Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

In the public schools, thinking tended to be frowned upon as a matter of course. (As late as 1946, the Hungarian comic writer George Mikes could write of how, when he had first arrived in Britain, he had been proud when a woman called him ‘clever’, only to realise later the loadedness of the term and the connotations of untrustworthiness it carried.)

They exploited South America’s natural resources, and in return they gave football.

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.’

The problem is that when two highly energetic systems clash, it can create games like the 2007 Champions league semi-final between liverpool and Chelsea, which, for all its dynamism and physical exertion produced little if anything of beauty and was notoriously described by Valdano as resembling ‘shit on a stick’. That is not exactly good for ratings either.