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So, for example, we knew that Zidane, Raúl and Figo didn’t track back, so we had to put a guy in front of the back four who would defend. But that’s reactionary football. It doesn’t multiply the players’ qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplying effect on the players’ abilities.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (85%)

Van Gaal himself replaced Bobby Robson at Barcelona, furthering the Total Football influence there, even if he and Johan Cruyff did constantly squabble like two Marxist theorists debating obscure doctrinal details.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (78%)

‘Coaches,’ he said, ‘have come to view games as a succession of threats and thus fear has contaminated their ideas. Every imaginary threat they try to nullify leads them to a repressive decision which corrodes aspects of football such as happiness, freedom and creativity.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (74%)

With the game so well analysed and understood, and defensive strategies so resolute, by the early nineties the great question facing football was whether beauty could be accommodated at all.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (73%)

Set-plays were supposed to be his speciality, but he was so anxious about his side’s ability to defend them that, at 4 a.m. on the morning of the final, he burst into Ruggeri’s room, pounced on him, and, with the defender disoriented and half-asleep, asked who he was marking at corners. ‘Rummenigge,’ came the instant reply, which Bilardo took as evidence that Ruggeri was sufficiently focused.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (73%)

Could it be that football follows a similar logic and that those brought up within a Protestant work ethic feel the need to be doing something at all times and so are more comfortable with the constant movement of pressing? That proactivity, that overt exertion, somehow feels more worthy or more natural than the reactivity of a libero and defending deep?

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (69%)

When Norway beat England 2–1 in qualifying for the 1982 World Cup, it was such a shock it sent the radio commentator Børge Lillelien into barely coherent delirium: ‘Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen [we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all]. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher […] your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!’

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (68%)

Discerning the quality of football is necessarily subjective and, anyway, there are bad 4–3 thrillers (excitement and quality are not synonyms) just as there are superb goalless draws. If goals alone were a mark of excellence, there would be thousands queuing to watch primary-school football.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (66%)

If there really is – and there isn’t – a one in nine chance of scoring with any shot regardless of circumstance, it is still one in nine whether a forward has scored with his last ten or missed with his last hundred. That assumes the coin is unbiased, of course. If a coin keeps on landing heads, it is probably because it is weighted; if a striker keeps on missing chances, it’s probably because he’s not very good.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (66%)

On his return, he tried to set up Brazil to deal with increasingly physical opponents, changing personnel so as to raise the average mass of his defence by five pounds and their average height by three inches. His modifications, though, led only to confusion.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (59%)

The Americans beat the Soviets in the space race, and Brazil beat Italy in the World Cup final, yet neither opponent is mentioned. Rather the triumphs, which happened less than a year apart, come to be regarded as a greater endeavour, a victory attained less against corporeal rivals than over external, nonhuman elements, as though to play football of that majesty were somehow a victory for all of humanity.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (58%)

This, as Lobanovskyi saw it, meant that football was ripe for the application of the cybernetic techniques being taught at the Polytechnic Institute. Football, he concluded, was less about individuals than about coalitions and the connections between them. ‘All life,’ as he later said, ‘is a number.’

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (55%)

The theory Winner sets out in Brilliant Orange that the Dutch are particularly adept at the manipulation of space because of the way their flat, frequently flooded landscape forces them to manipulate space in everyday life is persuasive (and just as the Viennese coffeehouse writers saw a connection between Sindelar’s genius and their own literary output, it doesn’t seem a huge leap to see a relationship between the precise, glacial brilliance of Dennis Bergkamp and that of, say, Piet Mondriaan)

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (53%)

Most of Michels’s Ajax side are dismissive of the links between the cultural and football revolutions, but it is difficult to disagree with Winner when he concludes that they are there, even if they extend no further than a self-confidence that was prepared to question the orthodoxy.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (52%)