By Abul Hassan Rubel
Football has always attracted me as a child, as a young man, and now, as a grown adult; no other sports had the same effect. I have tried to analyze my feelings and found out some reasons for that attraction or to explain my love. The core reason is its closeness to the real life. It has attacking, defending, circulation of the ball, pressing the opponent, passing to fellow players, the transition of counterattacking, pace, power, retaining of the shape, calmness, ferocity, a holistic plan and at last the goal. It has everything. Thereby it touches every emotion of life.
Football brings us pleasure and joy, as well as disappointment, embarrassment, and feelings of deceit and betrayal in our life. Football teaches us how to work with people to achieve a mutual goal even if we have little in common. Football makes us aware how people degenerate themselves when they are blinded by only money and fame. It makes one a passionate member of a group with shared emotions. One of the biggest reasons for its popularity is its exciting nature and simplicity of the rules. Yet football is not a simple game. Nor it is static and unrelated. It’s always evolving with the socio-economic changes, new scientific and technological innovation, and enriched by great footballing minds.
How it all began
Let us consider some examples from football history. In his absorbing and informative work Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson has shown how fascism destroyed the coffee house cultures and by those tactical innovations of Austria and Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s were dried up in the next decade. In Britain, ‘the discussion’ of the game took place in the pub; in Austria, it took place in the coffee house. By the 1930s, football had become a resolutely working-class sports in England. In central Europe, it had followed a more complex arc, introduced by Anglophile upper middle classes, rapidly adopted by the working classes and then, although the majority of the players remained working class, seized upon by intellectuals. It was concentrated in Vienna and best expressed by its coffee culture. The city was a mixture of classes and nationalities, faiths, and worldviews. Order a Wiener melange in a Viennese coffee-house today, suggests Steven Beller – a historian of Austria, stir the hot milk into your bitter coffee and imperial Viennese culture emerges, a dissolving of differences to produce something fresh. The Viennese cultural elite encouraged intellectual collisions to give birth to the new. “There was sperm in the air,” as the writer Stefan Zweig somewhat off-puttingly stated. After the war and the end of the monarchy, there was a brief flourishing of progressive social democracy in the city, the era of ‘Red Vienna’. In the new, truncated Republic of Austria, the more conservative provinces slowly tightened their grip on the country. In 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss seized power in the name of Austrofascism, which gave way to Nazi fascism in 1938 with the Anschluss. Hitler, who moved to Vienna from Linz in upper Austria, had been transfixed by Schoenerer and, particularly, Lueger. He hungrily absorbed all his hero’s complaints about the Jews and the mixing of “races”; he called the Viennese a “repulsive bunch.” Thus, liberal Vienna had produced its exact opposite: militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the interwar years, these forces gradually took hold of the new Austria and from the 1920s onwards, many began to flee abroad. One of the last outs, in 1938, was Freud.
Building the Bridges
Let’s come back to football again. Football boomed in Austria during the 1920s and continued to impress into the next decade. There were some features that are quite revolutionary in the football sense. They had their brain in their legs. They offered fluidity in the attack, introduced man marking and off the ball running to attack the opponent’s goal. Sindelar, the best representative of a coffee house jubilant was a Moravian immigrant. Life was becoming increasingly difficult for immigrants in the new environment. There was a match between Germany and Austria known as a reconciliation game. Germany was an improving team by that time but not as artistic as Austria. In that game, Sindelar missed series of chances in the first half. Given how frequently he rolled the ball a fraction wide of the post, even today people wonder whether he had been mocking the Germans – and supposedly ordered not to score – by missing on purpose. Eventually, he scored a goal in the second half and his friend Schasti Sesta scored the second. He celebrated in front of a directors’ box packed with high-ranking Nazis.
Sindelar was openly a social democrat and refused to play for the United German team. He bought a café and was reluctant to put up Nazi posters. In January 1939, he was found dead in his own flat. His death was described as the death of athlete-artist, darling of Viennese society who couldn’t live when it died. Nevertheless, coffee house football not only remained heroically romantic, it sowed the seeds that we could find even today in different forms.
“WHAT I KNOW MOST SURELY ABOUT MORALITY AND THE DUTY OF MAN I OWE TO FOOTBALL.” – ALBERT CAMUS
Icons of the New Era
We have taken some spaces to explain the connection but there are other numerous examples of football’s correspondence with social, political, scientific and cultural life. Let’s think about arguably the greatest national team in history, Brazil of 1970. The long economic boom from the fifties to mid-seventies created a wider market for Brazil’s raw materials, which led to the rises in employment and wages. That prompted a rise in consumption among the working classes and creation of urban middle-class, but the gap between city and country widened. That created an influx of migration and the rapid rise of Brazilian slums or ‘favela’. This was a perfect condition for football. The new dictator of Brazil used football to gain some popularity and sent the team to NASA for its preparations. It seems ridiculous today that Joao Saldanha, known to be the real architect of the team, was much maligned and ridiculed for asking Pele to help in defensive works, and it has partly contributed to his sack as the national team coach. One crucial factor for this glorious Brazilian team achieving an iconic status was television. It was one of the early global events of the tele-cultural age. The Brazilian jersey with vibrant yellow and cobalt blue was perfect for the new age of color television (for more information, see Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson).
