Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

by Jonathan Wilson

  The links between Britain and the Scandinavian game had always been strong. Football was introduced to Sweden through the usual route of British sailors, with a little help from Anglophile Danes. When the Swedish Football Federation (SvFF) decided to appoint their first professional coach after the Second World War, they sought advice from the FA, and appointed George Raynor, who had been reserve team coach at Aldershot. Under his guidance, and advantaged by their wartime neutrality, Sweden won gold at the 1948 London Olympics, finished third at the 1950 World Cup and then reached the final against in 1958. There, they played a typical W-M with man-marking, something that, largely because of the amateur ethos of the SvFF, did not change until the late sixties.

  Professionalism was finally sanctioned in 1967, and, in the aftermath of Sweden’s failure to qualify for the 1970 World Cup, Lars Arnesson, a leading coaching instructor, was appointed to work alongside the national manager, Georg Åby-Ericson. Arnesson envisaged a unified playing style across Swedish football, and decided it should feature a German-style libero. That seemed to be vindicated at the 1974 World Cup, as Sweden finished third in their second-phase group, effectively fifth in the tournament. Although there had not been sufficient time for his idea of uniformity across all levels of coaching to have taken effect, that success did prove that Sweden could be internationally competitive with the system.

  Almost immediately, though, a counter-movement sprang up as Eric Persson, an ageing autocrat who had been chairman-coach of Malmö FF, decided to stand down to allow greater specialisation of management roles at the club. A high-profile banker, Hans Cavalli-Björkman, was appointed as chairman, while for a manager, feeling local coaches were overly conservative, the club turned to a twenty-seven-year-old Englishman called Bobby Houghton.

  Houghton had played at Brighton and Fulham, but decided early to become a coach. He came through Wade’s training course at the FA with top marks, and, in 1971-72, was appointed player-manager at Maidstone United. There he signed as player-coach a former school-mate, Roy Hodgson, who had also shown promise on Wade’s coaching courses.

  Wade was a modernising force, who argued repeatedly against coaching drills that were not directly related to match-situations. His main concern was less individual skills than shape and the distribution of players on the pitch. It was those ideas Houghton instituted at Malmö. When, two years later, he installed Hodgson at Halmstads BK, a division was created between their modern English school and those who favoured the libero. Houghton and Hodgson employed a zonal defence, pressed hard and maintained a high offside line. They counter-attacked, not in the way of the Dutch or Dynamo Kyiv, but with long passes played in behind the opposition defence. According to the Swedish academic Tomas Peterson, ‘they threaded together a number of principles, which could be used in a series of combinations and compositions, and moulded them into an organic totality - an indivisible project about how to play football. Every moment of the match was theorised, and placed as an object-lesson for training-teaching, and was looked at in a totality.’

  That, according to Arnesson, ‘stifles initiative, and turns players into robots’, and, as critics dismissed the English style as ‘dehumanising’, the debate about the relative merits of beauty and success came to Sweden. Peterson compares it to listening to Charlie Parker after Glenn Miller or viewing Picasso after classical landscapes: ‘the change does not just lie in the aesthetic assimilation, ’ he wrote. ‘The actual organisation of art and music happens on a more advanced level.’ Naivety is gone, and there is a second order of complexity.

  Success Houghton and Hodgson certainly had. They won five out of six league titles between them, while Houghton took Malmö to the 1979 European Cup final, where they were narrowly beaten by Clough’s Nottingham Forest. At the 1978 World Cup, though, Sweden finished bottom of a first-phase group that included Austria, Brazil and Spain, a poor showing that was blamed on the corrosive influence of the English style (England themselves, of course, had failed to qualify).

  When Sweden then failed to reach the finals of the 1980 European Championship, the SvFF was moved to act and, on 11 December 1980, formally declared that the English-style would not be played by the national team, nor taught at any national institution. As Houghton and Hodgson left to take up positions at Bristol City, it seemed that the libero may prevail, but their influence was carried on by Sven-Göran Eriksson, who as part of his coaching education had observed Bobby Robson at Ipswich Town and Bob Paisley at Liverpool.

  Eriksson had worked as a PE teacher in Orebro, playing at right-back for BK Karlskoga, a local second division side. There, his thinking on the game was heavily influenced by his player-manager, Tord Grip, who had himself become convinced of the merits of the English style. After his retirement as a player, Grip became manager of Orebro before moving on to Degerfors IF. When, at the age of twenty-eight, Eriksson was badly injured, Grip asked him to join him as assistant coach. Grip was soon appointed as assistant to Georg Ericsson with the national side, leaving Eriksson, in 1976, to take over at Degerfors.

  He twice led them to the playoffs, finally winning promotion to the second division in 1979, at which, to widespread surprise, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. ‘Here was this really shy man, who had been the manager of a little team called Degerfors,’ said the defender Glenn Hysen, ‘and now he was suddenly in charge of the biggest club in the country. We had never heard of him, as a player or as a coach, and it took us a while to get used to him and respect him.’

