The Philosophers' Football Match was a comedy sketch on Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus and later a part of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
The sketch depicted a football match between philosophers representing Greece and Germany, including Plato, Socrates and Aristotle on the Greek team, and Heidegger, Marx and Nietzsche on the German team. Instead of playing, the philosophers competed by thinking while walking on the pitch in circles. This left Franz Beckenbauer, the sole genuine footballer on the pitch (and a "surprise inclusion" in the German team, according to the commentary), more than a little confused. Confucius was the referee and Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine were the linesmen.
Outcome
Nietzche receives a yellow card after claiming that "Confucious has no free will"; "Name go in book" says confucious. Socrates scored the only goal of the match in the 89th minute, a diving header from a cross from Archimedes (who gets the idea of using the football first after shouting out "Eureka"!). The Germans dispute the call; "Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside." When viewing the replay it is clear that goal was offside and Marx was correct in his dissent.
Line-ups
Germany: Leibniz; Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling; Beckenbauer, Jaspers; Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
Greece: Plato; Epictetus, Aristotle, Sophocles, Empedocles of Acraga; Plotinus, Epicurus, Heraklitus, Democritus; Socrates, Archimedes.
Trivia
Brazil's World Cup team of 1982 featured a player called Sócrates.
References
Script: [1]