Or, think about total football, one of the greatest tactical innovations in football history. Rinus Michels and Valery Lobanovskyi both came to almost the same conclusion about how football should be played at the same time. They saw the game was about space and how it was controlled. Both encouraged the players to interchange the position, relied upon teammates to cover, pressing the opponent, off-side trap and make the pitch big when you have the ball and make it easy to retain it and make it smaller when opponents have it and force them to make an error. Michels was the father of total football. But you can’t separate the whole environment of Amsterdam from it. It was a capital of youth rebellion at that time. Art and culture became increasingly avant-garde and that had surely inspired the destruction of the established order. Whereas Michels was inspired by contemporary art, Labanovskyi was inspired by science. A polytechnic student, Lobanovskyi was an early user of computers in the game. He explained football as a system of 22 elements – two subsystems of 11 elements. The strength of sub-systems determines the results. He found it fascinating that the efficiency of sub-system is greater than the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it. And he found it ripe for the application of cybernetics. His conclusion was football was less about individuals than about coalitions and connections and all life is a number. They came to the same realization about space but produced completely different aesthetical philosophies about football. But without a supreme level of fitness, proper nutrition and advancements in sports science their system couldn’t work and it’s no surprise that it took the late 60s and 70s to reach its peak (Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson).
We have picked these examples for not only showing the connection between football and socio-economic life, but those examples had left some permanent marks which the football world still carries with it. Big center forward and long balls aiming him to score was the epitome of old-school football; this style is effectively outdated and over. A more fluid, high energy, highly tactical football is in the offering for quite some time. Does it have anything to do with the structure of transnational corporate capital and its management? Maybe or may not be. Before deriving to a conclusion, let’s examine this.
One for the Books: The Unwritten Lessons
In his recent book, The Mixer, the Story of Premier League Tactics, From Route One to False Nine, Michael Cox explains the tactical evolution of the Premier League in its first 25 years. He explains, “Get it in the mixer! These five words represent the simplest tactic in football: launch the ball into the penalty box, take advantage of ensuing chaos, perhaps following a goalmouth scramble, and hope to pinch a scruffy goal.” That tactic resulted in predictable, simplistic team and one-dimensional, brain-dead players. But over the course of 25 years, this has changed. And according to Cox that has happened in two different ways.
First, it became universal on a tactical level. In the early 1990s, there were very specific demands for every position – defenders simply defended, attackers simply attacked. But gradually positions became more encompassing, with defenders expected to start attacking moves and attackers encouraged to start defensive pressure. Players were increasingly all-rounder rather than specialists.
Second, it also became universal on a geographical basis, as English clubs broadened their horizons and became increasingly dependent upon foreign players and managers. Amazingly on the premier league’s opening weekend in August 1992, just 11 foreign players started for the 22 clubs combined, and there were no foreign managers. By its 25th season, the majority of Premier League players and managers were foreign, and almost every major footballing nation was represented.
He has summarized it expertly. But to understand the changes in tactics, we may need to look at some details. Not only defenders are tasked to initiate the attacking moves today, defending is not the task of defenders alone. “We defend as a team,” we would hear from modern-day coaches and players very often. Once it was sweepers in the midfield who were tasked to defend along with defenders. Now, it starts with central strikers. Role of a modern-day striker is not only about scoring goals but to create chances for his teammates and foiling the attacking move from opposition defense. The full-back position almost transformed into wing backs and to fill the void from the forward runs other players from midfield need to cover him. In recent seasons a revival of back three and wingback system has been proved successful. The uses of traditional wingers are more or less abandoned. Then come to the wide forwards who frequently come inside to form a very fluid attacking trio. The traditional defensive midfielder and playmaker division are also weakening. All action midfielders are taking their place. No team can afford a luxury player and depend only on their creativity to create goal scoring chances. High pressing in the opposition penalty area, high-speed counter-attack and sharing the creative duties are new phenomena.
Two great tactical innovations of this time are ‘tiki-taka’, the name denounced by its champion and counter-pressing or gegenpressing. The two systems are generally seen as quite opposite to each other but they have common elements and both try to find fluidity, as well as retaining the system. Pep Guardiola once stated in an interview:
“I loathe all that passing for the sake of it, all that tiki-taka. It’s so much rubbish and has no purpose. You have to pass the ball with a clear intention, with the aim of making it into the opposition’s goal. It’s not about passing for the sake of it. In all team sports, the secret is to overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defense to cope. You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’ve done all that, we attack and score from the other side. That’s why you have to pass the ball, but only if you’re doing it with a clear intention. It’s only to overload the opponent, to draw them in and then to hit them with the sucker punch. That’s what our game needs to be. (There is) nothing to do with tiki-taka.”
“The best moment to win the ball is immediately after your team just lost it,” Klopp has said. “The opponent is still looking for orientation where to pass the ball. He will have taken his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception and he will have expended energy. Both make him vulnerable.”
