ABSTRACT
Introduction There are football philosophies and there is philosophy of football. The former is about the more or less re ective outlook on the game that people have or else about the style of play that a football team chooses to follow, whereas the latter – to philosophise about the practice of playing football – is what we will aim at here. When Bayern Munich’s Spanish manager Pep Guardiola told the press after his club had been given a 4-0 beating at Allianz Arena in Munich by Real Madrid in the 2014 Champions League that ‘[f]ollowing this defeat I am even more convinced of my philosophy’, he was talking about style of play, not a philosophical position akin to, say, existentialism or realism. So, football philosophies aside, what might a philosophy of football look like? The answer is simple: it will look like any other philosophy. The only di erence between, say, the philosophy of football and, say, the philosophy of biology or the philosophy of lm, is that in the former case we apply the tools from the philosophical toolbox to the phenomenon of football and not, as it happens, to biology or lm (or any other social practice).1
