The History Side
Hello and welcome back to my second blog. Last time we talked about the most common formations and the different tactics that were implented throughout football history. Today I am going to continue this quartet of blogs by writing about the evolution of football and the evolution of its tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century and the further transformation it may go through.
The roots of football as we know it today, stem back to the 3rd century BC. Back then the sport didn’t have any systems or sets of rules and everyone played by their own rules, deciding them as they went, and as it pleased the players. The earliest known example of this is ‘Tsu’Chu’ and the ‘Harapatsum’. The Tsu’Chu was a Chinese game where the goal was to kick the ball into a 30-40 cm wide opening between two sticks of wood. This game as we can see is very similar to football as we know it, nevertheless, it had a few big differences, which all stemmed from the lack of rules in the Chinese version. The Harapatsum took its inspiration from the Chinese game as they had the same rules, the big difference was that the Greek believed more in the technical ability of what was then a friendly game, therefore playing with a smaller ball as they believed it would evolve the technical ability of the player.
As the games of China and Greece spread throughout the world, every hundred years they began to look more and more like the modern version of football. In 1315 right before the ‘Hundred years war’, as both England and France were expanding their armies, the game of football was introduced to England. The English took the game as a chance to let off their steam and therefore every time people played football, injuries would happen. The king, in contrast to his citizens, believed that people shouldn’t try to kill each other, and therefore he banned football. Nevertheless, it ensued, so he decided to create a punishment - prison.
Fast forward to the start of the 19th century and we get to the beginning of the beautiful game. In Jonathan Wilson’s book “Inverting the Pyramid”, he describes the rise of football as sudden and unexpected. It began when a journalist named David Winner, stated that the decline of Britain, could be fixed by the introduction of team sports. Many different Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge picked up on this suggestion and decided to start teaching football and evolving the sport that was once a crime.
In our modern history, football has become one of the lesser aggressive sports and is far less aggressive than rugby for example. Despite this, they originated from one sport. The colleges that created football thought that it was a ‘manly’ sport and therefore would allow England’s male citizens to increase their manhood through the brittleness that was associated with the sport back then. Yet there were some people who disagreed with this approach and the more the 19th century progressed the more the idea of playing the sport for its beauty and not for its animalistic qualities. In 1848 a meeting in Cambridge between different universities was made to establish a coherent set of rules, but that was not achieved and football and rugby went their separate ways, with football creating an association called the FA and therefore following its rules. Nonetheless, it still took football many more years to create its first real tournaments, as the FA cup was only created in 1872.
The Tactical Side
After football separated from rugby and they went their different ways, many questions started to arise on how football should be played, and therefore the answers from different countries to this question were very different. Back then at the start of the FA and football as a whole, tactics and formations as we know them didn’t exist, only styles of play. England started off with the idea of dribbling. This idea encompassed the belief of individuality, as the best player on the team was supposed to dribble the entire team with his teammates protecting him. This belief was also accompanied by an FA rule which said that the ball could not be passed forward, only to the side or backward. Of course, as we know that rule was later changed to the offside rule.
Scotland went with a different approach and developed the idea of passing. This idea first introduced football as a team sport in terms of tactics and therefore impressed the Scottish audience and then the audience all around the world. Through the development of passing, the development of tactics began and this is why some say that Scotland contributed to the beginning of football more than any other country.
During the start of the tactical evolution, all emphasis was placed on attack and therefore the different formations also applied to this principle. For example, the starting go-to formation for everyone before 1888 was the 1-1-8. It relied on the strikers not giving away the ball and moving in a parallel line, not to stop the opponent from scoring, but to outscore the opponent.
[1-1-8 by Author]
In 1888, the first competitive league was created in England, combining English and Scottish clubs to create the ultimate first British league. This is where the first pyramid formation came into play or as it is otherwise called “The Inverted Pyramid”. It was the 2-3-5. William Sudell’s Preston North End, which was created less than a decade before the start of the league, went unbeaten. Everyone who watched football back then was mesmerized and shocked by their style of play. They were the first team who tried to move away from the vicious physicality of English teams and try to balance every role on the pitch. They were the first team to use the inverted pyramid.
The inverted pyramid relies on the 3 midfielders being versatile and being able to play in any position on the pitch, even center-backs. The 2 center backs are tied to their positions and act as no-nonsense center backs, which means that they act only in the center and they don’t play with the ball but just defend the other team from scoring. The 2 midfielders out of 3, that are on the two sides act as versatile midfielders which means that they go out during the attack and push forward to help the attackers, but the center midfielder stays back to act as a Defensive Midfielder. This allows there to be a good attacking and defensive balance - something which other teams couldn’t achieve.
[2-3-5 by Author]
During the defensive phase, the 3 midfielders would drop down and 2 of the attackers would drop wide and down, which will lead the formation to become a 4-1-2-3. This tactic was really revolutionary and served as a beginning for our modern structures and formations. This formation was dominant until 1925. This formation had to change as the FA introduced a new offside rule which restricted the 2-3-5.
[4-1-2-3 by Author]
Throughout the years, after the ‘Inverted Pyramid’, tactics progressed at an exponential rate. During these years, many different managers like Viktor Maslov, Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola more recently and many other coaches changed football. Nevertheless, although each one of them had different ideas and systems I’m putting all of them into one category because everything in football was moving in one direction - mobilizing the attack. From the 19th century to the 21st, there has been growth in pressing and defending from the front. Over the years, a phrase became popular - “Attack is the best defense”. This phrase fully represents the idea of pressing and defending as a team which led us to mobilize tactics. Despite this, unlike in the 19th-century football development was led by international countries. Due to trade and the industrial revolution, British people went to different continents and with them brought the game of football. And we are lucky that they did, as, formations like the 4-2-3-1 or the 4-3-3, the most exciting formations, came from the Spanish and the Dutch wanting to portray football as a game of skill, beauty, and goals.
Conclusion
During this blog, we explored the history and the evolution of football. We can see that many different cultures contributed their individual ideas to football, therefore making it a truly unique sport, whose tactics are based on years and years of history. But as we explore its history, a question arises - ‘What is next?’. Well, right now football tactics are at a standstill as what could have been created and revolutionized, was already completed. This is why right now managers are reusing tactics and adding their twist to them. Nevertheless, what could be the future is micro-tactics. Micro-tactics is the idea of evolving tactics based on giving instructions to certain players from a team and then making the tactics versatile so that it is harder for the opponent to understand your game.
All in all, there could be a lot of new evolutions but what’s most important is that it all happens for the good of football. Thank you
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