Infi­nite Football

Now I’m not say­ing I’ve been miss­ing foot­ball dur­ing the lock­down, but the oth­er day I dropped a pair of fresh­ly rolled socks and pro­ceed­ed to drib­ble them around my flat before cooly slot­ting them through the legs of a clothes airer.

I realise it may sound glib to bemoan the loss of sport when there are far more seri­ous issues at hand, but foot­ball has been a con­stant in my life for as long as I can remem­ber, and as such it’s some­thing that I care deeply about, though there are times when I wish I didn’t. It’s fun­ny how you appre­ci­ate things more once they’re gone – even some­thing as patent­ly imper­fect as the Eng­lish Pre­mier League.

At the time of writ­ing, the bean coun­ters and salary­men behind The Best League In The World™ are still thrash­ing out the details of Project Restart, which sounds like some­thing cooked up by Tyler Durden’s accoun­tant and has major clanger writ­ten all over it. So until foot­ball as we know and love/​hate it returns, allow me to turn your atten­tion to the new film from stal­wart mid­field gen­er­al of the Roman­ian New Wave, Cor­neliu Porum­boiu (whose new, new film, The Whistlers, is also released online this week).

In this 70-minute essay doc, Porum­boiu checks in with his old mate Lau­rențiu Gingh­ină to dis­cuss the beau­ti­ful game in all its splen­did, absurd glo­ry. Gingh­ină begins by recall­ing a painful inci­dent from his youth. While play­ing for his local team in Vaslui in the late 1980s, he was bad­ly hurt in a tack­le, frac­tur­ing his fibu­la. He suf­fered fur­ther injury the fol­low­ing year and was forced to hang up his boots for good. But he doesn’t blame him­self or even the offend­ing oppo­nent for his mis­for­tune – instead he believes it was the result of a fun­da­men­tal flaw in the game itself.

From that moment, Gingh­ină ded­i­cat­ed his life to improv­ing the laws of foot­ball with a view to improv­ing play­er safe­ty while enhanc­ing the spec­ta­cle. His first big idea is to intro­duce octag­o­nal pitch­es… and things only get cra­zier and more com­pli­cat­ed from there. Using a flip chart and coloured mag­net­ic coun­ters, he out­lines his vision for Foot­ball 2.0 (and 3.0, 4.0…) in earnest to an increas­ing­ly puz­zled Porum­boiu. For us watch­ing at home, the expe­ri­ence is akin to being made to lis­ten to your mate’s crack­pot uncle down the pub explain how he would fix the off­side rule. Which is to say it’s exas­per­at­ing yet strange­ly enthralling.

Gingh­ină has a habit of los­ing his train of thought and fre­quent­ly con­tra­dicts him­self, but his enthu­si­asm and avun­cu­lar man­ner makes him instant­ly relat­able. If only there were more peo­ple like him at the top of the game. But of course, Infi­nite Foot­ball goes way beyond tac­tics and reg­u­la­tions. It’s a hum­ble rejec­tion of the sys­tems and struc­tures that gov­ern all aspects of our dai­ly lives, not just sport. It’s an impas­sioned pitch for a more open, expres­sive soci­ety. It’s a por­trait of a man, a fam­i­ly, a com­mu­ni­ty. It’s the sto­ry of a bro­ken dream pieced back togeth­er into some­thing new and beautiful.

Admit­ted­ly, there’s not much in the way of actu­al foot­ball on offer here (unless you’re real­ly crav­ing some Roman­ian ama­teur indoor five-a-side). So apolo­gies if you feel I’ve led you this far under false pre­tences. But the hope­ful, uni­ver­sal mes­sage at the heart of Porumboiu’s film is sure­ly one we can all get behind right now.

Infi­nite Foot­ball is released 8 May via Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma.