Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

Equally, designations of formations can at times seem a little arbitrary. Just how far behind the main striker does the second striker have to play for 4-4-2 to become 4-4-1-1? And how advanced do the wide midfielders have to be for that to become a 4-2-3-1? And if the support striker then pulls a little deeper and the wide men advance, is that still 4-2-3-1 or has it become 4-2-1-3 or even 4-3-3? Given full-backs often push high, so their average position places them level with the holding midfielders, why don’t we classify some 4-2-3-1s as 2-4-3-1? The terms essentially are shorthand, often rooted in convention as much as actuality, a useful if slightly crude way of giving a basic idea of a line-up.

If there is one thing that distinguishes the coaches who have had success over a prolonged period – Sir Alex Ferguson, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Bob Paisley, Boris Arkadiev – it is that they have always been able to evolve. Their teams played the game in very different ways, but what they all shared was the clarity of vision successfully to recognise when the time was right to abandon a winning formula and the courage to implement a new one.

Brazilian football is all about flair and improvisation, but it looks yearningly at the defensive organisation of the Italians. Italian football is about cynicism and tactical intelligence, but it admires and fears the physical courage of the English. English football is about tenacity and energy, but it feels it ought to ape the technique of the Brazilians. The history of tactics, it seems, is the history of two interlinked tensions: aesthetics versus results on the one side and technique versus physique on the other.

Interplay among forwards, if it happened at all, was rudimentary and from that sprouted certain fundamentals that would shape the course of early English football: the game was all about dribbling; passing, cooperation and defending were perceived as somehow inferior. Head-down charging, certainly, was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general.

‘If you do away with [hacking],’ he said, ‘you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.’ Sport, he appears to have felt, was about pain, brutality and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win. A joke it may have been, but that his words were part of a serious debate is indicative of the general ethos, even if Blackheath did end up resigning from the association when hacking was eventually outlawed.

The ideal of effortless superiority may have belonged to the early amateurs but it carried over into the professional game. Training, as such, was frowned upon. Players were expected to run, perhaps even practise their sprints, but ball-work was seen as unnecessary, possibly even deleterious. Tottenham’s training schedule for 1904, for instance, shows just two sessions a week with the ball, and they were probably more enlightened than most. Give a player a ball during the week, ran the reasoning, and he would not be so hungry for it on a Saturday: a weak metaphor turned into a point of principle.

The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.’ 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. Those who were there, though, were enraptured as Uruguay maintained their form through the competition, scoring a total of seventeen goals and conceding two in their four games before beating Switzerland 3–0 in the final. The reaction of the French essayist and novelist Henry de Montherlant was typical. ‘A revelation!’ he wrote. ‘Here we have real football. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a schoolboy’s hobby.’ Gabriel Hanot, who would go on to edit L’Équipe but was then coming to the end of a distinguished playing career, offered a less emotional response. Uruguay, he wrote, showed ‘marvellous virtuosity in receiving the ball, controlling it and using it. They created a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective.’ As to the thought that British football might still be superior, Hanot was dismissive: ‘It is like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to f...

Imagination was prized to the extent that certain players were lionised as the inventors of certain skills or tricks: Juan Evaristo was hailed as the inventor of the ‘marianella’ – the volleyed backheel; Pablo Bartolucci of the diving header; and Pedro Calomino of the bicycle-kick, although this last example is disputed. Some say the bicycle-kick was invented in Peru in the late nineteenth century; most seem to credit Ramón Unzaga Asla, a native of Bilbao who emigrated to Chile and first used it in 1914 (hence the use of term chilena throughout Spanish-speaking South America, unless that refers to David Arellano, a Chilean who popularised the technique on a tour of Spain in 1920); while others follow Leônidas, the Brazilian forward of the thirties, in attributing it to Petronilho de Brito. Weirdly, the former Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis also claimed to have invented the bicycle-kick, even though he never played football to any level and was not born until ten years after the first record of Unzaga performing the trick. Who actually invented it is less important in this context than what the arguments show of the value set on imagination around the River Plate estuary in the twenties. The shaming aspect for British football is that the game’s homeland was so ill-disposed to innovation that it is just about conceivable that Ellis was the first man to perform a bicycle-kick on British soil.

The following year Huddersfield completed a hat-trick of league titles, but by then Chapman was gone, enticed south by what he saw as even the greater potential of Arsenal. It was not, it must be said, obvious. Arsenal were struggling to stay up and, in Sir Henry Norris, labouring under an idiosyncratic and domineering chairman. Leslie Knighton, Chapman’s predecessor, had been forbidden to spend more than £1,000 on a player in an age in which £3,000 fees were becoming common, while there was also a ban on bringing in players measuring less than 5ft 8ins. When Knighton defied the height restriction to sign the 5ft Hugh ‘Midget’ Moffatt from Workington in 1923, Norris offloaded the player to Luton Town before he had played a single league game. Knighton was dismissed at the end of the 1924–25 season, with Norris citing poor results, although Knighton claimed it was because the club wanted to avoid paying him a bonus he was due from a benefit match. Chapman, warning that it would take him five years to win anything, took the job only on condition he would face no such restrictions, something to which Norris reluctantly agreed. His first signing was Charlie Buchan. Sunderland valued him at £4,000, which their manager, Bob Kyle, insisted represented value for money as the inside-forward would guarantee twenty goals a season. If he was so confident, Norris replied, then the fee should be structured according to Buchan’s scoring record: a £2,000 initial payment, plus £100 for eac...

