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August 22 - September 19, 2023
The first match in Austria took place on 15 November 1894, between the Vienna Cricket Club and gardeners from Baron Rothschild’s estate,
The greatest teacher of the Scottish game, though, was an Englishman of Irish descent: Jimmy Hogan. Born and raised in Burnley in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, in his teens he toyed with the idea of entering the priesthood, but he turned to football and went on to become the most influential coach there has ever been.
Chess with a ball? Charles Alcock would scarcely have recognised it, although he would presumably have appreciated the goalscoring ability of the centre-forward Pedro Petrone, even if he did refuse to head the ball for fear of disturbing his heavily brilliantined hair.
What was significant was not merely that Chapman had a clear conception of how football should be played, but that he was in a position to implement that vision. He was – at least in Britain – the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over the running of the club, from signings to selection to tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public-address system to keep the crowd entertained before the game and at half-time.
But where in Britain the discussion of games took place in the pub, in Austria it took place in the coffee house. In Britain football had begun as a pastime of the public schools, but by the 1930s it had become a resolutely working-class sport; in central Europe, it had followed a more complex arc, introduced by the Anglophile upper middle classes, rapidly adopted by the working classes, and then, although the majority of the players remained working class, seized upon by intellectuals.
Germany were semi-finalists in Italy in 1934, which encouraged thoughts that they might win gold on home soil at the 1936 Olympics. Instead they lost, humiliatingly, 2–0 to Norway in what, unfortunately for Nerz, was the only football match Hitler ever attended.
When Soviet myth-making was at its height, it was said that the Dinamo sports club, which was controlled by the Ministry of the Interior and ran teams across the USSR, chose blue and white as their colours to represent water and air, the two elements without which man could not live. The truth is rather that Charnock was from Blackburn, and dressed his team in the same colours as the team he supported: Blackburn Rovers.
It says much about the general technical standard of English football at the time that Wolstenholme was enraptured by Puskás nonchalantly performing half-a-dozen keepie-ups while he waited to kick off. If that sends a shudder of embarrassment down the modern English spine, it is nothing to what Frank Coles wrote in the Daily Telegraph on the morning of the game. ‘Hungary’s superb ball-jugglers,’ he asserted with a touching faith in the enduring powers of English pluck, ‘can be checked by firm tackling.’ Little wonder Glanville spoke of it as a defeat that ‘gave eyes to the blind’.
Ferencváros, meanwhile, were regarded as right-wing and nationalistic, the team of Budapest’s ethnic German population. When football was nationalised by the Communists in 1949, Ferencváros were deliberately run down, being placed in the control not of the army or the secret police but a catering union. Hungarian football has never recovered.
Selected for the 1924 Olympics in Paris, Guttmann was appalled by Hungary’s inadequate preparations. There were more officials than players in the squad, and the party accordingly was based in a hotel near Montmartre: ideal for the officials’ late-night socialising, less good for players who needed to sleep. In protest Guttmann led a number of his team-mates on a rat-catching expedition through the hotel, and then tied their prey by the tails to the door handles of the officials’ rooms. He never played for his country again.
He was never, though, quite the same after Benfica, and neither was the club. The story has developed that he cursed them, vowing they would never win another European trophy until he was paid what he was due; nonsense, of course, but Benfica have been in eight European finals since, and lost them all.
In his autobiography, Burgess recalled playing in a reserve game at Coventry, dashing forward from right-half and being battered in ‘a hard and gruelling game’. As he took his kit off in the dressing-room afterwards, McWilliam looked his bruised body up and down. ‘Serves ye right, boy!’ he said. ‘Perrrhaps that’ll teach ye not to hang on to the ba’!’ Unsympathetic McWilliam may have been, but Burgess concluded he was right.
In Stockholm in 1989, though, England simply sat back, defended deep, and relied on courage under fire: what Simon Kuper has called the urge to recreate Dunkirk at every opportunity.
The Daily Mail captured the sense of ecstasy as it ran the headline: ‘Hail Wolves, “Champions of the World”.’ It was a proclamation that so riled Gabriel Hanot he was inspired to institute the European Cup to disprove it.
