D3FC

Deptford Three Sided Football Club (D3FC) was formed in 2012 with the aim of undertaking a rigourous testing of the dynamics of three sided football – through the critical practise of active participation – in order to prove (or disprove) its founding father’s hypotheses regarding quality of play and outcome.

Originally imagined in 1962 by the Danish situationist, artist and philosopher Asger Jorn, three sided football was posited as a means of demonstrating how the introduction of a third element into a binary duality could neutralise what he saw as the deleterious effects of an inevitably antagonistic polarity. In such a game, the emphasis would change from scoring goals against a single opponent to preventing two other opponents from scoring. The match would, he felt, become a defensive one rather than an offensive one. However, rather than seeing within this inovative form of play a provocative and challenging possibility, Jorn suggests that it would not be a very exciting game and that “it is quite possible that there would be a climate of tension (or of frustration?) in such a situation and that this would lead to an explosion.”

The founders of the club had all played in one or more games of three sided football over the last twenty or so years and, in contradiction to Jorn’s suggested outcome, had found that each of the games had been an exciting and unconventional amalgam of subversion, diplomacy and non linear ball skills. Could Jorn have really been so wrong in his predictions? Like so many other aspects of the situationist programme, only a rigourous and dynamic practise would reveal the truth.

The first match was held in Deptford Park in late February 2012 and since then our games have been studiously documented in the form of successive match reports (see the pull down menu entitled ‘blog’ for reports and commentary). Our understanding of the game is still in its early stages and every match leads to greater awareness of the expansion in tactical possibilities which follows the suppercession of the binary by the complimentarity of the trinary. The square root of two dimensional football continues to be cubed….