Seeing Football Like a State

This article argues that football tactics offer an underexplored resource for anarchist political theory by reframing football as a site of collective intelligence, relational organization, and resistance to technocratic control. Challenging leftist dismissals of sport as mere distraction, the essay reads contemporary football through the writings of Scottish coach Jamie Hamilton, situating his critique of modern tactics alongside James C. Scott’s analysis of high-modernist state planning in Seeing Like a State. Hamilton’s opposition to dominant “Positionist” models -- characterized by rigid spatial grids, data-driven optimization, and bureaucratic rationality -- is developed as a footballing analogue to statist and managerial forms of power. In contrast, his concept of “Relationism” emphasizes emergence, improvisation, local knowledge, and embodied coordination, treating football as a living cultural practice rather than a system to be engineered. Drawing on examples from global football cultures, the potrero tradition, and relational coaching practices, the article frames contemporary tactical debates as a struggle between abstraction and life, control and creativity. It concludes by proposing Hamilton’s relational football as a practical and conceptual model for anarchist politics, one that privileges situated action, collective intuition, and bottom-up organization over universal schemas and centralized authority.