I recently watched a recording of the 1970 FA Cup final replay with my 12-year-old son. You can find the match by searching for “football’s most brutal game”. I was attempting to show him how football has “evolved” and it made me smile that the first thing you see in the BBC coverage is an upfront trigger warning that “some viewers might find the video disturbing”.
That in itself tells us how much society has changed over the past 50 years, before you see the Leeds manager, Don Revie, smoking a cigar in the dugout while Leeds and Chelsea play out a game that today looks like a combination of football and mixed martial arts. Some of the best players of that generation, including Jack Charlton, Billy Bremner and Ron “Chopper” Harris, spend more time kicking each other than they do the ball. The game was viewed on TV by nearly 29 million people and featured only one yellow card and no sendings-off.
Across the North Sea in the Netherlands at about the same time, Rinus Michels was developing a style of play that would become known as Total Football. A dynamic, fluid style is characterised by player versatility and positional interchangeability, where almost every player is expected to be adept at playing multiple roles. This style emphasised aggressive pressing rather than tackling in order to regain possession quickly and then maintaining control of the ball through skilful, short passing.
The English game has come far from those threadbare pitches and proponents of casual violence of the 1970s to the variant of Total Football that dominates today, not only in the Premier League but among the most successful teams in the English Football League.
It seems this expansive, possession-based game has won the battle for tactical dominance for a number of reasons. Most evidently, Pep Guardiola’s coaching philosophy at the UK’s most successful current team, Manchester City, is clearly rooted in a style that evolved from his playing days at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff. This lineage traces directly back to Michels, who built his freewheeling Ajax sides around Cruyff’s football intelligence. Cruyff then refined this philosophy at Barcelona, both as a player and later as Guardiola’s coach and mentor.
European coaches such as Michels, Cruyff and Guardiola have had a profound impact on tactical approaches worldwide because their methods have proven effective and entertaining. Their attractive style has been televised to a global audience and shown how success can be married with style. Michels won the European Cup with Ajax and then led the Netherlands to the World Cup final in 1974, where they were narrowly beaten by West Germany. Cruyff’s influence at Barcelona started a golden period from the early 1990s with their first European Cup win that reached its pinnacle under Guardiola, who showcased the effectiveness of this approach with the dominant team that overwhelmed Manchester United in the 2011 Champions League final. This prompted Sir Alex Ferguson to say: “They do mesmerise you with the way they pass it.”
English football, traditionally characterised by its direct style and physicality, began to slowly integrate more strategic and possession-based tactics with the arrival of foreign coaches such as Arsène Wenger. He came to the Premier League in 1996 with new ideas and philosophies about how a club can be run, starting a wave of change that has led to where we are today.
Changes such as the back-pass rule, VAR and regulations against harsh tackles have also facilitated a more possession-oriented, less physically risky style. These have encouraged teams to develop styles that prioritise control, technical skill and passing over physical aggression and dominance in order to be successful. This seems to reflect a societal shift in views on masculinity and the role of aggression and violence both on the pitch and in everyday life. Wimbledon’s late 1980s Crazy Gang encapsulated this most clearly with their unapologetic anti-football style, route-one simplicity and groin-grabbing intensity, which can be seen to symbolise the last flailing efforts of a style that hasn’t brought high-level success since. There are still flaccid imitators to be found in the lower divisions, but few who can build lasting success or a devoted fanbase in today’s game.
It is now a given that teams struggle to be successful without a long-term plan and clearly defined style of play. This “game model” allows clubs to create repeatable (though not predictable) behaviours, recruit specific types of players that fit the model, and develop academy talent towards a first-team system that they will recognise and fit into. This approach means they are not dependent on a head coach or manager’s vision, a model that limits success more to luck and low probability than something that can survive changes in key personnel.
English football has increasingly focused on improving the technical skills of players from a young age. Academies and training programmes emphasise ball control, tactical awareness and versatility much more than in the past. This shift has made it easier for teams to adopt styles of play that require technically skilled and tactically intelligent players as a more standard requirement for leagues that demand these qualities. Additionally, the influx of foreign players has brought different skills and tactical understandings, which have blended with the traditional English game to produce a more varied and tactically sophisticated style. Our partners at Twenty First Group discovered that in the past 20 years, the technical element of the game has improved significantly, highlighted through its data that shows there are 66% more successful passes per top-flight game since the inception of the Premier League.
When you look at the teams Leeds and Chelsea turn out today, most people would be glad to see that football has evolved to a higher state. Fans of a certain generation and mindset will lament the “sanitisation” of the game, the loss of physicality and of a player’s ability to make a crunching tackle that could potentially end an opponent’s career. That said, I think most have enjoyed the shift from the rough prose of the 1970s to the fluid poetry of the game today.
• Jason Stockwood is the chair of Grimsby Town
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