For the importance of tactics fully to be realised, the game had to be taken up by a social class that instinctively theorised and deconstructed, that was as comfortable with planning in the abstract as it was with reacting on the field and, crucially, that suffered none of the distrust of intellectualism that was to be found in Britain. That happened in central Europe between the wars. What was demonstrated by the Uruguayans and Argentinians was explained by a – largely Jewish – section of the Austrian and Hungarian bourgeoisie. The modern way of understanding and discussing the game was invented in the coffee houses of Vienna. Football boomed in Austria in the twenties, with the establishment of a two-tier professional league in 1924. That November the Neues Wiener Journal asked, ‘Where else can you see at least 40–50,000 spectators gathering Sunday after Sunday at all the sports stadiums, rain or shine? Where else is a majority of the population so interested in the results of games that in the evening you can hear almost every other person talking about the results of the league matches and the club’s prospects for the coming games?’ The answer was easy: Britain aside, nowhere in Europe. 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...

The impact of football on the wider culture is made clear by the career of the rapid centre-forward Josef Uridil. He came from the suburbs – in the Vienna of the time edgy, working-class districts – and his robust style of play was celebrated as exemplifying the proletarian roots of the club. He was the first football hero of the coffee house, and, in 1922, became the subject of a song by the noted cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi, ‘Heute spielt der Uridil’, which was so successful that it spread his fame even to those with no interest in football. He began advertising a range of products from soap to fruit juice and, by February 1924, he was appearing as a compere at a music hall while at the same time Pflicht und Ehre, a film in which he appeared as himself, was showing in cinemas. It was into that environment that Hugo Meisl’s Wunderteam exploded. The trend through the late twenties was upward and, despite a poor start, Austria narrowly missed out on the inaugural Dr Gerö Cup, a thirty-month league tournament also featuring Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland that began in 1927. After losing three of their opening four games, they hammered Hungary 5–1 and the eventual winners Italy 3–0, finishing runners-up by a point. In the ring, they weren’t satisfied, and agitated for the selection of Matthias Sindelar, a gifted, almost cerebral, forward from Austria Vienna, a club strongly associated with the Jewish bourgeoisie. He was a new style of centre-forward, a pla...

Austria, it must be said, seem to have been in need of him, or at least in need of some outside confirmation of their talents. A fortnight before the game in London, with Sindelar unwell and playing far below his best, Austria had struggled to beat a scratch Vienna side 2–1. Nerves, evidently, were an issue, while there were fitness concerns over Adolf Vogl and Friedrich Gschweidl. Nonetheless, Austria was agog. Crowds gathered in the Heldenplatz to listen to commentary relayed over three loudspeakers, while the Parliamentary Finance Committee adjourned a sitting to follow the game. The Wunderteam did not begin well, and within twenty-six minutes England were two up, both goals coming from the Blackpool forward Jimmy Hampson. Austria pulled one back six minutes into the second half, Sindelar and Anton Schall combining to set up Karl Zischek. Walter Nausch hit a post amid a welter of pressure, but then, as England rallied, an Eric Houghton free-kick deflected off the ducking Schall and past Rudi Hiden in the Austria goal. Sindelar, with consummate control and a cool finish made it 3–2, but almost as soon as he had done so a long-range effort from Sam Crooks put England back in charge. With England baffled by their opponents’ habit of dropping behind the ball when out of possession, Austria continued to dominate, spinning their webs of passes, but their lack of thrust was to cost them. Zischek bundled in a corner with five minutes remaining, but it was too late. They lost 4–...

Chelsea were only eleventh in the Southern Division – a full resumption of the league programme still being several months away – and struggled to a fortuitous 3–3 draw, but their comparative lack of sophistication was clear. Just as Sindelar had tormented England by dropping deep, just as Nandor Hidegkuti would, so Konstantin Beskov bewildered Chelsea by refusing to operate in the area usually occupied by a forward. The most striking aspect of Dinamo’s play, though, was their energy, and the intelligence with which they used it. ‘The Russians were on the move all the time,’ the Chelsea left-back Albert Tennant complained. ‘We could hardly keep up with them.’ Davie Meiklejohn, the former Rangers captain, wrote in the Daily Record: ‘They interchanged positions to the extent of the outside-left running over to the right-wing and vice versa. I have never seen football played like it. It was a Chinese puzzle to try to follow the players in their positions as it was given [sic] in the programme. They simply wandered here and there at will, but the most remarkable feature of it all, they never got in each other’s way.’ As Dinamo went on to thrash Cardiff 10–1, beat Arsenal 4–3 and draw 2–2 at Rangers, appreciation of their methods became ever more effusive. In the Daily Mail, Geoffrey Simpson spoke of them playing ‘a brand of football which, in class, style and effectiveness is way ahead of our own. As for its entertainment value – well, some of those who have been cheering thei...

The anthropologist Robert DaMatta came up with the theory of ‘jeitinho’ – literally, ‘the small way’ – to explain the creativity on which Brazilians so pride themselves, positing that because the laws and codes of behaviour in Brazil, even after the abolition of slavery in 1888, were designed to protect the rich and powerful, individuals had to find imaginative ways of getting round them. ‘Jeitinho’, he wrote in What Makes Brazil, Brazil?, ‘is a personal mediation between the law, the situation in which it should apply and the persons involved in such a way that nothing really changes, apart from a considerable demoralisation of the law itself . . . In the USA, France and England, for example, the rules are either obeyed or do not exist. In these societies, it is well known that there is no desire to establish new laws that are not in line with the common good or with the other laws of society, so creating room for bureaucratic corruption and diminishing the trust in the public institutions . . . So . . . the Americans, the French and the British stop in front of a “Stop” sign, which seems to us a logical and social absurdity.’ Brazilians, by contrast, find a way around such restrictions; they come to rely on themselves rather than on external structures. It is not hard to see the imaginativeness that has historically characterised Brazilian football as a particular expression of that trait. Individuals find their own way to master situations, and that means both high leve...

