Why a Lost Match Isn’t an Existential Crisis

Stop turning missed penalties into Greek tragedies.

I am frankly sick to death of it. At every major sports competition, at every World Cup final, or even when reading those countless LinkedIn posts by cardboard philosophers, it is always the same litany: commentators turn into tragedians, pundits into two-bit gurus, and they break out the violins about the “noble melancholy” of defeat. They talk to us about Epictetus, about a tearful humility that supposedly becomes the humus for the victory to come…

If I have to hear or read one more of these pseudo-stoic tirades that confuse failure, error, and defeat, I think I’m going to knock someone out with a grammar book.

Nevertheless, these frauds coupled with a total ignorance of what a playful or athletic activity actually is allow us to return to the essence of Play.

1. The Scam of the “Verdict of Reality”

These TV-set philosophers dare to assert: “Defeat is reality imposing itself; we control neither the wind nor chance.”

Bullshit. This invocation of stoicism to justify hitting the post or a backhand into the net, in my view, is a failure to even try to understand the nature of the game.

I am thinking of the anthropologist Huizinga, who believed that all play takes place within a “magic circle.”

A space-time radically separated from ordinary life, governed by strictly arbitrary and artificial rules. If we follow his thought, when a player misses a penalty, it is not the cosmic Destiny of the universe crashing down on him. It is not the relentless harshness of the World that he must accept with the humility of an ancient sage. It is merely the application of a geometric, playful convention.

Appealing to trendy stoicism for a lost match is confusing the play-contract (which we freely accept to have fun in a fictional setting) with the human condition in the face of death, disease, or extreme poverty (and we really cannot say that male footballers are in this condition).

The wind that deflects a ball has no metaphysical depth; it is an internal parameter of the magic circle.

Bowing to defeat is not accepting “the verdict of reality,” it is simply validating that the rule of the game worked. Period.

2. The “Spoilsport” Syndrome and the Confiscated Party

And then, there is this unbearable whining about defeat that allegedly “deprives us of the party,” this famous “inconsolable true sorrow” of childhood: Boo-hoo Mbappé, boo-hoo Cristiano Ronaldo.

In the very essence of play (this in-lusio, the entry into the illusion), victory only has meaning because defeat exists. The loser is absolutely not excluded from the party: he is its condition of possibility! Without him, there is no agon, no competition, no nervous tension. The party is the game itself in the making.

Putting on a devastated face at a press conference and talking about “the death of a hope” is what Huizinga calls corrupting play with the spirit of seriousness. The sports commentator who collapses in tears as if his country had just suffered a natural disaster, or the intellectual who aestheticizes this defeat into an existential drama, behave exactly like the spoilsport (the party-pooper).

They destroy the magic illusion and the lightness of the act by forcibly trying to inject the heavy, sticky pathos of “real life” into it.

Putting an End to Grandiloquence

The true humility of defeat does not lie in these two-bit transcendental triumphs, nor in self-flagellation disguised as wisdom. It lies in the purest and most elegant of assumed futilities. It is the exact moment when the magic circle dissolves.

True humility is shaking the opponent’s hand, leaving the pitch or the tennis court, and intimately admitting:

“Deep down, it was just a game.”

Nothing grandiose. Just the end of an interlude that had no importance whatsoever. And that, apparently, is far too simple and too radical to sell self-help books.