; one consists of finding less competitive ways of plying the game; another of finding a more unperturbed attitude towards competition.

In regard to the first option, four main possibilities come to mind:-

1. Juggling [‘keepy uppy’], passing, dribbling, kicking the ball around, rather than playing matches. They can definitely be fun, but the question remains if this is really still football, rather than a version of hackie sackin’ with a bigger ball. If for certain soccer ball aficionados this suffices great, but we guess it wouldn’t work for the majority of football fans.

2. Open-ended pick-up games: You have a certain group of people who start a match by forming two teams, and you play and try to score goals , but no one really keeps track of the score, and you neither play until a certain time is over nor until a certain score is reached but basically just till people are too tired or too few to continue playing a reasonable game. The advantages of this type of play are obvious: you have the thrill and motivation of trying to score and defend your own goal while playing, yet it doesn’t translate into winning or losing. Especially if the game is long and new arrivals join in and/or certain players switch sides during the game, etc. In the end neither side will be clearly defined, nor will certain individuals closely identify with a certain side, and so the notions of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ becomes irrelevant. This is one of our personal favourite ways of playing.

Especially since we are big advocates of pick-up games generally, since to us the social etiquette that surrounds pick-up games has definite anarchic dimensions. In our experience as people who’ve always been into all kinds of sports, and hence as people who have participated in pick-up games of numerous sports on numerous occasions and in numerous places, the smoothness and ease in which this usually happens seems remarkable: no-where you go is there ever any particular written code or table of rules as to how pick-up games should be set up and organised, as to how they should be refereed.

Or as to who has the right to play when and how long and with who. The ‘rules’ are always unspoken; sometimes they are inspired by a region’s or a country’s general social consensus on how to go about things, sometimes shaped by a social history and reality very specific to the site of play, but no matter; the outcome is almost always very simple, very clear, and very accommodating for everybody. Usually, following the unwritten rules of the site, everyone gets to play in a spirit of mutual respect. And we neither want to romanticise football nor come down on other sports, but we believe that this spirit is particularly strong in the case of the former. While particularly certain basketball courts know of folks who (while mostly still respecting pick-up game etiquette) can be rather territorial when it comes to ‘their’ court, we have hardly run into football pick-up games that appeared uninviting or unwelcoming; and this goes for many place spread out across many social, cultural, and political lines.

3. Mixing up sides: If you have a group of, say, ten players, you start with two teams of five, but every so often, individuals will change sides. This can be either done spontaneously, or following an agreed upon pattern, for example, along the lines of a traditional Amazonian game where after each goal the scorer automatically switches sides. Again this approach would maintain a competitive (‘motivating’, ‘exciting’) element in the game, yet would avoid clear cut outcomes of winners and losers.

4. Substituting sides: You form three teams (or more), two of them play till one scores, and whoever gets scored against has to clear the pitch for the waiting team, and so forth. Once again, you will have the rush and excitement of ‘competing’, but in the end there are no real winners or losers, only people who have played longer and others who have played shorter. This is another option we personally like a lot, the obvious problem being that some players will always end up rather impatiently on the sidelines - especially unpleasant in cold Winter months.