As far as some players were concerned, Hackett went on, ‘the triple lion badge of England could be three old tabby cats’. His reaction was typical: England may have been outwitted by disciplined opponents sticking to an intelligent plan, but the assumption was – as it so often had been, and would continue to be – that they hadn’t tried hard enough, that they hadn’t shown enough pride in the shirt. Brian James in the Daily Mail, while no less angry, came rather closer to a realistic assessment. ‘If you do not give a damn about the game, and are prepared to leave entertainment to music halls you
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Nonetheless, as time went by, Ramsey’s pragmatism became increasingly wearing. McIlvanney spoke for many when he noted caustically, after the 3–1 defeat at home to West Germany in 1972, that ‘cautious, joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. When it brings defeat there can only be one reaction.’
Inter, exhausted, could do no more than launch long balls aimlessly forward, and they succumbed with five minutes remaining. Again a full-back was instrumental, Gemmell laying the ball on for Murdoch, whose mishit shot was diverted past Sarti by Chalmers. Celtic became the first non-Latin side to lift the European Cup, and Inter were finished.
Celtic had proved attacking football had a future, and it wasn’t just Shankly who was grateful for that.
He was unequivocal about his methods. ‘How do you beat a team that has a great forward?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘Very simple. If you don’t want somebody to eat, you have to stop the food coming out of the kitchen. I don’t send somebody to mark the waiter; I have to worry about the chef.’
A win apiece meant a play-off in Montevideo, and this time Celtic decided to fight back. ‘The time for politeness is over,’ said Jock Stein. ‘We can be hard if necessary and we will not stand the shocking conduct of Racing.’ The game was even more brutal than the first. It was settled by another Cárdenas goal, but the result hardly mattered amid the violence. Celtic had four men sent off and Racing two, but it could easily have been many more. Celtic fined their players, Racing bought theirs new cars: victory was everything.
There are countless anecdotes about Spinetto’s toughness. He would motivate his players at half-time by asking what their mothers would think of them if they lost.
‘They used psychology in the worst possible way,’ said Presta. ‘There was a player from Independiente who had accidentally killed a friend on a hunting trip – when he played Estudiantes, all game long they chanted “murderer” at him. Or there was a goalkeeper for Racing who had a really close relationship with his mother. She didn’t want him to marry, but eventually he did, and six months later his mother died. Bilardo walked up to him and said, “Congratulations, finally you’ve killed your mother.”’
It has even been alleged that Bilardo, who was a qualified doctor, drew on his contacts in the medical profession. The Racing midfielder Roberto Perfumo, for instance, was sent off for kicking Bilardo in the stomach, supposedly because Bilardo had taunted him about a cyst his wife had recently had removed.
Managers of opposing teams willing to offer information and opinions about players were invited, and even Elton John visited during his time as Watford chairman. When offered a drink, Anfield legend has it, he asked for a pink gin; he was given a beer.
Clough is one of only four managers to have won the English league title with two different sides (Tom Watson with Sunderland and Liverpool, Herbert Chapman with Huddersfield Town and Arsenal and Kenny Dalglish with Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers being the others),
He revelled in the attention, polishing his one-liners and delivering them with devastating timing, always inflating his own greatness. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ he once said, ‘but then I wasn’t on that particular job.’
Noting that the average number of goals per game in World Cup matches fell from 5.4 per game in 1954 to 2.5 per game in 1986, Hughes passes almost immediately to the conclusion that ‘football is not as good as it was’. That a man whose authority came from the supposed application of reason and logic should be allowed to get away with such a leap is staggering. Discerning the quality of football is necessarily subjective and, anyway, there are bad 4–3 thrillers (excitement and quality are not synonyms) just as there are superb goalless draws. If goals alone were a mark of excellence, there
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Olle Nordin – ‘Marching Olle’ as he was mocked after the 1990 World Cup, at which his highly regarded Sweden lost all three games by the same scoreline: 1–2, 1–2, 1–2
He discovered that the probability of scoring before the ball goes dead again is higher when it is with the opposing goalkeeper than with your own.
His predecessor had been Kurt Nielsen, a likeable and cheery man with extraordinary mutton-chops but not a coach to drag Danish football into modernity. The documentary Og Det Var Danmark showed him before a game being asked if he had any particular tactical plans. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Tactically it’s still about scoring goals.’ Under him, the players had hung around at a Copenhagen nightclub that became known as ‘the clubhouse’. As Smyth and Eriksen said, ‘Denmark were an international team in name, and a pub team in nature.’
even England adopted the libero, almost as a last resort after they began the competition with a 1–1 draw against the Republic of Ireland so bad that La Gazzetta dello Sport reported it under the headline ‘No football, please, we’re British’.
