Luis Suárez is a malignant god. This much I know. This is my creed.

I know that he is a god. Look at his football. Look at the goals he scores. His scoring rate is Messi level – but he plays for Liverpool, not Barcelona, in England, not Spain. He is simultaneously one of the most creative players in the world and one of the top finishers. He is good in the air, on the floor, good at dribbling, shooting, tackling, lobbing, passing, controlling, leading, biting.

To call him a god is not idle or misguided or hyperbolic. Here are the crude level stats of Suárez, Ronaldo and Messi this year. He has scored the same number of league goals than Ronaldo, the recent winner of the Ballon D’or, an award that claims, erroneously, that he was the best player in the world in 2013.[1] He created far more chances, more so than everyone in the Premier League but David Silva. He made 2.9 key passes per game; he took 5.5 shots per game. He dribbled a bunch and tackled a load and passed a lot and played in three or four different positions.

These are just his basic stats. Others, more qualified disciples than I, have unveiled his mysteries further. He’s always been good at everything, but now he’s added unprecedented levels of success to unusually high volume. Not just does he take a whole load of shots, but he takes them from, in general, great locations. But he outscores his positions. The most telling stat, to my mind, is his shots from what Colin Trainor terms ‘Very Poor Locations’: two shots, one goal, 50% conversion rate. This is probably noise. Or it could indicate the freakish genius of a god, unbound by the petty rules of statisticians.

This shot, the one from a ‘Very Poor Location’ that went in, had an ExpG score of <0.001. Which is very low. Which makes it basically a miracle that that shot went in at all. And yet. It seems deliberate. It's like when Luke Skywalker makes that one in a million shot that sticks a torpedo in the Death Star. It's one in a million, but it's fated. Suárez has fate on his side. Suárez is vastly overperforming at his current freakish rate. Eventually, he may have to fall to earth, as gods are prone to doing sometime. Regression is a bitch. But, I don't think he will. The reason is this:

He has more than fate too. He is a malignant god. He does not play by the rules, he bends them to his will. He gets ahead, he cheats. He racially abuses opponents, to gain an edge. He dives and swears and complains and makes use of every opportunity he can find on the pitch. He is the moral equivalent of a glutton so desperate for more food that he will eat scraps from bins, mould and waste.

These two halves of his being are one and the same. He is a god because he is malignant. He is malignant because he is a god. This is my explanation for Suárez's unforgivable actions: not that he is necessarily wholly intrinsically evil, per se, but that he is so wild, so untamed, that he can't act on an impulse without absorbing it into his very person. He is a creature of caprice, of flashes of insight and inspiration and conviction. He acts each moment as it comes, evaluates each on its merits, each as a discrete problem. His instincts guide him; but his instincts have no memory. This is pure creativity, unburdened by knowledge. Without any fixed core, without morals and identity, existing just as an avatar of football playing efficiency, any action seems fair game. Suárez is a constant improviser, teetering, chaotic, unpredictable. This unpredictability is itself a strength, mostly: it becomes much harder to defend against a behaviour that Suárez hasn't yet decided to adopt. Occasionally this unpredictability is a hindrance; occasionally it is marked by egregious repetitions. There will come a time, perhaps, where Suárez tries an outrageous lob, and the ball careers 65 feet over the bar. And he forgets and tries it again because the next time he sees the goalkeeper off his line, even though Suárez himself is in his own half, maybe it will work, that time, in that moment. If biting an opponent in Holland didn't work, it might work here, now, in England, with this opponent, in this moment. Maybe Branislav really doesn't like being bitten. Maybe he will taste nice.

This is the same thinking that makes him so good at actually playing football: he tries to bend the rules, constantly. He forces the audacious, he imagines the unimaginable. Observe:

He would not do these things were he not a relentless experimenter; he would not do them if he didn't think that, somehow, the rules didn't apply to him. The goal against Crystal Palace, to my mind, perfectly sums up Suárez's unusual talents: it is a strange goal, scrappy and talented, masterfully improvised. It is, significantly, the only goal that could have been scored from that position, the most pragmatic, effective option.

Dennis Bergkamp knows Suárez from Ajax. In his (pseudo)autobiography, he praises Suárez's creativity: "maybe you wouldn't agree with the things he did, but he was always trying to create something, always thinking: 'How can I get the best out of this situation? Do I have to pull the shirt of the defender to get in front of him? Do I get out of position to control the ball?' His mind is always busy thinking. And sometimes he steps on someone's foot or he uses his hand. Silly things. But the idea in his head is not bad” (Stillness and Speed, 2013, p. 20). This interpretation is perhaps generous. It has a hint of self-justification to it: Bergkamp himself was similarly creative, similarly aware of the dark arts, if perhaps less tempted by them. There is another passage in the book where Bergkamp defends his trademark lobbed goals. Not on the grounds of beauty, but on the grounds of effectiveness. Their beauty is in their efficacy, one might argue.

Bergkamp was himself a god, but of a different sort: imperious, quick to anger; creative, yes, but not quite like Suárez. People would point out, rightly, that you don't need to be malignant to be a god. This is true, but it misses the point. The gods are a pantheon, and Suárez fulfils a necessary role: the trickster. Loki, Hermes, Tezcatlipoca. The Coyote Man. Suárez is the god you can understand, somewhat, because he's fucked up and broken and confused.[2] But the one you can never hope to truly understand, because he lies so much that he lies to himself and takes on the lie as his core, unstable identity, lies in a postmodern terrifying swirl, revolving constantly around some unseen black hole.

Luis Suárez is a malignant god. He has no interest in the rules that apply to regular mortals, or to regular gods. His only interest is his own – and sometimes, those who can help him. His interest in rules extends only to thinking about how he can break them. The problem with rules is that they constrain you; the problem with gods is that they don't like constraint. But if everyone else plays by the rules, then not playing by the rules can be an advantage. If everyone else plays by the rules, then fuck the rules, and fuck everyone else.

1. It was Suárez. More seriously, it was Phillip Lahm. Back to post

2. The Trickster is a necessary part of the pantheon for this pseudo-humanity, for this chaos and unpredictability, as Suárez is a necessary part of football's religion. Back to post