Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements Epigraph Chapter One - From Genesis to the Pyramid Chapter Two - The Waltz and the Tango Chapter Three - The Third Back Chapter Four - How Fascism Destroyed the Coffee House Chapter Five - Organised Disorder Chapter Six - The Hungarian Connection Chapter Seven - Harnesssing the Carnival Chapter Eight - The English Pragmatism (1) Chapter Nine - The Birth of the New Chapter Ten - Catenaccio Chapter Eleven - After the Angels Chapter Twelve - Total Football Chapter Thirteen - Science and Sincerity Chapter Fourteen - Fly Me to the Moon Chapter Fifteen - The English Pragmatism (2) Chapter Sixteen - The Coach Who Wasn’t a Horse Chapter Seventeen - The Turning World Epilogue Bibliography Index Jonathan Wilson is the football correspondent for the Financial Times, and writes for the Sunday Telegraph He is a columnist for guardian.co.uk and the Japanese magazine World Soccer King, and his work has appeared in the Independent, Independent on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, Scotland on Sunday, the Sunday Herald, FourFourTwo, Champions and When Saturday Comes Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football, was Jonathan Wilson’s critically acclaimed first book Inverting the Pyramid was shortlisted for the William Hill Book of the Year and won the British Sports Books Awards Football Book of the Year Inverting the Pyramid JONATHAN WILSON Orion www.orionbooks.co.uk AN ORION EBOOK First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Orion This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books Copyright © Jonathan Wilson 2008 The moral right of Jonathan Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library eISBN : 978 4091 1111 This ebook produced by Jouve, France The Orion Publishing Group Ltd Orion House Upper Saint Martin’s Lane London WC2H 9EA An Hachette UK Company www.orionbooks.co.uk Acknowledgements In writing this, I have been humbled by just how generous so many people have been with their time and thoughts This is a long list, but that should not diminish how vital a role each of the people included in it played In Ukraine, Hungary and Russia, my thanks to Taras Hordiyenko, Sándor Laczkó and Vladimir Soldatkin, who were as enlightening and thorough as ever Thanks also to Aliaksiy Zyl and his coterie of Dinamo fans in Minsk for their advice (and thanks to Chris Fraser for introducing us Dima: the polonium night at the Emirates will never be forgotten) In Argentina, my thanks to Marcela Mora y Araujo for introducing me to her vast circle of friends, to Rodrigo Orihuela, Féderico Mayol, Neil Clack and Klaus Gallo for their help in setting up interviews, translating, research and ferrying me around, and to Araceli Alemán for opening up her vast library of material, the regular disquisitions on the superiority of Juan Román Riquelme to, well, everything, and, of course, the extended walking tour In Brazil, my thanks to Ivan Soter, Roberto Assaf, Paulo Émilio and Alberto Helena Junior for sharing their time and learning so freely, to Cassiano Gobbet, Robert Shaw and Jordana Alvarez dos Santos for their efforts in research, translation and logistics, and also to Aidan Hamilton and Alex Bellos, for sketching out the background and putting me in touch with experts on the ground Thanks to Gabriele Marcotti for all his assistance with the Italian sections, for being such an informed and robust sounding-board, but most particularly for allowing me finally to participate in one of those restaurant debates in which bowls of hummus, tabouleh and tzatziki become the Udinese defence I’d still like my time-share on the quiz trophy, though Thanks to Philippe Auclair for his help in France, to Christoph Biermann, Raphael Honigstein and Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger for their assistance with all matters German, to Simon Kuper and Auke Kok for their words of wisdom on Dutch football, and to Sid Lowe and Guillem Balagué for their advice on Spain Thanks also to Brian Glanville for his unfailing generosity of spirit and for putting me right on a number of historical matters Thanks to Richard McBrearty of the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden and Peter Horne at the National Football Museum in Preston for sharing their expertise in the origins of football, and to the staff of the British Library at St Pancras, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale Thanks also, for their various help in reading over sections of the manuscript, translation, and suggesting avenues of research to: Jon Adams, David Barber, Maurício Ribeiro Barros, Hanspeter Born, Duncan Castles, Marcus Christenson, James Copnall, Graham Curry, Sorin Dumitrescu, Dave Farrar, Igor Goldes, Luke Gosset, Gavin Hamilton, Georg Heitz, Paul Howarth, Emil Ianchev, Maciej Iwanski, Richard Jolly, John Keith, Thomas Knellwolf, Jim Lawton, Andy Lyons, Ben Lyttleton, Dan Magnowski, Emma McAllister, Kevin McCarra, Rachel Nicholson, Vladimir Novak, Gunnar Persson, Andy Rose, Paul Rowan, Ljiljana Ruzić, Milena Ruzić, Dominic Sandbrook, John Schumacher, Hugh Sleight, Rob Smyth, Graham Spiers, György Szepesi, Eric Weil, Duncan White, Axel Vartanyan, Shinobu Yamanaka and Bruno Ziauddin Thanks to my agent, David Luxton, and my editor at Orion, Ian Preece, for their unflagging support and helpful interventions, and to the copy-editor, Chris Hawkes, for his diligence And thanks, finally, to Ian Hawkey for spending so much of the Cup of Nations sharing his expertise in matters of punctuation, and to Network Rail for the points failure that led to the long wait just north of Durham during which the flaw in Reep’s theory became apparent to me felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas* Virgil, Georgics, no 2, l 490 (* Fortunate is he who can understand the causes of things.) Prologue A tapas bar in the Bairro Alto in Lisbon, the evening after England beat Switzerland 3-0 in Euro 2004 The rioja had been flowing, and a multi-national group of journalists was discussing whether Sven-Göran Eriksson had been right to stick with an orthodox 4-4-2, or if, as it had been suggested he would, he should have switched to a midfield diamond Had player-power, a late-night delegation of midfielders, forced the unexpected reversion to the flat four in midfield? ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ an English colleague protested ‘They’re the same players The formation isn’t important It’s not worth writing about.’ There was a splutter of indignation As I raised a drunken finger to jab home my belief that people like him shouldn’t be allowed to watch football, let alone talk about it, an Argentinian, probably wisely, pulled my arm down ‘The formation is the only thing that’s important,’ she said ‘It’s not worth writing about anything else.’ 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 is a failing, and it is something that frustrates me, but this is not a polemic about the failure of English football Apart from anything else, unless we are making comparisons with the inter-war era, I’m not convinced that English football is failing Sven-Göran Eriksson was derided by the end, but only Alf Ramsey had previously guided England to the quarter-finals of three successive international tournaments Whether Steve McClaren’s failure to get England through a Euro 2008 qualifying group that was far tougher than the xenophobes imagined represents a blip or the beginning of a prolonged slide only history will tell, but it seems perverse to start arranging the wake