Genius at work - but can it ever be art?

You may, these past seven days, have heard the phrase "the beautiful game". Depending on your appetite for watching middle-aged men slumped on studio sofas, talking about events half a planet away, you may also have heard of moves orchestrated, of Latin maestros, of goals that are works of art. Somewhere in the world the words "poetry in motion" will have flickered through the ether by now. This World Cup, as in every other, we will hear of the ballet, drama, rhythm, artistry and genius of footballers. And defenders will be called statues, though not in praise.

Clearly, or so the courtiers and chroniclers of football would have us believe, the game is an art and its players artists. Vieri, had he been born 500 years earlier, would have been wielding paintbrushes on an Enthroned Madonna with Saints. Germany, in putting eight past Saudi Arabia, are finding expression for the same national spirit that gave us the Choral Symphony and Goethe's Prometheus Unbound. David Beckham, with his sensational and provocative Cracked Metatarsal X-ray, should win the Turner Prize.

And, shocking though this is to lovers of art, they are almost right.

Footballers, in their celebrity and skill, are the closest contemporary equivalents to Renaissance artists and 19thcentury musicians. To be a great footballer now, as to be an artist then, you have to show precocious talent, which is nurtured through childhood with single-minded determination by highly-tuned systems of training and apprenticeship.

Evidence of your greatness should appear by the age of 20 or so. Then, when your genius flowers, you will be capable of barely credible feats of bodily control.

Once this might have meant painting a fly so realistic people would try to swat it, to give an example cited by Vasari, the Renaissance biographer and artist. Now it means bending the flight of a ball such that it eludes the efforts of 11 men to stop it, and hits an area of goalmouth perhaps one foot square.

Few other walks of life, including contemporary art, music and literature, demand such lifelong dedication. A writer can drift a bit, drive a truck perhaps or travel the world, before settling down to write a book. An artist so dedicated to her craft that she had not lived a little would now be regarded as boring. In most vocations, people can do a bit of this and a bit of that before getting down to business.

But not in football, because football is too serious for dilettantes. The point, in the end, is to see how exceptional a human being can be, even if the thing at which he is exceptional- - kicking a ball - is not an activity of obvious value. Indeed, the pointlessness of the action puts all the more emphasis on the skill that goes into it. If the pressure to achieve is relieved by allowing a bit of dabbling in something else, the whole experiment is ruined.

And in keeping with Oscar Wilde's saying, that genius is 99 per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration, all the effort eventually produces flashes of true creativity, like Maradona's second goal against England in 1986 - the one without the hand. Out of somewhere, and not even the player himself will know where, something will come that has never before been achieved in the millions of games played. As was said of Beethoven's music, it had to be done before anyone would believe it could be.

Television gives these works of the instant the immortality of art. The dubious miracle of digital recording means that, long after Leonardo's Last Supper has finally crumbled into dust, our descendants will see the stocky Argentinianmesmerising the English-defenders as clearly as we do. Nothing, bar Armageddon, will remove this footage from our culture's stock of images

The reward, for the tiny number of winners in this lifelong test of technique and character, is to be a mobbed and celebrated figure of myth, as Michelangelo was. With the intense test of will goes the artistic temperament: eternally frustrated perfectionism, self-destructive rage, uncontainable passion, without which nothing great would ever be achieved.

We are familiar with these emotions from tales of Van Gogh and Caravaggio, and also from Roy Keane. What is the fat, wrecked figure of today's Maradona, but the archetype of the spent artist?

Footballers even have the striking hairstyles which, from Leonardo's beard to Beethoven's mop and Andy Warhol's blond wig, has always been a hallmark of genius. Many go for the late-Picasso all-over baldie. Argentina seem to be playing a squad of long-haired French romantic poets, apart from Juan Sebastian Veron, whose bald-and-bearded bard look can only mean he wants to be Shakespeare - to irritate the English, no doubt. And then there is the endless picturesque recoiffing of the head of the genius Beckham.

At this point I can hear howls of anger from lovers of art. Indeed, my own inner aesthete is protesting. Surely the Sistine Chapel is a greater monument to human achievement than Michael Owen's goal against Argentina in France? The former speaks of man's place in the world, of God and creation. Football is only a game.

Howls of anger would be entirely justified, if the point were not made as strongly as possible that the final products - a work of art or a goal - are utterly different. It should also be stressed that Michael Owen's intellect is very different from Michelangelo's, the latter having had a somewhat greater capacity for insight and reflection. It says something unflattering about our culture that the supreme efforts of our most gifted heroes are applied to something so trivial.

But the point stands that the footballing hero is the same rare type of character as the artistic hero of the past.