In a piece in A Gazeta in 1949, Mazzoni wrote that: For the Englishman, football is an athletic exercise; for the Brazilian it’s a game. The Englishman considers a player that dribbles three times in succession is a nuisance; the Brazilian considers him a virtuoso. English football, well played, is like a symphonic orchestra; well played, Brazilian football is like an extremely hot jazz band. English football requires that the ball moves faster than the player; Brazilian football requires that the player be faster than the ball. The English player thinks; the Brazilian improvises.

The most successful radicalism came at Tottenham Hotspur who, in 1912, appointed Peter McWilliam as their manager. He is an oddly neglected figure now but his influence was extraordinarily wide-ranging. He had learned the Scottish passing game from Bob McColl, a signing from Queen’s Park, while operating as a cultured wing-half at Newcastle and he soon imposed its principles on his new side. Perhaps even more significantly, McWilliam came to recognise the importance of youth development to school players in the close passing game and established the Kent league side Northfleet United as effectively a feeder club for Spurs, a move that, if not unprecedented, was extremely rare. ‘We train the players to have only good habits,’ he explained. ‘I always tell them to treat the ball as their best friend and always to pass it with care and consideration. Belting the ball . . . has no place in the Tottenham way of doing things.’ His ideas may have been progressive but in other ways McWilliam was very traditional in approach. ‘Peter McWilliam never minced his words with anyone,’ said the wing-half Ron Burgess. ‘He believed in calling a spade a spade in his broad Scottish brogue, and if a player displeased him, he was not backward in telling him so. I shall never forget the way he called everyone “Boy”, nor the way some of the younger players tried to look the other way as he walked into the dressing-room after we had lost a match which he thought we should have won.’ In his autobiog...

Given he led England to their only success, it seems bizarre that the general assessment of him should be so ambivalent. While there are those who look back on 1966 – as others before them had looked back to Chapman, or to the 2-3-5 – and see it as the blueprint for all football to come, there are those who seem somehow to blame Ramsey for having such devotees, as if it were his fault that, having been successful, others without the wit to evolve should seek to copy him. Even as England won the World Cup, respect for him was grudging. ‘His detractors would point to his dissection of the game as though it were a laboratory animal, arguing that it robbed football of its poetry, reduced it to a science,’ as his biographer Dave Bowler put it. ‘It’s an assessment he would not disagree with, one which he might well take as a compliment. For he saw football as a tactical exercise, a mental as much as a physical sport.’ Not that he cared, but it did not help Ramsey’s reputation that he could be so wilfully cussed.

‘We believe in striking quickly from defence,’ Ramsey said. ‘A team is most vulnerable when it has just failed in attack. If I had to suggest an ideal number of passes, I would say three.’ Three, perhaps not coincidentally, was also Reep’s magic number, although there is no suggestion that the two ever met. ‘Alf’s idea was the less number of passes you take, the less chance there is of making a bad pass,’ Leadbetter said. ‘It’s better to make three, good, simple ones, because if you try to make ten, as sure as anything you’ll make a mess of one of them. You should be in a position to shoot with the third one. You could do that then because of the way teams played.’

Over that summer, Ramsey rethought his strategy: system, he seems to have decided, was more important than personnel. His taciturn nature makes it hard to be sure, but it is not implausible to suggest that the two years that followed represent a carefully controlled evolution towards winning the World Cup.

It is that diminution of space, that compression of the game – pressing, in other words – that marks out modern football from old. It is such a simple idea that once one side had started doing it, and had had success by doing so, it is baffling that everybody did not follow them, and yet the spread of pressing is curiously patchy. It arrived in Germany only in the nineties. When Arrigo Sacchi imposed it on AC Milan in the late eighties, it was hailed as ground-breaking, yet Rinus Michels’s Ajax and Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv – even Graham Taylor’s Watford – had been using it for years. It was central, too, to the success of the Argentinian side Estudiantes de la Plata under Osvaldo Zubeldía in the late sixties. It was invented, though, by a Russian working in Ukraine, by a coach virtually unknown today outside the former Soviet bloc. The game’s evolution, of course, is not linear, and there are others who have had significant roles to play, but if there is a single man who can claim to be the father of modern football, it is Viktor Maslov. He was an unlikely revolutionary, noted at the time less for his vision or any kind of explosive leadership than for his warmth. ‘It always intrigued me that he was known as Grandad,’ said Mykhaylo Koman, probably Dynamo’s best forward of the fifties. ‘The players who played under him could have been his sons, but he was far too young for them to have been his grandsons. It seems the nickname had stuck before he arrived in Kyiv, a...

It remains a common complaint, and the distrust of ‘luxury players’ is still widespread, at least in northern Europe.

Maslov’s solution was exactly that which had allowed Didí such freedom. It was the forgotten innovation, the one devised by Zezé Moreira and used by Brazil for the first time at the World Cup in 1954: zonal marking. It was the theory that had prepared the ground for Brazil’s blossoming in 1958 and 1962, but it didn’t find immediate favour in the USSR. The difficulty with zonal marking is that it requires organisation and understanding between defenders. It is not quite as easy as a defender merely picking up any player in his area. Two forwards could come into his zone, or over-manning in another zone could require him to track a forward outside his zone, which then requires another defender to pick up anybody coming into the zone the original defender has just vacated, and that is not something that can simply be improvised.