Michael Cook observed, “Counter pressing attempted to redefine the accepted nature of the simple, cyclical four-part flow chart used in coaching manuals to explain the phases of play. Traditionally, a team is either in possession or out of possession. To move between these two phases there’s the transition – the concept Mourinho popularized during his first stint at Chelsea. So the flow is simple: in possession, defensive transition, out of possession, attacking transition. And repeat. You’re always in one of those four stages. But Klopp’s counter-pressing changed that – a successful counter press replaced the defensive transition and allowed the side to immediately return in possession.”
The Art of Fitness and Finance
In fact, both the system are most recent examples of outdating the old traditional way of playing and setting up new styles. It made football a high energy, high intensity, high pace, fluid and a flexible game more than ever. But does it have anything to do with characteristics of modern capitalism?
First, we shouldn’t forget that huge television broadcast and sponsorship deals were behind the changes made. In 2016, Premier league’s television broadcast deal was 2.75 billion pounds, 50 times more than that of 1992. But that was not out of thin air; the worldwide popularity of the league has made this enormous growth possible. And without being spectacular and competitive it couldn’t remain so popular. A worldwide consumer also led to include players and managers appointed from everywhere to make it diversified and universal.
Second, 22 players play football on the pitch but there is a larger picture that remains behind the scenes. There you can found many similarities between corporate structure and management. Like football corporate world has goals and that measures success. The traditional head coach is almost absent today, they are football managers. They are not only responsible for the on-field performance of the team; they are now the public image of the club, like the corporate CEO. A football coach’s playbook is like the executive team’s formulated strategy. The playbook provides instructions on how to advance the ball toward the goal line. Without a computer analyst, football strategies couldn’t be as detailed and effective as they are. Like every corporate office, football clubs have their IT specialist to understand a competitor’s tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. You can find similarities between pre-season training and brainstorm sessions, pre-game training to workshop and training programs, scouting department to human resource department and so on.
But most interesting part could be how on-pitch football resembles itself with capital. What we can say for sure is the age of sole proprietorship is over and now it’s the age of corporate ownership. The corporate form is less dependent on an individual owner and allows shared responsibility. It also needs more organizational effort and provides an option for constant expansion of ownership and businesses. There is another thing that came along with corporate capital is the highest efficiency in management. A decrease in the rate of profits and competitiveness made it necessary more than ever.
Keeping the Stamina Alive
Paul4Innovating put it best when it stated, “We are seeing far more fluidity in relationships where the knowledge is flowing within, across and between organizations. The boundaries are blurring, that increasing fuzziness needs shifting our style of decision-making and solution finding. There is also this growing sense that innovation is endless, it never stops but simply shifts from one stage to another, often looping back to be re-evaluated and thought through. The old linear process is not working, learning and adjusting is a constant all along the pipeline development process and requires a higher level of fluidness to deal with it. There is this nagging feeling of relentless destruction or disturbance, the very opposite of the stable equilibrium we seemed to enjoy in the past. Those that become capable of managing the constant change and disequilibrium will thrive.”
You may find the similar words needed to describe a relentless attacking football team or in a description of the needs of a team that is somehow boring and predictable. But the story doesn’t end there. Only fluidity can result in disorder and that needs a system to operate. Quoting from the same business article, “Those growing conditions of uncertainty and complexity also need boundary building, identity formation and problem-solving architectures that are stable and can provide replication of essential actions or activities. We need to seek out and maintain yet constantly challenge to “undo” and redesign.”
But the capital concentrated, television induced styles leaves a big gap i.e. living relationship with the community and supporters. On the eve of the transformation to Premier League and huge television deals, Sir Alex Ferguson ridiculed the concept as ‘piece of nonsense’ that would ‘sell supporters down the river’. But the money involved had made the incredible transformation possible. Now the game played on the pitch is more exciting, a fantastic spectacle. But sometimes lacks direct involvement of supporters, their passion, and vibrancy. Two great innovation of recent time ’tiki-taka’ and ‘gegenpressing’ both need the involvement of supporters. Whereas tiki-taka has achieved a high degree of tactical sophistication, gegenpressing has the revolutionary potential. “I believe in a playing philosophy that is very emotional, very fast, and very strong. My teams must play at full throttle and take it to the limit every single game – tactical, of course, but tactical with a big heart.” Klopp outlined. But without a living relationship with the community, supporters’ direct involvement, without a passionate atmosphere around, such an emotional game is not possible.
We need to integrate passion with reason, a system with freedom, sophistication with lifeblood, supporters of the club. As we see from the history of football that various social classes, their cultures, technological and scientific advancement and discussions in the public sphere have contributed to the development of its tactical evolution. Yet football of recent era has alienated itself from people. There remains a gap, rather a division or rift. There’s little direct involvement of the people in club matters. That is a bar even in the tactical innovations part. But it’s not the clubs that are responsible in isolation; instead, today’s world doesn’t allow this involvement. A change is needed to allow people to get into it; not only in football but in society and state as well. We need a more democratic, egalitarian, just society to have a democratic football culture and space for people to contribute to that culture. Then, even today’s tactical supremacy of football can achieve a new height in that society, to produce ‘Complete Football’. Don’t ask me when and how. It’s a dream. But a dream based on historical trends of football’s tactical innovations.
