@july

I really loved Dimitar Berbatov's playing style. One of the things that he was really good at, weirdly, was just making it look so effortless. Elegance and grace are terms that aren't often thrown around for a striker. I think of someone like Jamie Vardy is pretty much Red Bull can but a human being, but also can score goals and chat shit, and while that's really great, there's something stylistically elegant about Berbatov's style of play. Berbatov often had this very eloquent way of playing where it's slightly ahead of his opponents but they are very elegant and unexpected solutions to the run of play. I feel like he seemed to kind of not be particularly the best physical athlete, but I think there was almost elegant solutions that he had in his mind, and he would sort of contort reality to a certain extent to fit this elegance and would play almost in an elegant unexpected style. A very distinct style of play that I think Berbatov often had, but it was also highly efficient in its own way. It wasn't showboating or anything like that, and I think if anything, there was this sense of not elegance for the sake of elegance but elegance because it was the best solution. I don't think many people really can play like that ever. What is sort of playing with grace? It's carrying yourself with a certain kind of, I think, almost sensitivity in a way to what's going on around you constantly. It's extreme sensitivity to the positioning of the players around you and finding yourself paths to where things will go. I want to use a completely different player as an example of someone who has a very different distinct style of play that's not what I would call necessarily elegant or graceful is. Thomas Müller, he is a machine who does the same thing that is the right thing over and over again, but it's absolutely not, there's no sort of beauty in it in a way. But yes he is an absolute beast of a player. I think he was once described as “a player you fall in love with at fourth sight”, and I think illustrates how different he was as an artist from Berbatov (Müller is called the Ramdeuter for a reason.) And I think what does art show you? It shows you new paths, it shows you that he really cared essentially weirdly about how he played the game. And I think there is something really interesting about that. I think so many players have this chaotic energy. It's almost a lot of wasted energy, and I think first-touch control with Berbatov is often a very calculated mode of expression that would find, in a way, the soft underbelly of the entire situation and often it would be in a flash where he would just find ways, unexpected solutions to common situations. Part of it, in a way, I kind of think of it as finding the beauty that makes this situation unique and instead of ramming a predetermined path or solution or idea onto the situation and overpowering the situation by implementing some solution like Müller, he would find what made the situation unique and then let the unique situation dictate what the most elegant, efficient path was. And often by slowing down the defender, getting the defender to come to him which then would set the tempo for maximally exploiting the next situation all the way into goal. What a fantastic player. What a striker. Very unique, utterly unsuited for the modern high press, Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Gegenpressing style. Half-space finding play, but absolutely the kind of player that I love. But I feel like he’d make a comeback now. Unique, elegant, one of a kind, insightful, creative, and overall an artist.

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