Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my neighbor's son. It's a bit advanced for his age as he's only 10, but loves soccer/football. I figured it would challenge him and he'd grown into the book, making a good gift to help improve reading skill of a loved subject for a young boy. Also thought the book would be a good book for the boys father to read to him as he's a fan too.

I have been reading through this book which is almost the size of the bible. It's loaded full of detailed stories of soccer strategies and ideas. Really good to help a new comer be aware of what has come before. It also give me ideas for things we could try differently in various situations.

I enjoyed this read from Jonathan Wilson, as a big soccer fan. It’s really interesting to hear such a complete and wholistic view of the evolution of football from someone who has only been following closely for about 15 years. Learning the what and the why behind teams’s, clubs’s, or even nations’s soccer identities will have me watching matches in a whole new lens. I’ve already noticed myself interpreting moments or trends in seasons through a more critical eye with this historical perspective to back it up.

Historic

Excelente libro

This book is admirable for its erudition and its focus on the evolution of tactics from the playing fields of nineteenth century public schools to the present. One really must admire a British specialist who digs into the entire global picture of football and comes up with a relatively comprehensible narrative out of what must have been reams of club histories and match reports that probably contain very little of the information the author seeks. It is readable, informative and occasionally funny. Here comes the "but". Quality really declines toward the end, as if the author was rushing to meet a publishing deadline or simply outsourced the job to a football fan with a bizarre form of Tourrette's that forces him to spout senseless combinations of numbers such as "3-3-3-1, 4-5-1, 3-4-1-2". The next-to-last chapter is completely unreadable. Whereas other chapters developed the story of a single innovator or the situation in a single country, this one just rushed through a myriad of modern formations and discusses sweeping issues such as the disappearance of the playmaker. Another late chapter devotes incomprehensible amounts of space to an obscure polemic between a football statistician and a future England coach. The central narrative is lost completely, which is tied to another central weakness: the lack of occasional paragraphs to sum up the evolution of tactics as the long procession of teams, coaches and players parade through the foreground of the book and just as quickly disappear from view. The title "Inverting the Pyramid" is a brilliant example of this: it sums up an immense amount of information into a neat little compact literary phrase, but that kind of brilliance is somewhat absent from the rest of the book. In short, I enjoyed the book, I learned a lot from it and I will probably return to it frequently after matches, but it really could have used a little more tidying up from an editor (hopefully in a future edition).

Great book, a must read for any coach as it will help them understand the evolution of tactics.

(Reviewing the U.S. version of the book) This is a wonderful book for someone of an intellectual mindset coming to soccer as an adult. Wilson explains the early development of the sport, how duties came to be assigned to particular positions, and how those duties and positions evolved over time. He also describes how national styles developed, with a particular emphasis on how England came to its particular directness and physicality, and how it has failed to learn many lessons. I had only two complaints. The first is that Wilson repeatedly will switch from talking about one club, manager, or strategy to another without clear transitions or set-up for the new topic. This gets very confusing at times. The second is that this book is a challenge for non-British readers. Wilson assumes that the reader has a fairly detailed historical knowledge of British soccer. He'll refer casually to managers, players, and incidents of 100 or 150 years ago on the assumption that everyone knows who or what they are. That can make it difficult to understand some parts of the narrative. And now a special note of derision for the U.S. version of the book. The publisher appears to have recognized that Americans are getting more interested in soccer, and responded by producing an edition that, as far as I can tell, did nothing but search and replace "football" with "soccer," including in the subtitle. It comes off quite oddly in some places, particularly in references to "Total Soccer" instead of "Total Football." To be clear, any American who has taken the effort to read this book is accustomed to hearing the sport we know of as "soccer" called "football." If they wanted to produce a book for the U.S. market, their efforts would have been better spent by producing a glossary or adding some footnotes explaining the things that every Briton knows.

狙いは大げさなものです。１００年以上のサッカーの歴史を各国に振り返りそこに戦術、もっとはっきり言えば、システムの変化を探ろうとするものです。最初のシステムが、２−３−５だとすると、そのピラミッドをひっくり返して逆さにしたのが、５−３−２、もしくは４−５−１、並びにそのヴァリエーションだというわけです。これがこの書物の題の解題といわけです。この転倒への到達に１００年のサッカーの戦術の発展がたどられます。著者は、この転倒という現象の発現形態の現れ方に各国のサッカーの特殊性と価値観を見出します。取り上げられる国は、多岐にわたります。wembleyで初めてイングランドを破ったハンガリーからロシア（プレシングの発祥）、イタリア（カテナチオとゾーンプレス）、アルゼンチン（メノッティとビジャルドの対立）、ブラジル（４−２−４）、イングランド（４−４−２）、そしてswedenまでもが取り上げられます。どの国にも存在した勝利と美との間の対立とそこから生み出される戦術の発展（システムの応用と微調整）が焦点となりますが、転倒というわけですので、基本的にはデフェンシヴな戦術への変化が焦点となります。戦術とシステムの発展は、永遠と思われたDF、MFとFWの区分すら曖昧なものにしており、古典的なウィングというポジションが消滅したように、CFというポジションすら、その変化の後には消滅してしまう可能性があることが示唆されます。もっとも消滅というよりは発展的な解消といった方がいいのかもしれませんが。たしかに見事にシステムの発展がたどられますが、見たこともないそして映像も残っていない５０年以上前のシステムがきれいに文の上で整理されてしまうのは、後知恵の成せる業という印象は否めません。 4‐2‐3‐1―サッカーを戦術から理解する (光文社新書) との併読を勧めます。

Glad i bought it

Ottimo

Enjoying so far

great info on tactics