I’ve never particularly cared for scoring goals. I don’t discount the possibility that I might acquire the taste for it were I a more accomplished finisher, but goal-scoring has always seemed beside the point, the premise but merely that: the excuse to throw the party. The hunger for goals (in principle, not mine personally) and the fear of conceding them provide the game with its necessary intensity, the frisson of oppositional energy that tautens the pitch, that transforms a patch of grass into a thrilling battlefield, a giant green chessboard in which ground is fiercely contested and intensely significant. Empty space becomes precious; instead of nothingness, a manipulable element. You can see it, almost hear it: it swills and screams around an unmarked winger; it flows between centre backs, whispering to the striker. 

The most electrifying footballers are not simply those who have an otherworldly alliance with the ball itself but those who are, as the philosopher Simon Critchley has observed, expert interpreters and visionary manipulators of space. I find that my favourite entries in the sickly YouTube genre of player compilations are the least ostensibly spectacular (though arguably the highest brow): montages not of virtuosic footwork or acrobatic volleys but “through balls” – passes intricately threaded between or lofted over defenders, landing perfectly before an attacker in front of goal. Such passes carve a path through space that while latent wasn’t imaginable; they do not merely anticipate, they seem to divine.

Passing – even the kind of gormless to and fro that can bore you to tears – is a means of negotiating and managing space remotely, which must be partly why it seems such an intellectual talent. But players also, of course, master the space around the ball directly, with their bodies – though sometimes in mysterious ways. Those with both delicate ball control and a kind of charismatic equanimity exude an aura; they do not only evade tackles, they rebuff the very idea of one.