This is not Soccer!!!: Blue Lock’s poststructuralist approach to soccer

Abstract

ABSTRACT Like every particle in the universe encompassing the atomic structure of reality, soccer was a product of an entropic cycle whereby its inception in 1893 resulted from a historical hodgepodge of games involving kicking the ball to a goal post. Out of which, today’s soccer was borne, underscored as a complex semiotic system made up of form, value, and content (Yuruevich, 2020). Overtly conscious of the intersectionality between soccer, language, and theory, Blue Lock–a popular Japanese anime – plays soccer with one goal: to dribble the semiotic system of soccer across a deconstructed and decontextualized pitch. By putting Blue Lock at the midfield for literary analysis and spectatorship, this paper argued that the semiotic system of soccer is not fixed; rather, it caught in a perpetual state of différance that, in turn, underscore its robustness as a structure. Conclusively, the semiotic system of soccer was illustrated to be constructed by the deferral of meaning and anti-language.