The story of how the term “tiki-taka” entered soccer’s lexicon, how it came to define a style, might, perhaps, be apocryphal, but that does not matter. Sometimes, whether a story is true and whether a story reveals a truth are separate things.
The story, as you may know, goes like this. Javier Clemente was coach of Athletic Bilbao in the 1980s. Clemente was a brusque figure, and he wanted his teams to play a physical, direct, effective sort of soccer. It worked: In 1984, Athletic won both the Spanish title and the Spanish cup.
Its main rival that year was a Barcelona team coached by César Luis Menotti, an Argentine who was, in many ways, Clemente’s polar opposite. Menotti believed soccer was a form of art. He wanted his teams not only to win, but to take the crowd’s breath away with the beauty and synchronicity of their movements.
In Clemente’s mind, Menotti was fixated on ornament and indulgence. He would dismiss the idea of passing the ball around aimlessly, with a wave of the hand and a scowl on his face, as nothing more than tiki-taka: frills and frivolities, a waste of time, soft and gauche and worthless.
A few decades later, of course, tiki-taka would come to mean something else entirely. First Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and then Vicente del Bosque’s Spain would conquer the world playing the style that became known as tiki-taka: an approach based on fast, short passing and bright, ceaseless movement, first dizzying and then dazing opponents before moving in for the kill.
Tiki-taka, though it was and is a term that Guardiola dislikes, soon came to stand for style, sophistication and success. For a decade or so, it ranked alongside Brazil’s jogo bonito as soccer’s ultimate compliment: the way the game should be played.
A few weeks ago, a reader asked if I might name the teams I most enjoyed watching. It is a more complex question than it appears.
Partly, that is because we look for two things in a soccer match: not just a certain standard of ability, but a certain level of meaning. A tense, tight, hardscrabble game between two cautious teams can be more compelling than a seven-goal thriller, if the stakes or the standards are higher. (The perfect game ends without a goal, as the Italian coach Annibale Frossi once said.)
Likewise, watching perfection can be curiously cold. Manchester City, over the last three years, has often reached a pitch of brilliance that has overwhelmed almost every opponent. But – and again, this is purely personal – it has, at times, felt like watching a perfectly tuned machine.
The United States strolling to last summer’s Women’s World Cup title engendered the same response: Jill Ellis’s team was a more than deserving champion, vastly superior to every other team at the tournament. By every measure, it was what we would call an attacking team. It played on the front foot. It was impressive and efficient and clinical. It was impossible not to admire the engineering. But that is not the same as stirring the soul.
The other part, of course, is that what appeals to each of us is different, rooted in subjective metrics even we, deep down, probably do not fully understand, based on the cultures we grew up in, the expectations we were raised with.
A friend of mine always draws a parallel with weather presenters: They are always so gloomy about the prospect of rain, as if they are delivering bad news. Some people, we should probably not forget, quite like the rain.
This is significant in the context of elite, modern soccer. Few managers, now, present themselves as ideologically flexible. Rarely do they go into a club and tell prospective employers they will see what sort of players they have, and implement an approach that suits them. Far more often, they claim to stand for something, to be the emissaries of some particular, superior philosophy.
That suits the clubs, who have realised that being seen to play the right way is almost as important as winning games, competing for trophies and enjoying success. A style is something you can sell around the world. A style is what gets you on television. A style is what wins you fans.
None of that is necessarily bad. Having a defined idea of what a team is also makes it far easier to sign players. Often, it enables coaches to get the best out of their squad, because the principles of what they are trying to do are baked into their minds. It makes periods of struggle simpler to overcome.
But it should not be forgotten that beauty is not universally acknowledged. It is dangerous to pursue style above all else, because not everyone reacts to it in the same way. After a while, the appeal even of Guardiola’s Barcelona, and particularly the Spanish national team, started to pall.
Where once it had felt fresh and flowing, now it felt repetitive, stale, death by a thousand cuts. Tiki-taka, all of a sudden, drifted back closer to Clemente’s original meaning; what was once an aspiration became an insult again. Some people, after all, like the rain. – New York Times Service
