BatiGol Weekly 116: Guided by wire

Today is Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s 248th birthday. Say what you want about the nigh-incomprehensible German, but you have to admit that his influence over Western philosophy through the past couple of centuries has been undeniably vast, even if that influence is frequently reflected in other philosophers’ stinging rejections of his concepts. While I am not going to pretend to understand what the hell Hegel is talking about most of the time—again, nigh-incomprehensible—I do think that his philosophy is worth taking a look at right now.

Hegel’s biggest thing (yes, that’s how philosophers talk, and also shut up) was uniting dualities into a singular entity through a series of three steps, or the triadic development. This process usually starts with something being in an unenlightened or incomplete state, then becoming the opposite of its previous state, and finally the unification of the previous two states into a single and complete form.

“So what the crap does this have to do with Fiorentina?” you may rightly ask. My response would be, “Can you think of a club in the world that has to deal with more dualities than Fiorentina? Can you think of another team that vacillates between one thing and another as frequently or rapidly, so that sometimes it seems like the Viola are two things at once?”

Look at the preseason criticisms we had of this team. The attack wouldn’t generate enough goals, the midfield lacked anything approaching star power, the DVs aren’t sinking enough into the squad to compete with the mega-rich of the world football landscape, the fans are in open rebellion. Then, 90 minutes later, we’d changed our tune, because this is the highest-scoring team in Serie A with midfield that demolished the opposition because the Della Valles invested intelligently and the fans are fully behind them. And then, a day after that, we thought maybe we’d gotten a bit too optimistic (At Viola Nation? Surely not.) and swung back the other way.

That’s fine and maybe even correct, because maybe that’s what Fiorentina is: a set of contradictions, a bunch of binaries that exist simultaneously and in opposition to each other. If this team was an either/or proposition, we’d lose the fun from it. After all, who wants to support a club whose every detail is fixed, every path set, and every decision already known? That sounds bad and boring and even less intelligible than Hegel.

Latest news

When you’re too cool for a jersey sponsor, you put Save the Children on your shirt. Oh hey, Fiorentina’s doing that again.

Serie A has scheduled the Sampdoria vs Fiorentina match to Wednesday, 19 September. It’s a doozy.

Fiorentina took on Arezzo in a friendly to commemorate the tragic Bruno Beatrice, who played for both sides. There wasn’t any way to watch, but we did manage to pull some conclusions out of it.

Oh, erm, Fiorentina might have kind of beat the damn doors off of Chievo Verona yesterday. Here is our full coverage.

Must read

With the non-stop sniping between ownership and fans, it’s fair to wonder how much the Della Valles care about their team.

Your idiot fearless editorial team has reviewed the transfer window and previewed the season. As usual, all of our predictions are completely correct and will not be revisited by anyone who wants to mock us for being clueless numpties.

Given how often we’ve heard promises to make Fiorentina more Italian, we wondered how much it mattered to the fans, and you told us.

Comment of the week

Here’s slakas with your non-native Italian speaker update.

Thanks, slakas.

That’s it for this week, folks. Write some thank you notes to people who’ve given you stuff.