Pressing, demanding as it did almost constant movement from the midfielders, required supreme physical fitness, which may explain why it had not emerged earlier. Full-time professionalism was a prerequisite, as was a relatively sophisticated understanding of nutrition and condition. Dynamo had been noted for their physical fitness when they had won the title for the first time under Vyacheslav Solovyov in 1961, but Maslov took things to a new level. ‘He was the first Dynamo coach really to put an emphasis on the physical preparation of players,’ the midfielder Volodymyr Muntyan said. ‘Not Lobanovskyi as is often thought, but Maslov, although he did what felt right, whereas Lobanovskyi was acting on a scientific basis.’ The statistics are telling. When Dynamo won the title in 1961, they conceded twenty-eight goals in thirty games, so they had a history of defensive soundness. The following season, when they were fifth, they let in forty-eight in forty-two, and in 1963, as they slipped to ninth, forty-eight in thirty-eight. Maslov arrived the following season, and twenty-nine goals were conceded in thirty-two games as Dynamo came sixth. They were runners-up in 1965, letting in twenty-two in thirty-two, and it got better in their three championship seasons: seventeen in thirty-six games in 1966, a staggering eleven in thirty-six in 1967 and twenty-five in thirty-eight in 1968. Not surprisingly, the debate over Maslov’s tactics soon abated. In his review of the 1967 season, Ma...

Still, those were rare examples, and Dynamo, regularly changing their approach according to the opposition – something extremely rare at the time – proved adept at dealing with the many stylistic variations presented by the Soviet League. ‘This team has something like two different squads,’ Galinsky wrote. ‘One is fighting, engaging in a frank power struggle if that is offered by the opponent, while the other plays in the “southern” technical, combinational style, at an arrhythmic tempo. But the transformation from one squad to the other happens very simply at Dynamo. One or two changes before the match and sometimes even one substitution in the course of it is enough. They can go straight from the southern style to a much more simple game with runs down the flanks, crosses, shots and long aerial balls.’

And yet every now and again Maslov’s players did, by chance or by instinct, switch positions. ‘The 4-4-2 system introduced by Grandad was only a formal order; in the course of the game there was complete interchangeability,’ Szabo said. ‘For example, any defender could press forward without fear because he knew that a team-mate would cover him if he were unable to return in time. Midfielders and forwards could allow themselves a much wider variety of actions than before. This team played the prototype of Total Football. People think it was developed in Holland, but that is just because in Western Europe they didn’t see Maslov’s Dynamo.’ Maslov was eventually sacked in 1970 as Dynamo slipped to seventh in the table. In 1966, with several members of the squad away at the World Cup, he had managed to maintain Dynamo’s league form because of the emergence of a number of players from the youth team. In 1970, he found no such reserves. ‘Any coach’s fate depends on results,’ said the defender Viktor Matviyenko. ‘After the spring half of the season we were second in the table, and I’m sure Grandad would have kept his job if we’d have maintained that position to the end. He just needed to repeat the experience of 1966 when the outstanding youth players kept the players who had come back from England out of the squad. It was a similar situation in 1970. The Dynamo players who were at the World Cup in Mexico were absent for a month and a half, and played only a couple of games. They ...

Victory in the representative game over England in 1953 seemed only to confirm what everybody in Argentina had suspected: that their form of the game was the best in the world, and that they were the best exponents of it. Who, after all, was leading Real Madrid’s domination of the European Cup but Alfredo Di Stéfano, brought up in the best traditions of la nuestra at River and operating in the best traditions of the conductor? That conclusion was corroborated as Argentina won the Copa América in 1955 and retained it in Peru two years later. That 1957 side bubbled with young talent, the forward-line of Omar Corbatta, Humberto Maschio, Antonio Angelillo, Omar Sívori and Osvaldo Cruz playing with a mischievous verve that earned them the nickname ‘The Angels with Dirty Faces’. They scored eight against Colombia, three against Ecuador, four against Uruguay, six against Chile and three against Brazil. They lost their final game to the hosts, but by then the title was won and Argentina’s isolation emphatically over. They weren’t just back: they were the best side in South America, and possibly the world. By the time of 1958 World Cup, though, Maschio, Angelillo and Sívori had moved to Serie A, and all three ended up playing international football for Italy. Di Stéfano, similarly, had thrown in his lot with Spain. Come Sweden, Argentina were so desperate for forwards that for cover they were forced to turn to Labruna, who was by then approaching his fortieth birthday. A 3–1 defeat...

Spinetto was equally prepared to amend the traditional roles, eschewing the tradition of neat technical moves threaded down the centre of the pitch, using the inside-forwards as creative fulcrums. ‘I demand teams with fibra,’ he said. ‘Defenders who defend, forwards who attack . . . but you know for me what is a team? It’s the sum of players who hand out work and those who get down and look for it. And you have to attack on the wings . . . always on the wings . . . Parading through the middle may be very pretty, but how often do they try and how often do they deliver? Set yourself the task of recording the statistics of the game. Do you know what attacking is for me? To get behind the defenders. A forward must look to get behind his marker and at the same time his team-mate must try to give him the pass to hit the space behind the defender. And that must be done through the wings.’

