Many metaphors have been employed in the epic debate between determinists and indeterminists, compatibilists and incompatibilists, Calvinists and Arminians. Years ago I began conceiving of these two pictures of volition and responsibility as analogous to the difference between a game of foosball and football. If you imagine that the foosmen are conscious, foosball is an apt picture of the compatibilist picture. The foosmen are controlled by forces beyond them — “their feet can’t touch the ground” —, but their desires pass through them and move them. Like foosball, football is also constrained by rules, boundaries, and conditions beyond the players’ control. But, by contrast, within those bounds, the players have the freedom to dig in their cleats, to dribble or pass, to turn right or left. Most important to the comparison, I take it as revelatory that God chose to win the “game” by descending and playing amongst us. The incarnation, and God’s direct appeal to us as fellow sons of men, makes so much more sense if we are not controlled from outside. In honor of the 2026 World Cup, for your consideration, “Foosball or Football“.