Qatar 2022 gave us two games more than Luka Modric

The deadline was to expire on Friday 9 December 2022 before six in the evening, in the long run just before seven. The moment in which the last match at the World Cup should have ended Luke Modric. That day he had taken the field for the seventeenth time in the World Cup. The number seventeen is the seventh prime number, it is palindrome if we consider the binary number system (10001), it is above all the victim of the discrimination of bad luck. That numbers can bring bad luck is nonsense, but there are those who believe it. And the elimination of Croatia could have been yet another demonstration of a belief that is based on reasons as stupid as they are persuasive. However, Modric mocked his heptacaidekaphobia and Croatia eliminated Brazil. The time for farewells has dilated, football has allowed itself two more matches – the semi-final against Argentina (today at 8pm) and the final, whether it’s for third place or the Cup, it doesn’t matter – with Luka Modric in field. It wasn’t obvious, on the contrary: the green and gold were the favourites, they were strong and spectacular, baroque in their football made up of feints, refined touches, scenic exuberance. Everything was ready for the academic praise of fun football, the one that strikes the eye and warms the heart: they say, they said, like this. Isn’t it the show we are looking for and makes us exalt when we look at the playing field?

Advertisements, video game trailers, match highlights are full of feints, dribbles, stunts. There is nothing more striking than this: a double step, a rubber band, a rabona, a roulette or a veronica snatch hands, give wow, make your eyes widen. However, they make us forget that the balloon is an inert body subjected to the force of gravity and the viscous friction of the physical means of propagation. In other words, football is also ballistics, i.e. mechanical physics. And it takes math to explain it.

In March 1964, the physicist Richard Feynman, in a lesson-divertissement demonstrated that to derive Kepler’s laws, those relating to the motion of the planets around the Sun, not even a differential equation was needed, but high school knowledge was enough: that is, knowing what It’s Newton’s law of gravitation and an abc of geometry. All simple, like when you notice that the fastest way to get from point A to point B is to follow a straight line. All simple, as long as you are Richard Feynman.

When we watch a football match we always forget that even the ball is, deep down, physics. And while we forget about this, enchanted by feints and counterfeits, we don’t even grasp the beauty of certain plays that reject the superfluous and embrace the essential. We forget to focus on the marvel of linearity, of point A and point B joined by a single straight line. Luka Modric’s football is above all this: geometric vision, subtraction. It is a demonstration of the motion of the planets around the Sun without differential equations, pure celestial mechanics.