Dialogue between Simon Critchley and Jordi Puntí

The British philosopher and lifelong Liverpool fan, Simon Critchley has constructed a theory in which he brings together football and the human condition in the book What We Think about When We Think about Football (Profile Books, 2017). He suggests that the game concentrates all of life’s ingredients: space, time, passion, reason, beauty, emotions, destiny, uncertainty, and chance. Although the game has become a paradigm of unbridled capitalism and inequalities, Critchley ventures that it is a sport in which solidarity and collective identity prevail. Football teams have their own stories, myths and values. And on many occasions these end up fusing with those of the city they represent.

Simon Critchley will be talking about these matters with the writer Jordi Puntí, also a lover of football and inveterate Barça fan. After almost two decades writing regular articles about football in the press, Jordi Puntí has recently published the book Messi: Lessons in Style (Short Books, 2018) in which he analyses the figure of Leo Messi. In these brief exercises in style he sketches a portrait of his favourite player in which he identifies and elaborates on the main aspects of his game: beauty, speed, genius, modernity, obsession, and instinct.