Jonathan Wilson

In INVERTING THE PYRAMID, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing the global history of tactics, from modern pioneers right back to the beginning when chaos reigned. Along the way, he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the sport and probes why the English, in particular, have 'proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract'. This fifth-anniversary edition of a football modern classic has been fully updated to include an investigation of the modern-day Barcelona and how their style of play developed from Total Football, which itself was an evolution of the Scottish passing game invented by Queens Park and taken on by Tottenham in the 1930s. It also analyses different styles in the early British game and the changing mentality of South American football in the 1970s, as well as looking at the birth of the 3-5-2 system so prevalent today.

The History of Football Tactics

Inverting the Pyramid

Kay so Queso

Globalization is blurring national styles, but tradition, perpetuated by coaches, players, pundits, and fans, is strong enough that the styles remain distinguishable. (xxi)

The story of the game is really the British inventing it and everyone figuring out they’re wrong about how to play it 

…the purpose of sport was to play "on English grounds, with all their English customs and Enelish strategies ... amid the beautiful Dutch landscape." This was about imitation; invention didn’t come into it.

It was in central Europe and South America, where attitudes toward the British were more skeptical, that soccer began to evolve.

Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there is nothing worse than that.

Also, this quote is from an older version of the book that I had. The revised book just has the second half of this

"If you do away with the [hacking], 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."-FW Campbell of Blackheath; believed sport is about pain, brutality and manliness, without this 'any old foreigner' could win. He resigned when hacking was outlawed.

Yessir, let’s go! Over a hundred years ago and this guy spitting facts that I totally fw. It’s a shame how many coaches (across sports) lose connection with this philosophy. 

“In football, the tactics must always be adopted in relation to the ability of the men in the side to carry them out successfully. Because of this, it is hard to lay down hard and fast rules."-Tom Boyle, Barnsley and Burnley captain, 1913

Economics, globalization are inherently intertwined with the game’s international development.

It wasn't only Britain that found football irresistible; almost everywhere the British went in search of trade and commerce they left the game, and that didn't just include parts of the empire. There was money to be made exporting copper from Chile, guano from Peru, meat, wool, and hide from Argentina and Uruguay, and coffee from Brazil and Colombia, and there was banking to be done everywhere.

Love seeing this influence in the Latin American game

The anthropologist Eduardo Archetti insists that, as the influence of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to be felt, power and discipline were rejected in favor of skill and sensuousness trend that reached across a range of disciplines.

The priority and innovation of movement seems to be an eternal constant in sports.

…but they believed that movement was necessary, that too many teams were too rigid and so predictable.

It’s funny because I literally see people make the same complaints nowadays. “Gone are the playful maestros like Neymar and Ronaldinho, everybody now is an athlete in a system.” It’s so interesting when our complaints are literally the same after a hundred years

"Thirty years ago," he went on, "men went out with the fullest licence to display their arts and crafts. Today they have to make their contribution to a system."

Inverting the Pyramid quotes

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