when England would have qualified had Steven Gerrard converted a simple chance four minutes after half-time in Moscow Look at Uruguay, look at Austria: that is decline Look at Scotland, still punching heroically above their weight despite the restrictions imposed by a population of only five million Look, most of all, at Hungary, the team who, in November 1953, rang the death knell for English dreams of superiority By the time Ferenc Puskás, the greatest player of that most glorious of teams, died in November 2006, Hungary had slumped so far that they were struggling to remain in the top 100 of the Fifa world rankings That is decline Nonetheless, for English football, the 6-3 defeat to Hungary at Wembley stands as the watershed It was England’s first defeat at home to continental opposition, and, more than that, the manner in which they were outplayed annihilated the idea that England still ruled the world ‘The story of British football and the foreign challenge,’ wrote Brian Glanville in Soccer Nemesis, his reaction to that defeat, ‘is the story of a vast superiority, sacrificed through stupidity, short-sightedness, and wanton insularity It is a story of shamefully wasted talent, extraordinary complacency and infinite selfdeception.’ And so it was And yet, thirteen years later, England became world champions The vast superiority may have been squandered, but England were evidently still among the elite In the past half century, I’m not sure that much has changed Yes, perhaps we have a tendency to get carried away before major tournaments, which makes a quarter-final exit sting rather more than it probably ought, but England remain one of the eight or ten sides who have a realistic chance of winning a World Cup or European Championship (freakish champions like Denmark or Greece notwithstanding) The question then is why that opportunity has not been taken Perhaps a more coherent structure of youth coaching, an increased focus on technique and tactical discipline, limits on the number of foreign players in the Premiership, snapping players out of their complacent bubbles, or any of the other hundred panaceas that have been suggested, would improve England’s chances, but success is a nebulous quarry Luck retains its place in football, and success can never be guaranteed, particularly not over the six- or seven-game span of an international tournament A theory has grown up that winning the World Cup in 1966 was the worst thing that could have happened to English football Rob Steen, in The Mavericks, and David Downing in his books on England’s rivalries with Argentina and Germany have argued that that success set England back because it established deep in the English footballing consciousness the notion that the functionality of Alf Ramsey’s side was the only way to achieve success I don’t fundamentally disagree with either although the trait pre-dates Ramsey - but it seems to me that the real problem is not so much the way Ramsey’s England played as the fact that, in the minds of generations of fans and coaches in England, it laid out a ‘right’ way of playing Just because something was correct in a particular circumstance, with particular players and at a particular stage of football’s development, does not mean it will always be effective If England in 1966 had tried to play like Brazilians, they would have ended up like Brazil: kicked out of the tournament in the group stage by physically more aggressive opponents in fact they would have been worse off, for they had few, if any, players with the technical attributes of the Brazilians If there is one thing that distinguishes the coaches who have had success over a prolonged period - Sir Alex Ferguson, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Bill Shankly, Boris Arkadiev - it