"The afternoons I spent playing football on the Prati di Caprara (I would play even six or seven hours in a row, without a break: right winger, in those days, and a few years later my friends would call me the "Stukas": a sweet, grim memory) were undoubtedly the finest of my life. I almost get a lump in my throat when I think of it. Back then, Bologna was the most powerful Bologna in its history: the Bologna of Biavati and Sansone, of Reguzzoni and Andreolo (the king of the pitch), of Marchesi, of Fedullo and Pagotto. I have never seen anything finer than the exchanges between Biavati and Sansone (Reguzzoni was somewhat echoed by Pascutti). What Sundays at the stadio Comunale!"

Pier Paolo Pasolini

In paragraph 47 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant states that everything Newton set out in his immortal work on the Principles of natural philosophy, although it had required great effort to discover, could nonetheless be easily taught and learned. By contrast, however exhaustive the rules and precepts for the art of poetry may be, and despite the excellence of the models available, one will never be able to "learn to write poetry with richness of spirit". The reason for these assertions lies in the fact that fine art is the art of genius; and whereas Newton could have shown anyone the steps he took to arrive at his greatest discoveries, so that each person could have retraced them for himself, the creative genius cannot indicate how his ideas are produced and combined in his own head, "since he himself does not know it, and therefore cannot teach it to others either". The ability of genius cannot be communicated. It is, Kant writes, bestowed directly upon a chosen one by the hands of nature, "and thus dies with him, until one day nature endows another with it anew, one who needs only an example for the talent of which he is conscious to operate in a similar way".
The gesture of genius, then, can be neither taught nor learned. One can minutely study each of the steps that led to the creation of a great work of art, from the way of mixing colours to that of holding the brushes, from the technique used to work the stone to the tools used to carve it. One might even think one knew to perfection the author's own temperament. And yet all this will not be enough to produce a work of equal significance. Because the creative gesture, in its most hidden essence, is not reproducible.
Of course, it will be said, football is very far from fine art. It is above all an activity aimed at obtaining a particular result, scoring and winning, on the basis of respect for a limited number of rules known to the participants, players and spectators alike. Football is precisely a game; and as such, here it is above all the result that defines the value of the action; and the rules form the frame within which it becomes possible to devise strategies, plans or tactics aimed at defining the ever-optimisable conditions of victory. In this sense, that of purely technical skill, football appears as that which is reproducible par excellence. It is no accident, indeed, that games in general have played such a significant role in the development of artificial intelligence. Just as it is no accident that in this age of ours of "technical reproducibility" technological development has subjected the sporting event to a kind of vivisection in which even the most microscopic movement can and must be captured, studied, programmed and reproduced: think of the multiplication of cameras on the pitch, which make it possible to capture, to amplify and to repeat every action ad infinitum, even freezing the flow of the image on each single frame; but think too of the fact that football clubs of a certain level possess databases in which are stored not only the developmental curve of the technical and athletic performance of each of their own players (skill and speed of execution with the right foot, with the left foot, with the head, and so on), but also of players all over the world, so that it is possible to calculate, with a wide margin of probability, how each player will take a penalty kick. Ultimately, a sphere in motion is a purely physical event, and so it is not difficult to determine the ways and the angles in which it must be struck in order to give it particular trajectories and speeds. In this sense too, it is not surprising that there has recently been a television programme in which a journalist and a supposed scientist reproduce football moves, enunciating the physical laws that made them possible.
And yet, although it is a game with precise rules, football escapes any complete reduction to that logic of product optimisation, and hence of reproducibility, that dominates every sphere of contemporary life. If only because, as a game, an element of chance and instability also reigns within it: it is not possible to foresee in advance every rebound of the ball; whether it will be faithful to the designs of the one who plays it or will crash into another player; whether the latter will head it or it will end up merely grazing his back and will suddenly change trajectory, leaving an opponent alone in front of his own goal. Moreover, it is this randomness too that marks the ball's becoming "earthly". A symbol, from Parmenides onward, of every perfection, whether religious or metaphysical, the sphere here abandons its astral circular motion, uniform and ethereal; it thus lays aside its static and celestial perfection and becomes merely a wandering "ball", a fetish that slithers and rolls over a grassy rectangle, driven by "the most undisciplined and animal-like thing there is", the feet. This destiny of randomness, to which the ball irremediably consigns players and spectators, is without doubt an irreproducible element. The capricious caroms of the ball, its insensible trajectories or collisions, immerse us in the allure of a universe still wrapped in magic; at times indecipherable and threatening, at times generous and lavish.
But such a universe is marked not only by chance; here it can also happen that the unexpected magic or audacity of a player allows one, for once, to mock the gods, to snatch their secrets clandestinely. This is without doubt one of the most fascinating elements of football. The sudden tearing-open of the physical rules and of the tactical schemes is also what makes it irreducible to pure technique and therefore impossible to formalise and to optimise all the way through. Not only that. It is in the gratuitous, uncontrollable and bold gesture of the champion that the game shows its so to speak "eschatological" side, its being a kind of in-standing that points, for an instant, to another world; because it suspends, as Rilke said, "in the space/ in between, that from the beginning/ was founded for a pure event".

If, as Eugen Fink said, play is the interruption of that "ceaseless wandering" to which man is dragged, the gesture of the one who creates with the ball at his feet is the quintessence of such suspension, of this ecstasy in which, if only for a moment, he draws on the original. For this reason, perhaps, football, more than any other expression of social life, manages to kindle enthusiasm and to feed dreams, to tell stories and to sublimate sorrows. It is indeed thanks to this daring of the hero with velvet feet and childish impudence that football never ceases to produce, every Sunday, in every match, an old new narrative. In this sense, football is one of the last reservoirs of archetypes in this age of ours of technical reproducibility.
If it is true, as Pasolini said, that football is a language, a system of signs made up of fundamental minimal units, which are the podemes (just as the minimal units of language are phonemes), whose combinations form the "footballing words", then within that veritable dramatic discourse which is the match there is a gesture capable of articulating grammar and syntax, giving rise to inspired poetic creations. It is here that a story begins: it may be a nutmeg or a sombrerito; perhaps a rabona, a scissor-kick inside the box, or the timeless dribble. And all the existing geometries and combinations of meaning fall apart; the new and the unexpected burst onto the green turf, suspending for an instant the inexorable regularity and necessity of the natural laws and pointing to another possible world. It is the sparks of this world of grace that flash at every shout and at every collective swoon over a ball that has ended up in the back of the net or over an insolent lob.
As Edilberto Coutiño wrote: "…football, like literature, when well practised, is the strength of a people. Dictators pass. They will always pass. But a goal by Garrincha is an eternal moment. No one forgets it". A goal by Garrincha, a bicycle kick by Pelé, a dancing solo in midfield by Zidane, remain forever; because what enraptures us is the "gesture", pure gesture devoid of purpose, bare, a gesture that moves against itself and is, precisely for this reason, liberating. Who could ever forget Maradona's second goal against England in the Mexican World Cup of '86? His black curls, his left foot that receives and timidly caresses the ball, letting it slide onto the right and then again onto the left and dancing upon itself as in a milonga arrabalera, and his memorable run, which dodges first one and then two and then a third, cutting back inside with his left and then a fourth as well, and finally dribbles the goalkeeper, dragging the ball along and hurling it cathartically into the back of the net. That goal is already a story. The story of an entire country that held its breath for fifteen seconds, that blew the ball onward, that pushed its hero on with a shudder and that, at every Englishman fallen to the ground and mocked by the magic feet of an unruly little rascal, rejoiced at a victory that went some way to redressing, if only for a moment, a distant but never-forgotten theft.

There it is: Maradona, more than anyone else in the history of football, is the uncapturability of a gesture that can never be reproduced; it does not matter how many cameras are placed on the field of play, it does not matter how many replays, how many slow-motions, how many action-replays or how many different angles are called into play; it does not matter how many biodynamic studies are carried out on his body and on his muscular structure. Because what cannot be captured is precisely the wellspring of that gesture capable of transforming noise into signal, appropriating the laws that govern causal dynamics and impressing upon them a new meaning. It is in this sense, then, that football cannot be learned; just as, according to Kant, philosophy could not be learned. Because it is irreproducible, in its most intimate essence. Suspended between the randomness of a destiny before which one is powerless and the impudence of a gesture that, in its absolute gratuitousness, enraptures and draws one away from the causal rules and the whims of chance, football is like life. But life cannot be learned. Life is lived. If only every Sunday, as soon as the ball begins to roll.