Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Fiction

Football: From Logos to Telos

Can there be free kicks without free will? Or is there no such thing as a free kick? These are two questions about the philosophy of football not investigated here. Andrew Belsey.

There are some unsurprising connections between philosophy and sport. Michael Brearley was, for a while, the England cricket captain who had a first-class degree in philosophy and had been a philosophy lecturer. But this should raise no eyebrows, since cricket is obviously a game that ought to be described as “philosophical”, in all the meanings that this flexible term can have. (Look at Geoff Boycott, an obvious philosopher if ever there was one – though not exactly in the Brearley mould!) But football? Surely nothing could be less philosophical than the game that consists of twenty-two people kicking a spherical object around the park?

Wrong! Football is paradigmatically a philosophical subject. I swear that on the day of the first round of the FA Cup I turned on the radio and heard the presenter say: “Crawley are two-nil up, scorers Kant and Hume”.

…