  Gothenburg lost their first three games under Eriksson, at which he offered to quit. The players, though, encouraged him to stay, their form improved and Gothenburg finished runners-up in the league, winning the cup. That did not, though, make him popular. ‘Eriksson has been at variance with the ideals of the fans since, like most managers, he wants results before anything,’ the journalist Frank Sjoman wrote. ‘Before long, he had introduced more tactical awareness, work-rate and had tightened the old cavalier style. The result has been that while Gothenburg are harder to beat, they are harder to watch.’ Their average gate fell by 3,000 to 13,320.

  Eriksson, like Wade, was obsessed by shape. ‘Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch,’ the midfielder Glenn Schiller said. ‘“You stand here, you go there,” and so on… The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking, there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions.’

  Gothenburg finished second again in 1981, but they settled the debate decisively the following year, winning the league and cup double and, improbably, lifting the Uefa Cup. Although Eriksson soon left for Benfica, the English 4-4-2 was firmly established.

  In Norway, the debate was less ferocious, and more decisively won by the pragmatists. Wade and Hughes had visited repeatedly in the sixties and seventies, and Wade’s The FA Guide to Training and Coaching became central to Norwegian coaching and thinking, as is evident from Understanding of Football, the manual written by Andreas Morisbak, the technical director of the Norwegian football federation, in 1978.

  The Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education 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 IF’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, the most eye-catching of which is that the probability of scoring before the ball goes dead again is higher when it is with the opposing goalkeeper than with your own. This in turn led him to postulate that position of the ball is more important than possession.

  In 1987 Olsen presented a paper at the Science and Football conference in Liverpool. While there, he met George Wilkinson, who was a match analyst for Howard Wilkinson, then the manager of Leeds. Through them he came upon the work of Reep, which to his mind confirmed his own theories about the role of chance in football and the inutility of possession. Olsen met Reep in 1993, and the two maintained a friendship so close that when Olsen was appointed manager of Wimbledon in 1999, Reep, then ninety-five, offered to act as his analyst.

  Olsen became Norway national coach in 1990. He implemented a 4-5-1 formation, often playing a target man - Jostein Flo - wide to attack the back post where he would habitually enjoy a height advantage over the full-back who was supposed to be marking him. Taylor, interestingly, did something similar with Ian Ormondroyd at Aston Villa, and the theory was at least partially behind the use of Emile Heskey wide on the left under Gérard Houllier at Liverpool and for Eriksson’s England. Olsen, nicknamed ‘Drillo’ because of his dribbling skills as a player, demanded balls be pumped into the ‘bakrom’ - ‘the backroom’ - that is, the area behind the opponent’s defensive line, as his own side followed up with attacking runs. The phrase ‘å være best uten ball’ - ‘to be the best at off-the-ball running’ - initially attached to the midfielder Øyvind Leonhardsen, became a signature. Olsen was stunningly successful. Norway had not been to a World Cup since 1938, but he led them to qualification in both 1994 and 1998 and, briefly, to second in Fifa’s world rankings.

  Presumably because of their historical lack of success, Olsen’s philosophy seems to have been more widely accepted in Norway than the long-ball game was elsewhere. As Larson notes, under him Norwegian fans became used to dealing in ‘goal-chances’: a 1-1 draw in a World Cup qualifier at home to Finland in 1997, for instance, did not prompt anguish because it was recognised that they had won 9-2 on chances; they then beat the same opponents away, having won just 7-5 on chances. The issue, though, as it should have been for Reep and Hughes, is the quality of the chances. An open goal from six yards is not the same as a bicycle kick from thirty: not all chances are equal.

  England 1 Norway 1, Wembley, World Cup Qualifier, 14 October 1992

  More significant was the qualifying campaign for the 1994 World Cup. When Norway beat England 2-1 in qualifying for the 1982 World Cup, it was such a shock it sent the radio commentator Børge Lillelien into barely coherent delirium: ‘Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen [we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all]. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher [...] your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!’ When Norway beat England 2-0 in Oslo in 1993, a game that also produced a notorious catchphrase - Taylor’s ‘do I not like that’ - it was entirely predictable.

  The more damaging result, though, had been the 1-1 draw at Wembley, a game England had dominated and led until Kjetil Rekdal, a defensive midfielder, thrashed a 30-yard drive into the top corner fourteen minutes from time. This, for the dice-rollers, was vindication. Did Rekdal really think he would score? Did he send screamers like that flying in on a regular basis? Or was he simply, as Hughes would have urged him to do, buying another ticket for the raffle? Either way, random chance, as Reep no doubt saw it, had its revenge on Taylor.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Coach Who Wasn’t a Horse

  ∆∇ It was AC Milan’s success in Europe in the sixties that introduced the libero as the Italian default and, a quarter of a century later, it was AC Milan’s success in Europe that killed it off. Hamburg’s victory over Juventus in the 1983 European Cup final may have alerted coaches and pundits to the flaws in il giocco all’Italiano, but Juventus’s 1-0 victory over Liverpool amid the horror of Heysel two years later confirmed its predominance.

