Tactically Naive: Serie A is back, baby!

Hello, and welcome back to Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. We have edited out every mention of “BEN STOKES!” from what follows, but if you want the true immersive TN experience, just imagine somebody shouting it loudly in your ear every couple of sentences.

You know it. Tactically Naive knows it. Everybody knows it, even if they like to pretend otherwise. No football season has really begun until Serie A is back, in all its beautiful, scrappy, sizzling, silly glory.

Juventus won, 1-0, to begin their march towards a ninth straight title. But the secret upside of this superclub age is this: you don’t have to care about the superclubs until they start losing. So, let’s not care about Juventus. Doesn’t that feel relaxing?

The beautiful things were happening elsewhere, anyway. In Florence, Fiorentina and Napoli shared seven goals and two hilarious VAR decisions: one a familiar story of pedantic handball, the other a joyful failure to notice that Dries Merten was throwing himself on the floor. Mertens also scored a banger, which was then outbanged by Kevin-Prince Boateng. Eventually Lorenzo Insigne scored the winner, and everybody had a well-deserved rest.

Elsewhere, more delirious nonsense. Three times Roma took the lead, the third by mere millimetres. And three times Genoa dragged them back to parity, the third thanks to a diving header of almost Platonic purity. Christian Kouamé, we salute you, and we salute your willingness to absolutely hurl yourself through the air for the sake of a point away at Roma.

Finally, a note for AC Milan. Of all the teams that could be/maybe should be/aren’t competing with Juventus, Milan are perhaps the saddest case. Manager after manager, false dawn after false dawn, all at the club that for many, including Tactically Naive, basically defined what Serie A should be. That heady mix of style, substance, and cynicism. Those wonderful thin stripes. That Paolo Maldini. Ah, to be young again ...

Milan had 60 percent possession against Udinese. Milan didn’t manage a single shot on target. And Milan lost.

More exciting developments in the Premier League’s ongoing implementation of Referees Watching Television (VAR). This week we discovered that VAR will apparently not overturn penalty decisions if they are wrong but not, like, totally wrong.

So if, for example, the referee had completely missed David Silva being tripped in the penalty area against Bournemouth, then VAR would have politely suggested that this was something to be considered. But because the referee saw it but didn’t think it was particularly important, then nothing doing. This puts VAR in the slightly peculiar position of intervening with bad decisions that aren’t made, but not bad ones that are made. Unless they’re, like, real bad.

In some respects this is no different to how things have always been: if a referee doesn’t agree with how things appear to be, then bad decisions follow. Yet somehow it’s more frustrating when there is a system in place that at least, in theory, has the capacity to reverse this, but for some reason isn’t allowed to. “The referee didn’t get that one wrong enough” doesn’t sound like a recipe for happiness.

Especially when, as with Silva, the referee seemed to get it completely and entirely wrong. Especially when offside is being legislated with such aggressive precision as to appear sarcastic. Especially when the presence of VAR is having a transformative effect on frustration, diffusing it out from one person to an entire system. Because individual humans make mistakes, but systems are faceless, monstrous, and almost certainly in thrall to a shadowy alliance of vested interests that all hate you and your football team.

In April 1888, 12 football clubs got together and created the world’s first professional football league. They called it the Football League, because they didn’t need to call it anything else. 131 years later, one of those founder clubs, Bolton Wanderers, is days from liquidation, after a takeover deal collapsed on Friday night.

As with all similar stories the details are particular but the broad strokes are the same. At some point the ownership of a football club passed to somebody who shouldn’t have been allowed to take charge of a football club, and then it all went wrong.

One of the great tragedies of professional football is that governing bodies — and this applies well beyond England — have generally failed to interpret their function as one of protective curation. Football clubs are businesses, of course, but they are so much more than that: they are grand tangles of social history and cultural identity; they are institutions that create, and were created by, communities; they are totems and monuments, parish churches and cathedrals; they are folk songs and love stories.

What Tactically Naive is saying, in essence, is that the Football Association should be dissolved immediately. To replace it, a broad coalition of heavily-armed librarians, working with extremely strong, strict readings of the words “Fit” and “Proper.” Neglect of football clubs is an act of violence against humanity as a collective. Vote TN for a happier Britain.

Here’s the second most surprising thing to happen in Australian sport this week: