COLUMN: Realism in Football – Getafe, Jose Bordalas and the Matter of Aesthetics

Aesthetics and Beauty 

Us football watchers are unreliable narrators on the matter of beauty, a domain where even poets don’t seem to be in agreement. We often associate aesthetics in our sport with flowing automatisms, switches of play, synchronised pressure, technical smoke and light shows—the works. To harken to poetry, it is Wordsworth’s idyllic world; space and time duly pause to capture snapshots of the sublime, or in our case, the players ‘worth the entry fee’ and the teams that play for the love of the beautiful game. Football dominantly takes a flowery, Romantic-Era stance on aesthetics – time, nature… all standing still to appreciate a thing of beauty, a joy forever. 

Well and good. Getafe’s aesthetic position is far detached from this notion – this much is obvious. Their style cannot even find articulation, let alone joy in those previous descriptions; yet they do express a firmly and clearly articulated alternate aesthetic position of their own. One that resembles uncannily the modernist era aesthetics of the early 1900s.  

Modernist Aesthetics  

The era of industry, war, and the day-to-day grind. For the cultured modernist poet of the 1900s, the world was too cold and dark for fanciful sonnets on springtime pastures and lengthy odes to beautiful birds. The optimistic, childlike artist of the pastoral romantic era is long-dead, and the modern poet’s city space is bleak, busy, and FULLY industrialised. This is the new aesthetic picture to be reflected unto the canvas—the beauty of showing it exactly as it is. Hard, real, brutal.

Indeed, this is the same sense of “modern” hinted at by Getafe’s president in the La Liga: All Access documentary when he suggests that his coach, Jose Bordalas, “advocates a modern brand of football that’s all about fighting.”  

He is not discussing the same modern-ness that we often are when we try to assimilate yet another footballing trend into our tactical lexicon. It is not from that discourse of modern football at all, so to speak. Instead, it is the clearly defined 1900s modernist aesthetic – hard realism as a reflection of the times. 

The Work Must Go On 

The same documentary impassionately decribes Getafe as “a working-class town with hardworking people. It’s quite industrial.”  

The images we get are long shots of subdivided buildings interspersed with a rather dramatic display of an industrial working man working away, as Jaime Mata in the background explains how the club adopted its blue colours as an ode to the blue-collar workforce that powers the city. 

Right next to their glitzy and glamorous Madrid cousins, Getafe has always been about arduously sculpting out a minimal style within minimal means in football. As always, each other is all they have, in the absence of mythic heroes. There is no primary creation myth at Getafe, no grand philosophical ideals that the club pulls from. Instead, the myth and lore arise as a product of the work put in time after time, game after game, second after second, year after year. Their world is so naturalistic, brutal, and without a foundation of privilege that all the rights to assert oneself and exist in Primera must be earned every single day on the football pitch.  

The current brew for 24/25 started off with a converted defensive midfielder in Christantus Uche playing at striker. He’d spent his last two seasons in the 4th and 5th division of Spanish football respectively. The latest discovery as of January is Coba da Costa, a left winger from the academy who had also spent two years in the 4th tier himself. To go with these new but unfancied heroes, a strong core of stalwarts comprises the core – familiar names in Dakonam Djene, Luis Milla, Allan Nyom, Borja Mayoral, and more of the motley crew.

No grand budgets to speak of. Painfully critical squad depth. No quick squad overhauls, no marquee signings. Within such contexts, few have crafted an aesthetic position quite as sensuous and visceral as Bordalas with his Getafe sides. One mustn’t forget that he took them through to the Round of 16 in the Europa League just five years ago. A couple of brief spells later, destiny brought him back to Getafe, and in January 2025, he clinched the ‘Manager of the Month’ in Spain with his favourite club fresh off a 0-3 thrashing of Real Sociedad at Anoeta. They also proudly boast the second least goals conceded in the top flight so far. It is a football of economy – economy of goals scored and goals conceded. Minimal means, maximum efficiency.

More than a project of legitimising the manager’s credentials, this is a project of trying to legitimise and explain his and their aesthetic position clearly. So, let’s delve immediately into what a realist football aesthetic might look like by seeing what conditions of time and space it generates during the game. 

Modern Time 

In football, fluidity of play leads to fluidity of experienced time. Patterns can emerge in a flow-state, momentum can be accumulated, and teams can build chances with high levels of coordination and association. This on some level is what most ‘big’ clubs aim for at the outset of a game – to hit the flow-state where everything goes smoothly without edges or bumps. 

But time is experienced differently by clubs facing Getafe. Disruption of time is the nnormal aesthetic position. As in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, time is jagged, interrupted, and forcefully pieced together in different ways before it is even allowed to feel linear. The singular football match is thus broken down into a voluminous and never-ending series of disconnected skirmishes. Mini-battles, mini wars, frequent interruptions and frequent disruptions due to frequent transgressions of the law. If in modern poetry a stray voice or thought frequently breaks the flow of the established narrative, in Getafe the driven directness of the approach frequently chops up the flow of the football match. 

When Getafe play, you feel the match crawl to its last second, till the clock resembles an hourglass in function. And you’re sitting there feeling impatient, staring at the sand, waiting for it to run down faster than its own limitations allow. But regardless of how it makes one feel, it is an aesthetic position articulated and presented clearly, firmly, and successfully – an aesthetic of disruption. 

Modern Space 

Space, when facing Getafe, is not expansive and never-ending like Wordsworth’s green pastures and endless daffodil rows, but congested, busy, and always already occupied like Eliot’s London. Overdetermined, overpopulated… the game of space is a busy one in the modern industrial aesthetic. Space is ever-changing and highly territorial – to be fought for, to be earned, to be won constantly. The central zones of the pitch are the most contested territory with Getafe, and they converge harshly upon trespass, in hordes. No holds barred, stray balls will and must be won at all costs and disposed of efficiently.

They are comfortable shifting situationally between all line heights, but as a rule are intense and tough in high pressure when required, and just as combative in the duel when sitting compact and relatively deep. At the end of the day, the game is kept in a dangerous, dynamic balance in the sterile areas of the pitch. A lot of energy goes into maintaining absolute dominance in defensive territory – and Getafe are arguably the hardest-working off-the-ball side in La Liga.  

Summarising the Aesthetic: Realism in Football 

For Getafe, things are all too real for something as elaborate as an orchestrated footballing masterpiece; there is simply no time for that, because there is work to be done. And there is no space for ideas that have lofty, dreamy bearing in principle, outside of the here and now. Ambition is sacrificed for collective effort, and immense pride is taken in doing more out of inherent self-conviction. 

It’s a good time to conclude the article, just before it starts to sound like an attempt to romanticise this aesthetic. And since they do not care for what we call romantic, this would obviously be counterproductive. The article is instead an attempt to legitimise Getafe’s aesthetic position. To clarify it, ground it historically, and provide it with the aesthetic context it currently lacks but doesn’t deserve to lack. I doubt Papa Bordalas cares in any case; the work must go on.