Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

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.

for all the claims of Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Caribbean, Mexico, China or Japan to be the home of football, the modern sport has its roots in the mob game of medieval Britain.

the game essentially involved two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch. It was violent, unruly and anarchic, and it was repeatedly outlawed.

There are very good politico-economic reasons for the coincidence, but there is also a neat symbolism in the fact that, after football had been used to shore up the Empire, Britain’s ultimate decline as an imperial power coincided with the erosion of the footballing superiority of the home nations.

It wasn’t even until the 1870s that the goalkeeper became a recognised and universally accepted position; not until 1909 that he began to wear a different coloured shirt to the rest of his team; and not until 1912 that he was restricted to handling the ball only in his own box

The third of the instructional columns in the Sheffield Telegraph and Star Sports Special was written in 1907 by the Woolwich Arsenal centre-half Percy Sands and asked ‘Is Football becoming More Scientific?’ In it he reflected that such was the level of thought devoted to how the game should be played that ‘one hears of the adoption of various combinations such as the open game, the short passing game, the triangular movement, the kick and rush method, the individual method, and so on’.

They ran their businesses, but they also established newspapers, hospitals, schools and sporting clubs. They exploited South America’s natural resources, and in return they gave football.

It was in central Europe and South America, where attitudes to the British were more sceptical, that football began to evolve.

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.

This is a fundamental: it could be said that the whole history of tactics describes the struggle to achieve the best possible balance of defensive solidity with attacking fluidity.

The most obvious immediate effect of the change in the offside law was that, as forwards had more room in which to move, the game became stretched and short passing began to give way to longer balls.

The W-formation evidently spread rapidly – astonishingly so, given the absence of television coverage. If teams as diverse as Southampton and Raith were using it by early October, it seems to have been a nationwide phenomenon within seven or eight games of the new season.

Today they have to make their contribution to a system.’ And so, finally, resolved to winning, football recognised the value of tactics, the need for individuality to be harnessed within the framework of a team.

Football in central Europe was an almost entirely urban phenomenon, centred around Vienna, Budapest and Prague, and it was in those cities that coffee-house culture was at its strongest.

Other fascist countries followed a similar path. Football had begun in Spain in much the same way it had begun everywhere: it was introduced by the British.

British involvement in mining also took the game to Bilbao and it was there that it really took hold. The first purpose-built football stadium in Spain was the San Mamés, built in Bilbao in 1913, and that became the cradle of the Spanish game.

With the Anschluss came the end of the central European Jewish intelligentsia, the end of the spirit of the coffee house and the death of Sindelar.

The football boom came late to the USSR and, perhaps because of that, it rapidly took on a radical aspect, uninhibited by historically rooted notions of the ‘right’ way of doing things.

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.

the squad for the 1958 World Cup was the best-prepared in Brazil’s history. Officials visited twenty-five different locations in Sweden before selecting a training base, and then had all twenty-five female staff at that hotel replaced with men to minimise potential distractions. They even campaigned, without success, to have a local nudist camp closed for the duration of the tournament.

The dribbling technique of Garrincha or Stanley Matthews doesn’t exist in today’s game, not because the skills have been lost, but because no side would ever give them the three or four yards of acceleration room they needed before their feints became effective.

The Moscow press was appalled, one newspaper printing a photograph of four Dynamo players converging on an opponent with the ball with the caption: ‘We don’t need this kind of football.’

there were times Herrera appeared monstrously heartless. When Guarneri’s father died the night before a match against AC Milan, for instance, Herrera kept the news from him until after the game. In 1969, when he had left Inter and become coach of Roma, the forward Giulano Taccola died under Herrera’s care.

Spinetto’s principal legacy, though, was not what he did for Vélez but the foundations he laid for anti-fútbol, the sense he left that football was as much about motivation and toughness as it was about skill. To call him a tactical revolutionary is perhaps too strong, for his ideas look basic by comparison with what was going on in Europe or in Brazil at the same time, and yet the very fact he thought so deeply about tactics and the style of the game made him a radical in the Argentina of the late forties.

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.

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.