Knowing what we do about English football journalists, you would never expect one to write a book as intelligent and knowledgable as this ‘History of Football Tactics’, but having spent the bulk of his career in Eastern Europe, Wilson has not been exposed to the sort of stultifying groupthink that makes English football culture the least intellectual in the world. That’s allowed him to produce a masterful work, which traces the development of football strategy – both in terms of style and formation – from the first international in 1872, when England lined up in a rugby-style 1-2-7, to Roma and Manchester United’s current ‘strikerless’ formations. Wilson’s work acts as a sort of truncated version of David Goldblatt’s recent ‘The Ball Is Round’, similarly spotting the globe as it follows a more or less chronological path through the history of the game.
Where it differs is with its greater readability and its focus on systems as much as individuals. To aid the latter, the text is interspersed with regular diagrams of team line-ups, illustrating the way tactics have developed over the years, and also the vast disparity in systems, from W-M to Inter’s lopsided catenaccio and Brazil’s extraordinary 4-2-2-2 in the 1982 World Cup. It’s all deliciously nerdy – a cross between a coaching manual and a social history – and if its publication helps foster a flowering of interest in the tactical and analytical side of the game in this country, it could be the best thing to have happened to English football in years.
