The Middle-Aged Serial Action Murder Epic has been one of the most popular movie types of the last 50 years. These films tend to have the same basic setup, which is middle-aged men repeatedly murdering the thing they’re anxious about.
For many years this was simply Nazis. A group of men, occasionally disguised in Nazi uniforms – nuance: fear that deep down they actually are Nazis – slaughter thousands of endlessly replicating Nazi soldiers and everyone feels good about this.
The Taken films were popular because they showed a middle-aged man repeatedly murdering his own feelings of no longer being useful. Liam Neeson dramatised brilliantly the sense that while you, a middle-aged man, may spend your time driving around sombrely in a family estate car, you are still utterly vital to the correct functioning of the world because nobody else out there knows how to stack the dishwasher properly or seal a leaking shower tray; that we are only ever a second away from a tearful life or death call because no one else has your very specific set of skills on how to restart the wifi router (“Listen carefully to what I’m about to say … ”).
In recent years Jason Statham has dominated the genre. Statham’s key skill is murdering the alarming and indeterminate future, as represented on screen by yacht-dwelling international power-brokers and their slick and flashy goons. But really this is global elites, modernity, Ulez cameras, the cash-free economy, new lightbulbs, stuff that means you can’t get anyone on the phone any more but have to download an app.
By contrast Statham is analogue, petrol-driven, bald but still ripped and handsome. Often he’s called things like The Roofer or The Tiler. In his latest film he’s The Beekeeper. He has a workshop where he makes things with his hands. His mission is to murder a whiney douchebag crypto bro who’s making the world worse by harvesting data or some internet shit. Statham shoots him in the head in front of his mother.
A bit earlier he also encounters another younger beekeeper (“So, you’re my replacement”) who is glamorous, female and dressed in purple (optics: woke), and briefly it seems like a mouthwatering new adversary has arrived. But she’s only on screen for two minutes before Statham throws her against a petrol pump and burns her to death. Statham is murdering the future. So men can still have sheds. And this feels good.
Why talk about it here? What does it have to do with Google and Liverpool FC’s new study into the use of artificial intelligence in elite football tactics? Or Henrik Rydström’s innovative Malmö team thrashing Halmstad last week to line up a Swedish domestic double? Or the startling and explosive Endrick playing for Brazil at Wembley? Well. Something. Maybe.
Malmö are a hugely interesting team, at least judging by highlight clips and stuff their manager says. There was an excellent interview with Rydström this week on the Sky Sports website in which he talks about his tactical approach, which has been described as “Relational Football” and is often framed as a reaction against the dominance of positional play, where rehearsed movements are drilled into elite players, roles ingrained, overseen by some whirling, pointing details freak on the touchline.
That dominant Barça-Cruyff-City model is at bottom about control. There is still room for flair – Pep Guardiola loves dribblers – but this is always contained within a rigid team dynamic (for a while Guardiola would paint a chalk spot on the training pitch and order Raheem Sterling to stand there out of possession).
This has been the direction of travel in elite football, a desire to flatten out the variables, to reduce this endlessly complex matrix to a manageable piece of mathematics. Witness for example the release this week of Google’s DeepMind Liverpool FC project, a study into how AI is going to revolutionise football tactics. Based on a “352-dimensional” machine study of 7,176 corner kicks, DeepMind found that AI-designed corners were not just indistinguishable from human corners, but more likely to succeed, as judged by a panel of “human expert raters”.
AI is better at corners than humans. Of course it is. Machines can analyse infinitive detail. What seems to us an object of mystery, of endless variations, is basically a game of snap to the robot brain. AI will change how sport is planned, controlled and played. The game will be dramatically schematised. This is going to happen. Does it sound good?
By contrast Rydström wants to succeed by breeding spontaneity. The idea is to find overloads and weak spots with fluid, unpredictable movements that are essentially made up in real time, to play close together in small areas, pass at strange, high-speed angles. It makes sense as an approach. Wealthier teams with larger squads of more gifted players will always win a controlled positional game. City and 2011-era Barcelona have looked close to unbeatable. Why not attack the formula with unpredictable elements?
It can look a bit like futsal, and fittingly so, as Rydström was inspired by Fernando Diniz’s Fluminense. Some have suggested this is a South American response to the dominant, controlling European style, which is certainly a nice, punkish idea. Watching footage of the 17-year-old Endrick, who might get a run at Wembley on Saturday, the thought occurred this is why he’s so prized, because he is not just high-end but also unpredictable, creative in the way he uses small spaces, odd angles, weird lines to disrupt defensive systems, that he looks like a Relationist star in the making.
It will probably end up being nothing. Perhaps it just sounds silly, the idea Malmö guy and Fluminense guy are going to come up with some fresh tactical blueprint. And of course it isn’t totally new either, because nothing ever is. Arguably Real Madrid played like this in their we’re-just-some-awesome-guys era, bunched together high up the pitch, making up their own combinations, unbothered by vacant space.
But it feels significant just to talk about doing something different. Possession football is into its third decade now. Frankly, it’s about time someone out there began to kick against the pricks and tried something that feels like an aggressive reaction to cold positional dominance, or the rise of AI studies containing the sentence “each model’s learning objective is regularised with an L2 norm penalty with respect to the network parameters”.
In that sense the interesting thing about Relational Football is that it is clearly counter-cultural, something to put against the dominant template devised by a 53-year-old man with his head in the 1970s. But it’s also old school, hot, emotional, human, Statham-ish. It’s the opposite of control, a system that rewards individualism, “en-skilling” its human parts rather than reducing them to avatars of a system.
More to the point, after almost 20 years of a dominant single style it is simply refreshing to know there is still scope for Rydström (mugshot: bald, stubbly, rugged) to come bowling out of his shed with a handmade flamethrower, ready to go to work.
