Music and Football (I) - Empathy

I’ve always been a football fan, increasingly just of the game itself rather than of my hometown team. Plenty of classical musicians are. Judging by common media portrayals this seems unlikely, but I can assure you there are a fair few of us! And the more I think about the two domains, the more convinced I am that there’s something deeply similar about them. Of course, in an ideal world music would have nothing at all to do with competition - Bela Bartok’s ‘competitions are for horses’ remark has always struck a chord with me. But even if the similarity doesn’t run all the way down, it’s also clear that for many people the enjoyment of football isn’t ultimately dependent on winning or losing, but is wrapped up in a lot more than that. If outcomes represented absolutely everything, it’d be hard to explain Spurs fans, for instance.

I’m far from the only person to have noticed this, or to share this pair of enthusiasms. One of the best-known examples among musicians was Hans Keller, a writer and thinker whose interests were famously wide-ranging. He acknowledged that ties existed between music and football, mostly in social and organisational senses. But he generally treated these passions in parallel, as though one was a serious business and the other a source of mild embarrassment. Class associations no doubt had a role to play here. But it seems entirely plausible that somebody of his intellectual and aesthetic curiosity (and strongly held opinions) would be drawn to football, and I think the reasons for this could be quite interesting to explore. Unlike him, I don’t regard looking more deeply into comparisons as an entirely facetious exercise.

I was recently reminded of this when I came across Dan Leech-Wilkinson’s brief use of a footballing analogy in his Challenging Performance website and e-book. [1] I happened to see a casual game being played in Crystal Palace Park the same day, which rather drove home the point. Keller is surely right that some common comparisons are overly simplistic; the observation that both require teamwork, for instance, offers little further explanation in and of itself, not least because it encourages no specificity whatsoever. But there are a few parallels that I think run much deeper. I’m going to devote an article to each, because I think they’re all worthy of relatively detailed discussion. They’re necessarily a bit speculative, but that’s what I’m here for!

The first I’d like to introduce is the notion of “empathy without expertise”. In professional settings, it seems that a significant part of a fan or audience member’s enjoyment is derived from strong empathetic association, either with individual players/musicians, or with the whole team/ensemble. This is not the same thing as being able to accomplish the same physical actions as the player/performer. All that is necessary is to imagine and ‘feel’ a connection with the players or musicians, and which manifests itself in an awareness of a ‘field of options’: the choices that are available in each moment. This is necessarily a slightly abstract idea, but it’s no less powerful for that. If you’ve ever overhear football fans discussing the details of tactics and positional play, you’ll know exactly what I mean about the importance and ubiquity of abstraction. I’ll come back to this in more detail in another post.

The kind of enjoyment I’m talking about seems also to have a retrospective component. I obviously don’t possess the vision, judgment or ability of, say, Spanish midfielder David Silva, when he finds a gap in a packed defence to create a chance on goal - which he usually does by thinking several moves ahead. He anticipates the shifting positional dynamics of both his opponents and his teammates in a way that I cannot; not only that, I cannot contemplate being able to do it. My (aesthetic?) enjoyment of his ingenuity in that moment is enhanced, not limited, by not being able to do it or predict it myself. But my particular sense of appreciation is still derived from putting myself in that position, and comparing what a hypothetical me - with his abilities quite abstracted from my real skill - might have chosen to do in that situation. Empathy is probably similarly responsible for the fact that people tend to get pretty vocal when a player does something much less convincing. Witness: “that was utter ****, I could have scored that one”. 

After something profoundly expert has happened, then, it seems both obvious and easy. The admiration doesn’t just occur from afar: it is deeply empathetic, often on both the individual and group level simultaneously. Of course, football is adversarial in a way that interposes extra layers here; having said that, I’m pretty sure that most football fans appreciate quality and imagination, even from their most bitter opponents. Most are not in the habit of only watching the highlights of their own team’s match, and they can certainly appreciate good play among other teams. They simply develop weaker affinities with the out-group, resulting in a different kind of appreciation - usually grudging respect.

I don’t think it’s stretching a point to say that musical listening involves empathising with the sounds that performers make. (There’s a lot of research on this - King & Waddington 2018 is a great summary). It’s certainly not a prerequisite for musical empathy to have the physical ability to achieve those sounds yourself; neither is it necessary to be able to anticipate all possible future moves. I’d go as far as to say that, just like in football, sometimes the most satisfying musical outcomes are the moments which your own imagination didn’t/couldn’t predict in advance, but which make sense in hindsight. The best musicians, like David Silva, often have the ability to conceive of possibilities for how the next moment might ‘go’, for which the rest of us simply don’t have the vision (or aural equivalent). That doesn’t mean that we can’t understand and appreciate it completely after the fact.

The kind of interpersonal association that’s responsible for the things we experience in both sport and music - enjoyment, involvement, satisfaction, entertainment, emotion, frustration, stress, excitement - is extremely complex, and armchair speculation isn’t going to be able to shed much light on its actual basis. (I’m also not saying that there isn’t a potential enhancement from real, embodied knowledge of an instrument or a sport - just that it doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite). But I think it’s fair to note that part of the similarity between these domains revolves around the idea of deep involvement with, and investment in, another group of people, and also in the kinds of options that they have available to them. It’s this last bit that adds the real depth of experience that hooks the true enthusiasts. And we can think of musicians as playing within ‘rules of the game’ just like footballers do. (This is something I’ll return to a lot in these posts). How individuals make sense of, and get value from, what they do is not a simple one-to-one relationship, because the ‘terms of empathy’ between performer and listener, or player and fan, are not expressed in terms of one-to-one relationships either. 

Maybe it’s unfashionable to admit that music - classical music especially, but surely other genres too - isn’t intrinsically, straightforwardly and immediately ‘accessible to anyone’. But it really can be hard to understand if you weren’t exposed to it early on, and I think it’s probably counterproductive to assert that it isn’t. I wonder if a sporting analogy is useful because it points to the usefulness of a certain kind of “non-expert empathy” that involves the gradual development of affinity with both the participants and the options available to them. This isn’t about knowledge per se, however,, but about mindset, perspective and expectations: more pretentiously, that is to say it’s about possessing a framework for creating meaning. I recently tried to persuade my dad that football becomes a lot more rewarding when you’re aware of the defenders’ movements just as much as the attackers’; he’s really enthused by patterns and abstraction, so once he could apply that kind of thinking to the game, he started to enjoy it a lot more. It’s that kind of subjective perspective shift that I think is the most rewarding way to think about getting to know classical music. It’s not about knowledge, in the same way that enjoying football isn’t about knowing who won the FA Cup in 1976. Although it can be, if that’s your sort of thing...

[1] Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel (2020). Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them. Version 2.01 (31.vii.20). https://challengingperformance.com/the-book-6-17/