Unpalatable their methods may have been, but Estudiantes were undeniably effective and, at least at first, that was enough for commentators to overlook their excesses. There was, after all, more to them than thuggishness. ‘They were really well constructed,’ said Delgado, who played against them after his move to Santos. ‘Aside from marking, they knew how to play. Verón was the key player. He gave them a flow. The two central midfielders – Pachamé and Bilardo – were not really talented. Pachamé was really defensive, and Bilardo was not talented but really really smart. Bilardo was the least talented of them all.’ Estudiantes won the Libertadores in 1968, beating racing in a brutal three-game semi-final, and then opening up to beat Palmeiras of Brazil in a final that also went to a third-game play-off. It was during that run that the term ‘antifútbol’ was coined to describe their methods, but El Gráfico remained supportive, although acknowledging that their style was ‘more solid than beautiful’. Later in the year they faced Manchester United in the final of the Intercontinental Cup over two games of predictable violence. In the first leg in Buenos Aires, Denis Law complained of having his hair pulled, George Best was punched in the stomach and Bobby Charlton was left requiring stitches following a foul by Bilardo. Nobby Stiles received a cut eye from a head-butt and then, having been goaded all game, was sent off late on for flicking a V-sign at a linesman. Amid it all, Mar...

The game, as they saw it, was about space and how you controlled it: make the pitch big when you have the ball and it is easy to retain it; make it small when you do not and it becomes far more difficult for the opposition to keep it.

Pressing was the key, but it was probably only in the mid- to late-sixties that it became viable. In an amateur context, pressing is all but impossible. It is hugely demanding physically, requiring almost constant motion and thus supreme levels of fitness. By the time of Michels and Lobanovskyi, the shortages of the war years were over, nutrition was good, and sports science (both legal and illicit) had advanced sufficiently that players could keep running for ninety minutes. This was a stage of football’s development that stemmed as much from enhanced physical possibility as from advances of theory.

It is difficult now, given its modern reputation for liberalism and excess, to imagine how Amsterdam must have been in the years immediately following the war. There has been an undeniable commodification of its bohemian nature, but it is still readily comprehensible that the city should nurture revolutionary ideas. Back in the fifties, it was not. In The Fall, which was published in 1955, Albert Camus writes of how bored he was by Amsterdam, a city where ‘for centuries, pipe smokers have been watching the same rain falling on the same canal’.

Dutch football’s founding father was Jack Reynolds. Although he had once been a second-string player at Manchester City he, like so many influential coaches, pursued a far from stellar playing career, moving from Grimsby Town to Sheffield Wednesday and then Watford. In 1912 Reynolds went to Switzerland to become manager of St Gallen, and he was set to take up a position in Germany when war broke out in 1914. He sought refuge in the Netherlands and was appointed manager of Ajax – for the first time – in 1915. Over the following thirty-two years, he would spend twenty-five years at the club in three separate spells. His first departure was caused by a row with directors; his second by the Second World War, during which he was interned in the Tost detention centre in Upper Silesia, a former lunatic asylum. There he was held with P.G. Wodehouse, who had been picked up in the French resort of le Touquet. ‘An Associated Press man, who came down to interview me later,’ Wodehouse said, ‘wrote in his piece that Tost lunatic Asylum was no Blandings Castle. Well, it wasn’t of course, but still it was roomy. If you had had a cat, and wished to swing it, you could have done so quite easily . . .’

At the centre of that lay Cruyff, even at that stage very obviously the leader of the team. Young, iconoclastic and unselfconscious about ensuring he was paid what he was worth – itself a product of the new classlessness – he became an icon of the burgeoning Dutch youth movement of the time, the equivalent, the former Ajax youth coach Karel Gabler said, of Lennon in Britain. In 1997, in a piece in Hard Gras magazine marking Cruyff’s fiftieth birthday, the journalist Hubert Smeets wrote that: ‘Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.’ Cruyff was not a Provo – his conservatism in such matters as family values was diametrically opposed to their beliefs – and yet he shared with them an awkwardness, an anarchic attitude and a love of provoking the establishment. Most famously, he refused to wear the three Adidas stripes on his shirt during the 1974 World Cup, honouring his contract with Puma by insisting on wearing only two. ‘The Dutch,’ Smeets went on, ‘are at their best when they can combine the system with individual creativity. Johan Cruyff is the main representative of that. He made this country after the war. I think he was the only one who understood the sixties.’

‘We could play sixty minutes of pressing,’ Swart said. ‘I’ve never seen any other club anywhere who could do that.’ Within a few years, Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo certainly could, but there was no one else, which raises the question of how they were able to maintain that intensity for so long. Both Ajax and Dynamo invested significantly in the science of preparation, working on nutrition and training schema, but both also looked to pharmaceutical means. In an interview he gave to the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1973, Hulshoff spoke of having been given drugs ahead of a match against Real Madrid six years earlier: ‘We took the pills in combination with what we always called chocolate sprinkles,’ he said. ‘What it was I don’t know, but you felt as strong as iron and suffered no breathlessness. One disadvantage was you lost all saliva, so after thirty-five minutes of the game I was retching.’ Salo Müller, who was Ajax’s masseur between 1959 and 1972, admitted as much in his autobiography, published in 2006, and revealed that Hulshoff and Johnny Rep had both come to him with concerns over pills given them by John Rollink, the club doctor. Over time, Müller collected pills Rollink had distributed from other sportsmen and had them analysed. ‘The results were not a surprise to me,’ he wrote. ‘They ranged from painkillers, muscle relaxants and tranquilising pills to amphetamine capsules.’ Even before joining Ajax, Rollink had form. The first drugs scandal to hit Dutch sport came at the 1...