is that they have always been able to evolve Their teams played the game in very different ways, but what they all shared was the clarity of vision to successfully recognise when the time was right to abandon a winning formula and the courage to implement a new one What I want to make clear is that I don’t believe there is a ‘correct’ way to play Yes, from an emotional and aesthetic point of view, I warm more to the passing of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal than to the pragmatism of José Mourinho’s Chelsea, but that is a personal preference; it is not to say one is right and one is wrong I am well aware, equally, that compromises have to be made between theory and practice On a theoretical level, I respond to Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv or the AC Milan of Fabio Capello Yet on the pitch, when at university I had for two years the chance to influence the Pachamé Padhila, José Bastos Pagliuca, Gianluca Paine, Terry Paisley, Bob Palmer, Carlton Palotás, Pétar Panucci, Cristian Parlour, Ray Parreira, Carlos Albert Parry, E.H Pasculli, Pedro Passarella, Daniel Passlack, Hans Patyi, Mihály Pays, David Pearce, Stuart Pedernera, Adolfo Pedrinho Peiro, Joaquin Pekerman, José Pelé Pellegrino, Manuel Peracio Percudani, José Perdigão, Paulo Pereira, Costa Pereira, Luís Pérez, Julio Perfumo, Roberto Péron, Isabel Péron, Juan Perrotta, Simone Persson, Eric Peters, Martin Peterson, Tomas Petit, Emmanuel Petrić, Mladen Petrone, Pedro Pfister, Otto Phillips, Kevin Phillips, Ted Piazza, Wilson Picchi, Armando Piccinini, Alberto Pimenta, Adhemar Pinheiro Pinto, João Piola, Silvio Pirilo, Silvio Pirlo, Andrea Pivatelli, Gino Pizarro, David Pizzuti, Juan José Plánicka, Frantisek Platini, Michel Platt, David Platzer, Peter playmaker Pluzhnik, Grigori Poletti, Alberto Polgar, Alfred Polkhovskyi, Serhiy Pollard, Richard ponta da lanća Pontoni, René Poole, William Leslie Povlsen, Fleming Pozdyanakov, Nikolai Pozzo, Vittorio Prati, Pierino pressing Presta, Juan Price, John Primus, Mandy Prini, Maurilio Prinsep, E.M.F Prokopenko, Alexander Pronk, Tonny Prosinečki, Robert Puc, Antonín Puskás, Ferenc Quarentinha Quinn, Niall Quiroga, Ramón Radcliffe, Charles Raffo, Norberto Ramos Delgado, José Ramsey, Alf Rapaić, Milan Rappan, Karl Raţ, Razvan Rats, Vasyl Rattín, Antonio Rẳl Rawlinson, J.F.P Rayner, George Rebrov, Serhiy Redondo, Fernando Reep, Charles Reilly, Lawrie Reinaldo Rekdal, Kjetil Renny-Tailyour, Henry Rensenbrink, Rob Rep, Johnny Reuter, Stefan Revie, Don Reynolds, Jack Rijkaard, Frank Riquelme, Juan Roman Riva, Gigi Rivellino, Roberto Rivera, Gianni Robben, Arjen Roberts, Billy Roberts, Charlie Roberts, Herbie Robinson, Paul Robinson, Richard Robson, Bobby Rocco, Nereo Rodrigues, Nélson Rolff, Wolfgang Rollink, John Roma, Antonio Romantsev, Oleg Romario Romeu Ronaldhino Ronaldo, Cristiano Rooney, Wayne Roose, Leigh Richmond Rossi, Daniele De Rossi, Néstor Rossi, Paolo Rostron, Wilf Rowe, Arthur Roxburgh, Andy Ruggeri, Oscar Rummenigge, Karl-Heinz Rush, Ian Russo, Miguel Sabaldyr, Volodymyr Sábato, Ernesto Sacchi, Arrigo Saldana, João Samuel, Martin Sánchez, Hugo Santana, Telê Santos, Ernesto Sárosi, György Sarti, Giuliano Sarychev, Vasily Sauer, Gunnar Saunders, Tom Savićević, Dejan Saviola, Javier Schall, Anton Schiaffino, Juan Schiavo, Angelo Schiller, Glenn Scholes, Paul Schön, Helmut Schulz, Willi Schumacher Schüster, Bernd Scirea, Gaetano Scott, Laurie Sebes, Gusztav Seedorf, Clarence Segato, Armando Semichastny, Mikhail Seone, Manuel Serebryanykov, Viktor Serginho Sergio, Paulo Sesta, Schasti Sevidov, Alexander Shackleton, Len Shankly, Bill Sharp, Graeme Shchehotskyi, Konstantyn Shcherbytskyi, Volodomyr Shearer, Alan Sheringham, Teddy Shevchenko, Andriy Shevchenko, Volodymyr Shylovskyi, Viktor