‘Marco van Basten used to ask me why we had to win and also be convincing. A few years ago, France Football made their list of the ten greatest teams in history. My Milan was right up there. World Soccer did the same: my Milan was fourth, but the first three were national teams – Hungary ’54, Brazil ’70 and Holland ’74. And then us. So I took those magazines and told Marco, “This is why you need to win and you need to be convincing.” I didn’t do it because I wanted to write history. I did it because I wanted to give ninety minutes of joy to people. And I wanted that joy to come not from
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Sacchi admitted he could barely believe he was there, but responded tartly to those who suggested somebody who had never been a professional footballer – Berlusconi, who had played amateur football to a reasonable level, was probably a better player – could never succeed as a coach. ‘A jockey,’ he said, ‘doesn’t have to have been born a horse.’
The sides returned the following day. Van Basten and Dragan Stojković exchanged goals, but the game was overshadowed by the horrific injury suffered by Roberto Donadoni in a collision with Goran Vasilijević. As Donadoni lay unconscious on the pitch, his life was saved only by the quick thinking of the Zvezda physio, who broke his jaw to create a passage for oxygen to reach his lungs.
Van Gaal was red-faced, dogmatic, and given to crudeness and sudden outbursts of temper. At one point when he was Bayern Munich manager, for instance, he made the point that he was unafraid of his big-name players by dropping his trousers in the dressing-room. ‘The coach wanted to make clear to us that he can leave out any player, it was all the same to him because, as he said, he had the balls,’ said the forward Luca Toni. ‘He demonstrated this literally. I have never experienced anything like it, it was totally crazy. Luckily I didn’t see a lot, because I wasn’t in the front row.’
‘There’s a right-wing football and a left-wing football,’ said César Luis Menotti. ‘Right-wing football wants to suggest that life is struggle. It demands sacrifices. We have to become of steel and win by any method… obey and function, that’s what those with power want from the players. That’s how they create retards, useful idiots that go with the system.’
The result was one of the most notorious fouls in history as Goikoetxea clattered into Maradona’s standing leg, snapping the lateral malleolus in his left ankle and rupturing the ligaments. Maradona was carried off; Goikoetxea wasn’t even sent off, although he subsequently received an eighteen-game ban that was reduced to six on appeal. Athletic showed no remorse: Clemente suggested after the game that Maradona had exaggerated the seriousness of the injury, while Goikoetxea, who insisted there’d been no intent, kept the boot with which he’d committed the foul in a glass case in his living
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point behind Athletic. There was still one game to come, though, the Copa del Rey final, in which the acrimony boiled over. Clemente and Maradona traded barbs before the game and the atmosphere at a damp Bernabéu was soured further when Athletic fans whistled during a minute’s silence for Barça fans killed in a coach crash on the way to Madrid. There were numerous bad fouls from both sides while Schuster lobbed missiles that had been thrown at him back into the crowd. Endika scored early for Athletic, chesting the ball down and finishing neatly, and having gone ahead, Athletic sat back,
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The essence of Guardiola’s philosophy was simple. ‘In the world of football there is only one secret: I’ve got the ball or I haven’t,’ he said. ‘Barcelona have opted for having the ball although it is legitimate for others not to want it. And when we haven’t got the ball we have to get it back because we need it.’
At a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, Carlos Alberto Parreira, who led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup, spoke of the possibilities of a 4-6-0. ‘You’d have four defenders at the back although even they’d be allowed to run forward,’ Andy Roxburgh, the former Uefa technical director, explained. ‘Then six players in midfield, all of whom could rotate, attack and defend. But you’d need to have six Decos in midfield – he doesn’t just attack, he runs, tackles, covers all over the pitch. You find him playing at right-back sometimes.’
But the more reactive he became, the more Mourinho stepped outside the mainstream of modern football. And the older he got, the harder he seemed to find it to forge those ferociously strong bonds with players that had once been his hallmark. When he departed Real Madrid in 2013 and Manchester United in 2018, there were no squad members tearfully recalling his ability to see the future. He had become the past.