The following year, by winning the European Cup again, Ajax became the first side since real Madrid to complete a hat-trick of titles. Appropriately, having hammered Bayern Munich 4–0 in the first leg of the quarter-final, it was real Madrid whom Ajax beat in the semi. The aggregate score of 3–1 barely does justice to their superiority, and the tie is better remembered for Mühren’s keepieups in the second leg at the Bernabeu, a moment of arrogance and joie de vivre that encapsulated the ethos of Kovács’s Ajax. ‘I knew I was going to give the ball to Krol, but I needed some time until he reached me,’ Mühren recalls. ‘So I juggled until he arrived. You can’t plan to do something like that. You don’t think about that. You just do it. It was the moment when Ajax and real Madrid changed positions. Before then it was always the big real Madrid and the little Ajax. When they saw me doing that, the balance changed. The real Madrid players were looking. They nearly applauded. The stadium was standing up. It was the moment Ajax took over.’

Winner claims that that Ajax side was ‘probably as close as anyone has ever come to running a major football team like a workers’ cooperative’, although there is no doubt that there was one major figure within that. ‘Cruyff was a big influence,’ Haarms said, ‘especially as he grew older and talked more and more about tactics with other players.’ Kovács was close to Cruyff, but he wasn’t entirely cowed by him. On one occasion, it is said, when Cruyff complained of pains in his knee before a game, Kovács, knowing his captain’s reputation for loving money, took a 1,000guilder note and rubbed the afflicted area. With a smile Cruyff agreed he was feeling better, and played without any ill effect. He was not, though, tough enough. Where ruthlessness lay beneath Paisley’s shabby cardigan, it seems probable that Kovács was too nice, lacking the steel to rein in Cruyff as he took on an increasing prominence in that second season. rep accuses Kovács of ‘not having the guts’ to promote him in place of Swaart until Cruyff gave his approbation, and the players in time came to resent Cruyff’s influence. Ajax

Valeriy Lobanovskyi was a twenty-two-year-old winger when, in 1961, Dynamo Kyiv won the Soviet Supreme title for the first time. They had come so close so often that their fans had begun to despair of it ever happening, and the joy at Dynamo’s victory was heightened by relief. Amid the jubilation, though, Lobanovskyi wasn’t happy, as he made clear on what was supposed to be a celebratory visit to the Science and research Institute of the Construction Industry with his team-mates Oleh Bazylevych and Vladimir Levchenko. ‘Yes, we have won the league,’ Volodymyr Sabaldyr, a Kyivan scientist and long-time amateur footballer, remembers him saying in the face of excited congratulations. ‘But so what? Sometimes we played badly. We just got more points than other teams who played worse than us. I can’t accept your praise as there are no grounds for it.’ Sabaldyr asked him how it felt to have achieved something that had been a dream for Kyivans for decades. ‘A realised dream ceases to be a dream,’ Lobanovskyi replied. ‘What is your dream as a scientist? Your degree? Your doctorate? Your post-doctoral thesis?’ ‘Maybe,’ Sabaldyr replied. ‘But a real scientist dreams about making a contribution to scientific development, about leaving his mark on it.’ ‘And there you have your answer.’

Lobanovskyi arrived at Dynamo as part of a team of four. He had specific responsibility for modelling playing systems; Zelentsov was in charge of the individual preparation of players; Bazylevich, having been prised from Shakhtar, took care of the actual coaching; while Mykhaylo Oshemkov dealt with what was known as ‘informational support’ – that is, the collation of statistical data from games. Everything was meticulously planned, with the team’s preparation divided into three levels. Players were to have individual technical coaching so as to equip them better to fulfil the tasks Lobanovskyi set them during a game; specific tactics and tasks for each player were drawn up according to the opponents; and a strategy was devised for a competition as a whole, placing each game in context by acknowledging that it is impossible for a side to maintain maximal levels over a protracted period. Dynamo, accordingly, would regularly lose late-season games with the title already won, and habitually killed games away from home, looking only for a draw while attempting to conserve their energy. ‘When we are talking about tactical evolution,’ Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov wrote in their book, The Methodological Basis of the Development of Training Models, ‘the first thing we have in mind is to strive for new courses of action that will not allow the opponent to adapt to our style of play. If an opponent has adjusted himself to our style of play and found a counter-play, then we need to find ...

Oleksandr Khapsalys, who played for Dynamo in the late seventies and early eighties, recalled how Lobanovskyi would simply shout down any perceived criticism. ‘It was better not to joke with Lobanovskyi,’ he said. ‘If he gave an instruction, and the player said: “But I think . . .” Lobanovskyi would look at him and scream: “Don’t think! I do the thinking for you. Play!”’ With Dynamo, he was hugely successful, winning eight Soviet titles, six Soviet Cups, five Ukrainian titles, three Ukrainian Cups and two European Cup-Winners’ Cups, and defining Ukrainian football. In his various stints with the USSR, though, Lobanovskyi was less successful. Twice in 1975 – against Turkey and the Republic of Ireland – his demand for ‘a star-team’ rather than ‘a team of stars’ led him to field a national team made up entirely of Dynamo players, and the squad he took to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal was similarly Dynamo dominated.

Whether the moon landing was the supreme technological achievement of the twentieth century, whether Brazil’s 1970 World Cup success was the supreme sporting achievement, is debatable, but what is sure is that no other event in either sphere had such an immediacy of impact, such a universal symbolic importance. The reason for that is simple: television. Instantly, to a watching audience of millions across the world, Neil Armstrong’s one small step and Carlos Alberto’s thunderous strike became icons, destined from the moment of their happening to be reproduced again and again in a multiplicity of forms. These were the first two great global events of the telecultural age. As if to seal the symbolic link, the second moon landing happened on the same day that Pelé converted a penalty for Santos against Vasco da Gama to reach 1,000 career goals. It helped that Brazil played in vibrant yellow with shorts of cobalt blue: they were perfect for the new age of colour television. Under the iridescent heat of the Mexican sun, it seemed as though this was the future: bright and brilliant. Brazil kept just one clean sheet in the tournament, but it didn’t matter. Fallibility was part of their charm: there was a naivety about them that gave them a universal appeal – except, perhaps, in Argentina. ‘Those last minutes,’ Hugh McIlvanney wrote in his match report of the final, ‘contained a distillation of their football, its beauty and élan and almost undiluted joy. Other teams thrill us and...

