Inverting the Pyramid Quotes

“Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrongheaded pseudointellectualism is far worse.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Many before have hailed the end of history; none have ever been right.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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?”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“In the beginning there was chaos, and football was without form.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand but over hacking; that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F. W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favor. “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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“Head-down charging, certainly, was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general. 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 realize later the loadedness of the term and the connotations of untrustworthiness it carried.)”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“Van Gaal was red faced, dogmatic, and given to crudeness and sudden outbursts of temper. At one point when he was Bayern Munich manager, for instance, he made the point that he was unafraid of his big-name players by dropping his trousers in the dressing room. “The coach wanted to make clear to us that he can leave out any player, it was all the same to him because, as he said, he had the balls,” said the forward Luca Toni. “He demonstrated this literally. I have never experienced anything like it, it was totally crazy. Luckily I didn’t see a lot, because I wasn’t in the front row.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“كان مينوتي شخصية رومانسية بشكل يفوق الوصف. كان نحيلا كقلم رصاص، ومدخنا شرها يتدل شعره على ياقته، أشيب السوالف، وله نظرة محدقة كصقر، بدا كما لو كان تجسيدا للبوهيمية الأرجنتينية، كان جناحأ أيسر ومفكرا، وفيلسوفا، وفنانا. يقول: «أدافع عن فكرة أن الفريق فوق الجميع»
«وأكثر من كونها فكرة فهي .بمثابة التزام، وأكثر من كونها التزاما فهي اعتقاد جلي ينبغي على المدرب أن ينقله للاعبيه للدفاع عن تلك الفكرة»
«لذلك فاهتمامي أننا معشر المدربين لا ندعي لأنفسنا الحق لنزيل من المشهد المرادف لكلمة الابتهاج، لصالح القراءة الفلسفية التي لا يمكن أن يطول بقاؤها، وهي تجنب المخاطرة، وفي كرة القدم هناك مخاطر لأن الطريقة الوحيدة التي يمكنك بها التغلب على المخاطر في أي لعبة يكون عن طريق عدم اللعب»
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313/314ص”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“First International: Scotland 0 England 0, Partick, 30 November 1872”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Various cultures can point to games that involved kicking a ball, but, 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. Rules – in as much as they existed at all – varied from place to place, but 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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“British crowds soon grow tired of patient build-up, but in, for instance, Capello’s first spell at Real Madrid, crowds booed when Fernando Hierro hit long accurate passes for Roberto Carlos to run on to.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“the Scots achieve the same result as the English with less exertion,” wrote Looker-On in 1910 (although he was, of course, a Scot). That first-class football in Scotland is more calculated, more methodical, and consequently slower than English football is something which practically every Scotsman will admit, and I may say . . . that as a rule the Caledonians are very proud of the fact. Country clubs in Scotland play a game very like the average English League game, and in first-class circles in Scotland this is usually referred to with contempt as “the country kick and rush game.” Scotsmen apart from football are as quite fast as Englishmen, but when playing Soccer they seem to play a “thinking game” to a greater extent than the Saxons.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“The debate was long and furious but, after a fifth meeting at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, at 7:00 p.m. on December 8, 1863, carrying the ball by hand was outlawed, and soccer and rugby went their separate ways. The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand but over hacking; that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F. W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favor. “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.” Sports, he appears to have believed, were 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.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“If Matthias Sindelar represented the cerebral central European ideal, it was Arsenal’s Ted Drake – strong, powerful, brave and almost entirely unthinking – who typified the English model.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics