Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

Inverting the Pyramid has been part of that movement. It didn’t, as some have suggested, cause it; rather it caught a wave that was rising anyway and perhaps helped provide a historical context for those with an interest in analysing what they were watching. English football can still feel luddite at times but its consumption is growing in sophistication every day. In fact, it may be that in some the interest in tactics has gone too far and become an obsession.

And there, in a moment, was laid bare the prime deficiency of the English game. Football is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment. (I should, perhaps, make clear that by ‘tactics’ I mean a combination of formation and style: one 4-4-2 can be as different from another as Steve Stone from Ronaldinho.) The Argentinian was, I hope, exaggerating for effect, for heart, soul, effort, desire, strength, power, speed, passion and skill all play their parts, but, for all that, there is also a theoretical dimension, and, as in other disciplines, the English have, on the whole, proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract.

That tension – between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d’arte and futebol de resultados – is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport, but also to life: to win, or to play the game well? It is hard to think of any significant actions that are not in some way a negotiation between the two extremes of pragmatism and idealism.

‘In football,’ he said, ‘the tactics adopted must always be in relation to the ability of the men on the side to carry them out successfully. Because of this, it is hard to lay down hard and fast rules.’

Newcastle’s Bob Hewison, who occupied a number of roles on the left side of the pitch, termed it ‘the three cornered triangular, or sixth forward play,’ which suggests its attacking nature. ‘The critics,’ he said, ‘regard it as the essence of pure football, the science and art of the pastime.’ It was comparatively rare, though, largely because it was so difficult to get right. ‘Too much importance cannot be attached to individuality, brains, adaptability, speed,’ Hewison wrote. ‘The demands are so great that only the real artist is able to play it. But there is no reason why there should not be a cultivation of the art, since it is the pure football.’

‘Like the tango,’ wrote the Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano, ‘football blossomed in the slums.’ Different conditions necessitate a different style. Just as the game of the cloisters differed from the game of the playing fields in English public schools, so, in the tight, uneven, restricted spaces of the poorer areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, other skills developed and a new style was born: ‘a home-grown way of playing football,’ as Galeano put it, ‘like the home-grown way of dancing which was being invented in the milonga clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile, and football players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.’

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. So grew up the theory of la garra charrúa – ‘charrúa’ relating to the indigenous Charrúa Indians of Uruguay and ‘garra’ meaning literally ‘claw’ or, more idiomatically, ‘guts’ or ‘fighting spirit’. It was that, supposedly, that gave a nation with a population of only three million the determination to win two World Cups, and it was also that which gave a tenuous legitimacy to the brutality of later Uruguayan teams.

In both Argentina and Uruguay the story is told of a player skipping through the opposition to score a goal of outrageous quality, and then erasing his footsteps in the dust as he returned to his own half so that no one should ever copy his trick.

What it comes to is that when circumstances are favourable, the professionals are far more capable than may be believed, and it seems that, if we would have better football, we must find some way of minimising the importance of winning and the value of points . . .’ Winning and losing in football, though, is not about morality any more than it is in life.

Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.

One of the most intriguing, and undeniable, properties of great athletic performance lies in the impossibility of regulating certain central skills by overt mental deliberation: the required action simply doesn’t grant sufficient time for the sequential processing of conscious decisions.’

Disenchanted with England, Hogan had moved to Switzerland in 1921, spending three years with Young Boys of Berne and then Lausanne, before returning to Budapest with MTK, in their new guise as FC Hungaria. He then moved to Germany, working as an adviser to the football federation, coaching SC Dresden – where one of his pupils was Helmut Schön, who was assistant to Sepp Herberger when West Germany won the World Cup in 1954, and led them to victory himself in 1974 – and generally evangelising for a technically adept style of football that would ensure English football was soon overhauled by Europe. He was initially greeted with suspicion and, when various local coaches complained about his lack of fluency in German, the German FA asked Hogan to prove himself by delivering a lecture without a translator. It began badly, as Hogan inadvertently presented himself as ‘a professor of languages, not a master of football’, and got steadily worse. Attempting to stress the importance of the mind in football, he told his bemused audience that it was a game not merely of the body, but also of the committee. Faced with laughter and derision, Hogan called for a ten-minute intermission and left the stage. When he returned, he was wearing his Bolton Wanderers kit. He removed his boots and his socks and, telling his audience that three-quarters of German players could not kick the ball properly, smashed a right-footed shot barefoot into a wooden panel fifteen yards away. As the ball bounced ...

The following day, a Dutch newspaper, comparing Spain’s play to the ferocity of the Spanish troops that had sacked Antwerp in 1576, coined the term ‘la furia’. Spain happily adopted it.