After Dino Sani and Otto Glória had both turned down the job, Mário Zagallo, the shuttling left-winger of 1958 and 1962, was appointed as his replacement. He had been Saldanha’s protégé at Botafogo, but, more importantly, he was seen as a safe pair of hands, unencumbered by any dangerously left-wing political beliefs. When the military government installed Captain Cláudio Coutinho to work as his fitness coach – it was he who went on the fact-finding mission to NASA – and added Admiral Jerônimo Bastos to the touring party, he raised no fuss. He did not, though, pick Dario. In fact, Zagallo was faced with only two significant selection decisions. By the time he arrived, Pelé said, ‘the team was more or less chosen but there were a few changes to be made’. Saldanha had based his squad around Santos and Botafogo, working on the same logic as Vittorio Pozzo and Gusztáv Sebes: that players who play together on a regular basis will have a greater mutual understanding than those who don’t. Zagallo, though, brought in Roberto Rivellino from Corinthians and confirmed the importance of Cruzeiro’s Tostão. When critics suggested they were too similar to Gérson and Pelé, Zagallo replied, ‘What this team needs is great players, players who are intelligent. Let’s go with that and see where it takes us.’ It took them to heights that perhaps remain unsurpassed. ‘Our team was the best,’ said Gérson. ‘Those who saw it, saw it. Those who didn’t will never see it again.’ The final against Italy...

As so often, progress began with defeat. Chris Lawler’s goal in a 2–1 loss in the first leg in the Marakana had given Liverpool hope of overcoming Crvena Zvezda of Belgrade in the second leg and reaching the quarter-final of the 1973–74 European Cup, but at Anfield, Zvezda, under the guidance of Miljan Miljanić, played a brilliant counter-attacking game and struck twice on the break through Vojin Lazarević and Slobodan Janković to complete a 4–2 aggregate win. The following day, 7 November 1973, in a cramped, windowless room just off the corridor leading to the Anfield dressing room, six men set in motion the stylistic shift that led English clubs to dominate Europe in the late seventies and early eighties. The boot-room, as history would know it, was not an obvious place to plot a revolution. It was small and shabbily carpeted, hung on one side with hooks for players’ boots and decorated with team photographs and topless calendars. Joe Fagan, the first-team coach under Bill Shankly, had begun the tradition of post-game discussions there, stocking the room with crates of beer supplied by the chairman of Guinness Exports, whose works team he had once run in nearby Runcorn. Initially he met only with Bob Paisley, in those days the team’s physiotherapist, but gradually other members of the club’s backroom staff began to drop in. ‘You got a more wide-ranging discussion in the boot-room than the boardroom,’ Paisley said. ‘What went on was kept within those four walls. There was...

The days of the old-fashioned stopper centre-half, the boot-room decided, were over: it was necessary to have defenders who could play. Larry Lloyd, exactly the kind of central defender they had declared extinct (although he would later enjoy an unlikely renaissance at Nottingham Forest), then ruptured a hamstring, and Phil Thompson, originally a midfielder, was pushed back to partner Emlyn Hughes at the heart of the defence. ‘The Europeans showed that building from the back is the only way to play,’ Shankly explained. ‘It started in Europe and we adapted it into our game at Liverpool where our system had always been a collective one. But when Phil Thompson came in to partner Hughes it became more fluid and perhaps not as easy to identify. This set the pattern which was followed by Thompson and [Alan] Hansen in later years. ‘We realised at Liverpool that you can’t score a goal every time you get the ball. And we learned this from Europe, from the Latin people. When they play the ball from the back they play in little groups. The pattern of the opposition changes as they change. This leaves room for players like ray Kennedy and Terry McDermott, who both played for Liverpool after I left, to sneak in for the final pass. So it’s cat and mouse for a while waiting for the opening to appear before the final ball is let loose. It’s simple and it’s effective . . . It’s also taken the spectators time to adjust to it.’ Shankly was no great tactician – he tended to leave that side of...

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 would be thousands queuing to watch primary-school football.

In The Winning Formula, Hughes uses the evidence of 109 matches between 1966 and 1986 in which 202 goals were scored. That, it might be noted, is not a huge sample, particularly not for somebody basing on it the claim that ‘world soccer has been moving in the wrong strategic direction for the better part of thirty years’. It is also tempting to ponder the significance of the fact that while Hughes rails against a World Cup that produced 2.5 goals per game, the matches in his sample produced only 1.85. But still, the results are intriguing, and they have, presumably to head off those – like Taylor – who argue that direct football is ineffective at the very highest level, been filtered to include only successful sides: Liverpool, the England Under-16 and Under-21 teams, and World Cup or European Championship matches involving Argentina, Brazil, England, Holland, Italy and West Germany. Of those 202 goals, fifty-three came from moves of no received passes, twenty-nine from one pass, thirty-five from two passes and twenty-six from three passes. In total, 87 per cent of the goals came from moves of five passes or fewer, while fewer than 3 per cent came from moves of ten or more passes (if Reep’s statistic that 91.5 per cent of all moves consist of three passes or fewer is correct, of course, that is still no endorsement of direct football). Then there is the issue of how many of those goals scored from three passes or fewer are the result of breakdowns brought about by longer m...

The Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education (NUSPE) was established in 1968 and in 1981 a lecturer there, Egil Olsen, who had won sixteen caps for Norway, dissected Wade’s model and presented a revised version. He argued that Wade had made possession too much of a priority, almost an end in itself, whereas he believed attaining it should be the aim of defensive play and the application of it to produce goals the aim of attacking play. That may seem obvious, but the slight semantic clarification was to have radical effects, as Olsen extended the thought. He felt that in Wade’s model too little attention was paid to penetration, that it was more important to pass the opposition longitudinally than to retain possession. His work came just as the Swedish debate between system and beauty spread to Norway, stimulated largely by Vålerenga’s title success in 1983 under Gunder Bengtsson, a Swede who had become convinced by Houghton and Hodgson’s methods. He was followed at Vålerenga and FK Lyn by another Swede, 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 – and Grip then became national manager. Olsen and his colleagues at NUSPE had begun statistically analysing games, the results of which led Olsen to a series of conclusions outlined in his Masters thesis. He discovered that the probability of scoring before the ball goes dead again is higher when ...

The match in which the shortcomings of il gioco all’Italiana were exposed came less than a year after it had beaten the Brazilian game, as Juventus lost the 1983 European Cup final to Hamburg. Three of Juventus’s back-four had played for Italy against Brazil in Barcelona, with Claudio Gentile and Cabrini as the full-backs and Scirea as the sweeper, the only difference being the presence of Sergio Brio as the stopper central defender. Hamburg played with two forwards: a figurehead in Horst Hrubesch, with the Dane Lars Bastrup usually playing off him to the left. That suited Juventus, because it meant he could be marked by Gentile, while Cabrini would be left free from defensive concerns to attack down the left. Realising that, the Hamburg coach Ernst Happel switched Bastrup to the right, putting him up against Cabrini. That was something almost unheard of in Italian football. Their asymmetric system worked because everybody was equally asymmetric: the marking roles were just as specific as they had been in the W-M. Giovanni Trapattoni decided to stick with the man-to-man system, and moved Gentile across to the left to mark Bastrup. That, of course, left a hole on the right, which Marco Tardelli was supposed to drop back and fill. In practice, though, Tardelli was both neutered as an attacking force and failed adequately to cover the gap, through which Felix Magath ran to score the only goal of the game.

France, under Michel Hidalgo, and blessed with a side almost as talented as Brazil’s, shifted shape according to the opposition, with Michel Platini playing sometimes as a centre-forward, sometimes in the hole and sometimes more as a regista. He was an exceptional player and Hidalgo’s use of him was probably unique, but what is significant is that he asked the playmaker to adjust to the demands of the system, rather than building the side around him. In that, it should be said, he was helped by the quality of the players around him: Alain Giresse and Jean Tigana were world-class playmakers in their own right and Hidalgo’s task was simply to find the right balance between creativity and structure; he could reasonably expect chances to arrive.

Blažević was born in 1937 in the Bosnian town of Travnik. He was a Yugoslav youth champion in skiing and then became a right-winger for Dinamo Zagreb, Sarajevo, Rijeka, and the Swiss side FC Sion, where a knee injury brought his career to a premature end. He stayed on in Switzerland, working as a coach and supplementing his income by taking a job in a factory that made watches. One day in 1968, shortly after he’d been appointed coach of Vevey, an old woman found him sweeping out the dressing-room. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked. ‘It’s not your job. You’re our head coach.’ ‘Yes, I’m the head coach,’ Blažević replied, ‘and one day I will become national coach of Switzerland.’ The old woman laughed. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘And one day, I will become Miss Switzerland.’ Blažević, after spells at Sion and Lausanne, was right; the old woman wasn’t. He returned to Yugoslavia with Rijeka in 1979 and a season later took over a Dinamo Zagreb in decline. Blažević rejuvenated the squad and introduced an attacking style based around starting the game at a furious pace. They finished fifth and then, as Blažević adopted a ‘lucky’ white silk scarf, Dinamo won their first league title in twenty-four years. The following year, Dinamo lost out to Partizan in a three-horse race for the title, but lifted the Yugoslav Cup. The move to 3-5-2 began, Blažević said, as soon as he arrived in Zagreb. ‘To make a decision on which formation and tactics to play, you have to take three factors i...

The back three also emerged from northern Europe in the form of Denmark, an international side who captured the imagination as the Dutch had a decade earlier. As Rob Smyth and Lars Eriksen wrote in an extraordinary paean to that Danish side in the Guardian, they were ‘both derivative and thrillingly futuristic. Although they had the Total Football hallmarks – spatial awareness, ceaseless movement and imagination of passing – they were like a fast-forwarded version of that Holland side. No team has ever had such a collection of jet-heeled dribblers.’ And like the Dutch of the seventies, there was something appealing about the character of the Danes, perhaps simply because theirs was the first great Danish side; they had no critics bleating on about past glories and no real expectations. Rather there was a sense of disbelief about their progress from players and fans alike, a gratitude that they were being allowed to join in with the rest of the world and an incredulity that they kept on winning. There was no pressure, because there was nothing to live up to. ‘They were unique, refreshing and life-affirming,’ Smyth and Eriksen wrote. ‘And even though time has not been kind to their array of tomboy mops, matted thatches and cock-rock mullets, they were seriously cool in a languorous, quintessentially Scandinavian way.’ After reaching the semi-final of Euro 84, the coach Sepp Piontek allowed them a night out with a 5 a.m. curfew; he brought discipline, but not too much. They w...