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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%)

“Boys, look after your legs, a player is worth a lot,” he said. He wanted them to take it easy. Barely had Don José gone when Spinetto shouted, “Queers! We have to win this game!” And Vélez won, and the players had to wait until about 10 p.m. to leave the ground because the fans wanted to beat them up.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (49%)

‘How do you beat a team that has a great forward?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘Very simple. If you don’t want somebody to eat, you have to stop the food coming out of the kitchen. I don’t send somebody to mark the waiter; I have to worry about the chef.’

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (48%)

It is, frankly, horrifying that a philosophy founded on such a basic misinterpretation of figures could have been allowed to become a cornerstone of English coaching. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (35%)

When Soviet myth-making was at its height, it was said that the Dinamo sports club, which was controlled by the Ministry of the Interior and ran teams across the USSR, chose blue and white as their colours to represent water and air, the two elements without which man could not live. The truth is rather that Charnock was from Blackburn, and dressed his team in the same colours as the team he supported: Blackburn Rovers.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (21%)

The camp was overflowing with personalities and eccentrics. There was F. Charles Adler, a world-renowned conductor who had studied under Gustav Mahler; Sir James Chadwick, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had been the first to conceive the idea of the nuclear bomb; Prince Monolulu, a horse-racing tipster and probably the biggest black celebrity in Britain at the time; ‘Bertie’ Smylie, the alcoholic editor of the Irish Times who usually sported a sombrero; and Geoffrey Pyke, who invented aircraft carriers made out of ice, once demonstrating them to Winston Churchill in his bath.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (19%)

The familiar battle-lines were drawn: England, physical, quick and tough; the continent, technical, patient and probably lacking in moral fibre.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (17%)