  There were efforts to move away from the libero and man-marking, but they were isolated. Luis Vincio introduced zonal defence at Napoli in 1974, but the experiment fizzled out, and then the former Milan forward Nils Liedholm employed a form of zonal marking with Roma, a tactic that got his side to the European Cup final in 1984. He moved on to Milan, but it was only after Arrigo Sacchi had succeeded him in 1987 that Italian football was awakened to the possibilities of abandoning man-marking altogether and adopting an integrated system of pressing. ‘Liedholm’s zone wasn’t a real zone,’ Sacchi said. ‘My zone was different. Marking was passed on from player to player as the attacking player moved through different zones. In Liedholm’s system, you started in a zone, but it was really a mixed zone, you still man-marked within your zone.’ It is probable no side has ever played the zonal system so well as Sacchi’s Milan. Within three years, he had led them to two European Cups and yet, when he took charge, he was a virtual unknown and the club appeared to be stagnating.

  Born in Fusignano, a community of 7,000 inhabitants in the province of Ravenna, Sacchi loved football, but he couldn’t play it. He worked as a salesman for his father’s shoe factory and, as it became apparent he wasn’t even good enough for Baracco Luco, his local club, he began coaching them. Not for the last time, he faced a crisis of credibility. ‘I was twenty-six, my goalkeeper was thirty-nine and my centre-forward was thirty-two,’ he said. ‘I had to win them over.’

  Even at that stage, though, for all the doubts he faced, Sacchi had very clear ideas about how the game should be played. ‘As a child I loved the great sides,’ he said. ‘As a small boy, I was in love with Honvéd, then Real Madrid, then Brazil, all the great sides. But it was Holland in the 1970s that really took my breath away. It was a mystery to me. The television was too small; I felt like I need to see the whole pitch fully to understand what they were doing and fully to appreciate it.’

  Those four sides were all great passing sides, teams based around the movement and interaction of their players. Honvéd, Real Madrid and Brazil - with varying degrees of self-consciousness - led the evolution towards system; the Holland of Rinus Michels were one of the two great early exponents of its possibilities. Tellingly, when watching them, the young Sacchi wanted to see not merely the man on the ball, not merely what most would consider the centre of the action, but also the rest of the team; he approached the conclusion Valeriy Lobanovskyi had come to, that the man out of possession is just as important as the man in possession, that football is not about eleven individuals but about the dynamic system made up by those individuals.

  Most simply, though, Sacchi warmed to attacking sides, and that alone was enough to set him apart from the mainstream of a football culture conditioned by the legacy of Gipo Viani, Nereo Rocco and Helenio Herrera. ‘When I started, most of the attention was on the defensive phase,’ Sacchi said. ‘We had a sweeper and man-markers. The attacking phase came down to the intelligence and common sense of the individual and the creativity of the number ten. Italy has a defensive culture, not just in football. For centuries, everybody invaded us.’

  It was that that led Gianni Brera to speak of Italian ‘weakness’, to argue that defensive canniness was the only way they could prosper, an idea reinforced by the crushing defeat of the Second World War, which seemed to expose the unreliability of the militarism that had underlain Vittorio Pozzo’s success in
the Mussolini era. Sacchi, though, came to question such defeatism as he joined his father on business trips to Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands. ‘It opened my mind,’ Sacchi said. ‘Brera used to say that Italian clubs had to focus on defending because of our diets. But I could see that in other sports we would excel and that our success proved that we were not inferior physically. And so I became convinced that the real problem was our mentality, which was lazy and defensive.

  ‘Even when foreign managers came to Italy, they simply adapted to the Italian way of doing things; maybe it was the language, maybe it was opportunism. Even Herrera. When he first arrived, he played attacking football. And then it changed. I remember a game against Rocco’s Padova. Inter dominated. Padova crossed the halfway line three times, scored twice and hit the post. And Herrera was crucified in the media. So what did he do? He started playing with a libero, told [Luis] Suárez to sit deep and hit long balls and started playing counterattacking football. For me, La Grande Inter had great players, but it was a team that had just one objective: winning. But if you want to go down in history you don’t just need to win, you have to entertain.’

  That became an abiding principle, and Sacchi seems very early to have had an eye on posterity, or at least to have had a notion of greatness measured by something more than medals and trophies. ‘Great clubs have had one thing in common throughout history, regardless of era and tactics,’ he said. ‘They owned the pitch and they owned the ball. That means when you have the ball, you dictate play and when you are defending, you control the space.

  ‘Marco van Basten used to ask me why we had to win and also be convincing. A few years ago, France Football made their list of the ten greatest teams in history. My Milan was right up there. World Soccer did the same: my Milan was fourth, but the first three were national teams - Hungary ’54, Brazil ’70 and Holland ’74. And then us. So I took those magazines and told Marco, “This is why you need to win and you need to be convincing.” I didn’t do it because I wanted to write history. I did it because I wanted to give ninety minutes of joy to people. And I wanted that joy to come not from winning, but from being entertained, from witnessing something special. I did this out of passion, not because I wanted to manage Milan or win the European Cup. I was just a guy with ideas and I loved to teach. A good manager is both screenwriter and director. The team has to reflect him.’