The The Geographical Approach to Football

Abstract

The article shows how football increasingly uses knowledge relevant to geography, as well as geotechnologies, but it does not incorporate concepts from geography nor employ geographers. It is also observed that the scientific production and geographic academic literature do not engage in the study of football, carrying out, at most, analyzes on the social or political dimensions related to the sport. Based on this diagnosis, one of the objectives of the article is to point out the enormous potential of geographical science for football, as well as to suggest and indicate the possible emergence of a new field of studies for Geography. Another objective is to claim the possibility of geographers being able to act in the football field. To meet the objectives, the article presents a well-known defense strategy, called individual marking by sectors, from a geographical point of view, in which the strategy itself is nothing more than a regionalization operation to better govern the territory of the penalty area. In the end, after discussing the concepts of Region and Territory, as well as their possible use in football, it is concluded that football loses a lot when it uses tools and methods that are fundamentally geographical, but does not go deeper into the study of geography itself. What is proposed here is a new way of seeing and thinking about football, from a geographical approach.