The Heat of Color

The strip of the soccer team I grew up supporting – the Sporting Clube de Portugal, also known as Sporting Lisbon, with its horizontally green and white striped shirt, black shorts, and green and white striped socks – has never ceased to give me a thrill that I can be deceived into thinking derives from the colors themselves, independently of what it is I associate them with. It is difficult to imagine a different set of colors provoking a similar reaction in another team’s fans, yet I know they do. For such is the power of color, of colorful banners, flags, uniforms, to arouse passionate identification – a power so great as to seem independent of the power of what is represented by the colors. It is as if it were the colors that were lending appeal to what they represent, rather than the other way around. And that may at least partly be the case: it seems to me that poorly colored teams do tend to be lackluster, as nations with uninspired flags tend to inspire little patriotism. Whence this power of color to promote and indeed to intensify or even replace identification with a group? I imagine it has to do with the fact that, in nature, it is color that primarily enables us to group things. First there is light, which renders things visible; then form, which lets us distinguish one thing from another and classify it; then color, which is so effective at letting us group things that we tend to think of their colors as their primary attributes, as if they were their colors. In other words, color is naturally an attribute of the group, of the team, and sports have simply, and wisely, copied nature. But not all sports – not, say, baseball, which uses club colors sparingly, with uniforms predominantly white or gray, and so cannot hope to arouse the passion that color-reliant sports like soccer do. And the relatively recent introduction of color uniforms into cricket may not only have marked but perhaps caused a heating up of a traditionally very cool sport.

The Soccer Field: A Classic

If sports fields were to be considered aesthetically, I would like to think that none would be found so compelling, so perfected, so beautifully classical in design as the soccer field. My enthusiasm for the sport itself has ebbed and flowed through the years, but the lines of a soccer field have never ceased to gladden my eye. The sight of soccer field, even if only the representation of one in a board game, always arouses at least a smidgen of joy that cannot, I think, be explained entirely by its power to nostalgically evoke the role that soccer has played in my own life. And little has turned me off U.S. soccer leagues as much as their willingness to hold games on American football fields. It seems to speak of a shallow psychological connection to the sport, a lack of true passion for it, a dilettantish impurity of interest. What a travesty to see a soccer field’s beautiful lines temporarily superimposed on, made subservient to, indeed marred by, the crude underlying gridiron, which consists entirely of horizontal stripes, like some basic measuring instrument. And, in my boyhood, did my sense of soccer’s utter superiority to rugby not have much to do with how bare and undeveloped, how barbaric even, the rugby field seemed. It is a field that truly requires only touch lines. Even the goalposts in rugby appear superfluous, more decorative than functional, an attempt to disguise rugby’s brutal simplicity, hence the low, afterthought-like value attached to getting the ball between those uprights. In my eyes, the simplicity of the rugby field made it more of a ring or arena for displays of brute force and brute instincts than a stage for a complex, strategic, tradition-rich team sport and the many and difficult skills required to play it. The empty soccer field, on the other hand, does indeed affect me as a stage that has been so thoroughly set as to make it seem that the play is already underway. That elegant, sparse, absolutely symmetrical complexity of circles, half circles and quarter circles playing off boxes within boxes already seem to be having a game amongst themselves and certainly imply much that could happen on the field.