Siffling, Otto ‘Silas Marner’ Silva, Mauro Silveira, Martin Simeone, Diego Šimić, Dario Simon, Jacky Simonyan, Nikita Simpson, Geoffrey Simpson, Jimmy Simpson, Ronnie Sindelar, Matthias Sinton, Andy Sívori, Omar Sjoman, Frank Skoglund, Nacka Slater, Bill Smeets, Hubert Smistik, Josef Smith, Billy Smith, Gordon Smith, H.N Smith, Robert Smith, Stratton Smith, Tommy Sobotka, Jírí Socrates Soetekouw, Frits Solari, Jorge Soldo, Zvonimir Solich, Fleitas Soloviov, Sergei Solovyov, Vyacheslav Solti, Dezso Song, Rigobert Sorín, Juan Pablo Soter, Ivan Spalletti, Luciano Spencer, Charlie Spinelli rna, Darijo Stábile, Guillermo Stanić, Mario Stanković, Dejan Starostin, Alexander Starostin, Andrei Starostin, Nikolai Steen, Rob Stéfano, Alfredo Di Stein, Jock Stepanov, Vladimir Stephenson, Clem Stephenson, Roy Stiles, Nobby Štimac, Igor Stoichkov, Hristo Stojković, Dagan Stone, Steve Streltsov, Eduard Stubbins, Albert Suárez, Aguirre Suárez, Luis Suurbier, Wim Svoboda, Frantisek Swaart, Sjaak Swinbourne, Roy Szabo, Josef Szepan, Fritz Szepesi, György Szilágyi, Gyula Szoltysik, Zygfryd Szymanski, Stefan Taccola, Giuliano Taddei Tagnin, Carlo Tápia, Carlos Tarantini, Alberto Tardelli, Marco Tassotti, Mauro Taylor, Graham Tejera, Eusebio Telch, Roberto Temple, Derek Tennant, Albert Tesanić, Branko Tevez, Carlos Thompson, E.A.C Thompson, Peter Thompson, Phil Thon, Olaf Thring, Reverend Edward Thring, J.C Tiago Tigana, Carlos Timoshenko, Semyon Tita Tomaszewski, Jan Tommasi, Damiano Toninho Torberg, Friedrich Töröcsik, András Torres, Carlos Alberto Torres, Fernando Toshack, John Tostão Total Football Totti, Francesco Touré, Yaya Trapattoni, Giovanni Trobok, Goran Tudor, Igor Turnbull, Eddie Turyanchyk, Vasyl Ulbrich, Egon Unzaga Asla, Ramón Urgan, Adolf Uridil, Josef Vadas, Grgy Valcareggi, Ferruccio Valdano, Jorge Valentim, Max Varallo, Francisco Varela, Obdulio Vargas, Walter Vartanyan, Axel Vashchuk, Vyacheslav Vasilijević, Goran Vasović, Velibor Vavá Venables, Terry Ventura, Jorge Vergeenko, Mikhail Vernon, Tom Verón, Juan Ramón Verón, Juan Sebastian verrou Vialli, Gianluca Viani, Gipo Vidić, Nemanja Viera, Ondino Vieira, Patrick Vilfort, Kim Villa, David Vincio, Luis Vincombe, John Vinkenoog, Simon Viollet, Dennis Virdis, Pietro Paolo Vogl, Adolf Vogts, Berti Voinov, Yuri Volante Volga Clip Völler, Rudi Voroshilov, Viktor Waddell, Willie Waddle, Chris Wade, Allen Waldir Peres Walker, Des Walker, Reverend Spencer Wallace, Willie Walls, Frederick Walters, Sonny Weah, George Webb, Neil Welfare, Harry Wenger, Arsène Whittaker, Spen Whittaker, Tom Widdowson, Sam Wieser, Gustav Wilkinson, George Wilkinson, Howard Williams, Richard Williams, William Carlos Williamson, Johnny Wilshaw, Dennis Wilson, Peter Wilson, Ray Wilson, Tom Winner David Winterbottom, Walter Wise, Dennis Wodehouse, P.G Wolstenholme, Kenneth Woods, Chris Worthington, Frank Wright, Billy Wright, Ian Wright, Mark Yácono, Norberto Yakushin, Mikhail Yanets, Grigory Yashin, Lev Yevtushenko, Vadym Young, Percy M Yuran, Serhiy Yustrich Zaccheroni, Alberto Zagallo, Mario Zakariás, József Zamora, Ricardo Zanetti, Javier Zappa, Mario Zelentsov, Anatoliy Zenden, Boudewijn Zico Zidane, Zinédine Ziege, Christian Zikán, Zdenek Zischek, Karl Zito Zizinho Zoff, Dino Zokora, Didier Zola, Gianfranco zonal marking Zubeldía, Osvaldo Zubizarreta, Andoni ... 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. .. said, was rather different to modern conceptions of the art In his history of the FA Cup, Geoffrey Green, the late football correspondent of The Times, quotes an unnamed writer of the 1870s: ‘A... onward course.’ In other words, even a decade after the establishment of the FA, one of the founding fathers of the game felt it necessary to explain to others that if one of their team-mates were