Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

‘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.’