Berg’s article reminds me that I’d love to see a study of how stadia function (historically, presently) as public spaces.  We’ve never attempted anything so rigorous here, but we have produced a few brief scattered thoughts on stadia, from Allianz Arena as a test case for networked urbanism to touring Soccer City Stadium from above and within to reading Dan Hill on the design of “The Cloud” for London’s Olympics.

[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander's photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg -- site of today's final -- but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in the "Landscape" series: "Pipe", "Forest", "Two piles", etc.]

Soccer City stadium, site of Sunday’s World Cup final, is the largest stadium in Africa — though it seats a bit under ninety thousand spectators in its current configuration, which sacrifices spectator seating in favor of “reserved seating” for the press, FIFA officials, and other “Very Important Persons” — but even its bulk is relatively tame in comparison to the slag piles (“massive dumps of crushed rock discarded after gold extraction”) that sit just to the west of the stadium.

[Via NASA Earth Observatory]

[Seen at Polis; Pied La Biche were last spotted playing three-sided anarchist-rules soccer on a hexagonal field.]

Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966.  Using archival footage played back at quarter- and half-speed in combination with a coordinate system derived from the markings on the pitch, Marsh traced the movements of each of the twenty-two players involved in the game (substitutions were not allowed in the World Cup until 1970) onto sheets of trace.

As I’ve previously talked about my interest in sport as a representative diagram of urban space — noting that the soccer field can be read both as an abstracted embodiment of a particular village landscape (a map) and as the site for the deployment of spatial strategies which mirror urban processes (a canvas) — it should not be surprising that I am fascinated by Marsh’s drawings, which essentially offer an architectural reading of a soccer match.

["B. Charlton v. F. Beckenbauer", David Marsh]

In strong contrast to the abstracted linearity of the live passing diagrams produced by the New York Times for South Africa or the Guardian’s (exceptionally informative) chalkboards, the resultant diagrams are willfully organic, being the strict record (their strictness and literal quality reminds me of record drawings and as-builts) of compromise between the wandering dictates of each player’s attention and the geometry of the soccer match.

Interviewed at Umbro’s soccer blog, Marsh suggests the obvious next step for his drawings, which is to apply the technique not just to the production of a record of a single match with historical significance, but to construct a library of games translated into ink strokes.  Combined with a previous suggestion that Marsh has produced an architectural reading of sport, this suggests the possibility that there might be comparative architectural sports analysts, commentators and scholars who specialize not in narrative (or even tactics, though the English tactical analyst Jonathan Wilson is probably the most architectural sports analyst I’ve ever encountered), but in space and relationship and construction.  (Here it might be worthing noting — as evidence for the validity of such an approach, or at least the existence of parallels between the endeavors — that, like architecture, sport has an ambiguous relationship with ‘art’, sometimes easily allowing itself to be read as ‘art’, and yet at other times just as thoroughly resisting that categorization.)

["England only", David Marsh]

I’d love to know what new insights into (and tools for understanding) sport such analysts might develop: we might learn, for instance, that — seen as a whole, like a finished building — the coordinated movements of Dunga’s Brazil possess a crystalline beauty to rival or even exceed the individual brilliance of the classic Brazilian squads of the seventies (a brilliance whose absence is consistently bemoaned in contemporary commentary); we might discover hidden threads of historical congruence like those that Wilson untangles in Inverting the Pyramid; or, a rogue Eastern European coach — formerly trained as an architect at the Cooper Union — spending caffeine-fueled nights pouring over countless overlays of matches played by each of his squad’s Champions League opponents, might spot hidden complexities in those opponents’ patterns of play which even their own coaches are unaware of and, exploiting that knowledge to maximize the effectiveness of his own team’s positioning, lead a Latvian squad of middling journeyman to the most unlikely of European titles, as they bewilder opponents by trotting out new and bizarre formations in each match.

The few of you who may have followed my rather undirected ramblings at eatingbark before the launch of mammoth will be aware that I’ve long been rather fascinated by the notion that sport fields, in general, and soccer fields (football pitches for the non-North Americans), in particular, are canvases for the construction of diagrams of urban space — that the movements of the players and the ball, the rules of the game, the condition of the field (water-logged; frozen; pristine), and the formations proscribed by coaches and managers are mirrors of urban processes. Geoff Manaugh has described ‘football’ (I don’t know which football he had in mind, and I don’t think it really matters) as “a series of contradictory landscapes strategies… competing ways of using and filling space,” the truth of which is elegantly demonstrated in Jonathan Wilson’s definitive book on the development of soccer tactics, Inverting the Pyramid, which traces the history of the sport not as a list of winners and losers or a narrative of heroes and villains, but as the continual search for free space (“the question is always where is the space”), for seams in the “analytic geometry” created by dominant formations and patterns of play.

Relatedly, Sam Jacobs has described soccer as “a kind of essentialised urbanism”, tracing the lineage of the pitch from its “chaotic vernacular origins” in the football of the 14th and 15th centuries, when opposing groups battled across the whole landscape of a village — “houses, agriculture, sites of worship” — to place the ball into or onto a selected marker at the other end of the selected landscape. So not just the patterns of play, but also the white lines carefully chalked into grass or turf embody patterns of urbanization within the space of the game (which allows one to fairly easily read metaphors about conflicting rulesets for urbanism into North American fields with both American football and soccer markings).

The point of all this is to point you to this essay in The Norman Einsteins (a “Sports & Rocket Science Monthly”), by Sport is a TV Show’s Fredorrarci, which is fueled by the photography of Hans van der Meer, though it is about a good bit more than them:

What are the most impressive elements to me about the photographs of Hans van der Meer are the backdrops, or rather, the contrast they present. The background changes from picture to picture. First, a mountain, then some chimney stacks, then some scrubland or a housing estate or a harbour. The foreground, however, is the same each time. The marking is identical. The game is identical. It’s all the more remarkable when you remember how recent the idea of mass organised sport is. It’s impossible — try as some might — to imagine a world without it. Yet it took people not so many generations removed from our own to conceive of these games, or to take existing games and properly codify them and give them form. It took the endeavour and enthsiasm of people to spread the games. It’s easy to take sport for granted, like a river or a mountain, but it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t always there.

Van der Meer’s photographs demonstrate the persistence of abstraction, of the need to maintain the regularlized and minimalist interpretation that Jacobs identifies, even in the face of terrains which defy it. Thus the idealized form (or nearly the Platonic idea) of the English village is projected onto and carefully protected from the landscapes of every other continent, an exported landscape covered by a myriad of invisible diagrams.

[see also this old City of Sound post on design, architecture, and football]