There is probably no other English word more abused in football today than “tactics.” The mere mention of it provokes instant, passionate arguments both for and against, as if “tactics” was some kind of footballing tool you could either take or leave like pink boots or performance-enhancing drugs. If this is were really case, you might expect to hear a supporter yell to his neighbour at a football match, “What this game needs right now is some more ‘tactics,’” and his neighbour responding, “No, there’s too much bloody ‘tactics’ in this match as it is. Blasted Europeans.”
Of course when fans today mention “tactics” they mean something else entirely, because tactics and football—even dreadful, inept football—are inseparable as water and wet. Even if you’re a Charles Reep-following Watford manager from the early 1980s who believes the best way to score goals is to pump long balls to a strong, tall “traditional” centre forward, you’re still employing a pre-arranged plan of attack, i.e. a football tactic.
Today however, “tactics” is just short hand for “knowledge,” or at least a more in-depth, specialized knowledge of the game that goes beyond intuition or impression. This might include player positioning, successful pass completion ratios, the type of defensive marking etc. For a long time in English-language journalism, these details either weren’t recorded or considered worth mentioning in match reports. Far more interesting for most journalists (and to be fair, most readers) was the story arc of the match, how the home team pressed and pressed until the dying whistle before getting an equalizer and prompting a tearful pitch invasion, whilst at the same time confirming everyone’s belief in the “mental toughness” of the manager.
The important thing to consider here is that the English-language press’ former reluctance to mention tactical details did not mean that English managers—even awful English managers—weren’t aware of them. It’s just they weren’t considered of interest to journalists, and therefore the general public.
That’s now changed as the result of as writers like Jonathan Wilson and Michael Cox offering tactical points of discussion and post-match breakdowns to the general public via their respective publications. More and more fans of the game are now demanding discussion of football tactics from soccer writers, which is completely understandable—once you’re aware why one formation has a different set of causes and effects than another, you’re going to want to read about it in a match report.
There is however a growing misunderstanding among critics that discussion of tactics reduces individually-talented, improvisatory soccer players—the kind of thing you need great writing to express to the unseeing reader—to nubbins on a Subbuteo board. Nubbins are of course much easier to convey in words than human beings, perhaps why Alexander Netherton thinks tactical discussion is a covert means for bad writers to jump into the soccer writing game. As he writes in a recent piece for ESPN Soccernet:
Tactic hawkers take themselves far too seriously. Respected writers succeed by combining passion for football with an eye for a phrase. The obsession with tactics smacks of admitting defeat. “I’m not good enough to describe it in words, so have a look at my drawings.”
Netherton believes tactical breakdowns ignore the importance of ineffable traits like character and passion in helping to determine the outcome of football matches. This however is a straw-man argument. It’s clear one of the “puritans” Netherton is targeting is Michael Cox of Zonal Marking. But read any match report on ZM and you quickly realize Cox is by no means a tactical reductionist.
Here for example is Cox’s take on Chelsea’s comeback against United in the Premier League: “What turned the game? There was little tactical change, but Chelsea showed more strength and determination in the second half.” More strength and determination—hardly the stuff of Opta stats analysis, but clearly according to Cox integral to winning football matches, and the very sort of thing Netherton believes is being ignored by the tactics geeks. Read ZM enough however and you realize he’s just filling in a yawning tactical blank in traditional print match reports, not turning soccer into chess.
The real shame is that Netherton ends his piece with a note on social class. “Football was taken from the working class in the ’90s and passed to the middle class. ” he writes. “Just as food was fetishised as an instrument of snobbery, now football is being snaffled by the poseurs.” The underlying assumption here is that all this tactical gobbledygook is above the heads of the Sky Sports watching working classes, who are only apparently interested in pace, power and passion (an assumption well-skewered on Run of Play today).
This is a strange and doubtful claim considering vigorous tactical discussions at football grounds have been a part of the sport across class divides since football began (tactical preference certainly played a huge part in association football’s eventual distinction from rugby). Again, all that has changed in recent times as far as football tactics goes is the English press.
As tactical discussion becomes more a part of match reports and analysis, it doesn’t mean writers will point to a chalkboard in lieu of solid prose. If anything, the best soccer writing has always been grounded in tactical knowledge (see early Brian Glanville). It would be hard to take a soccer writer seriously if he reduced football to individual character, passion, and screaming crowds of fans.
So let’s not fear knowledge, let’s embrace it. Let’s welcome tactical detail in soccer writing, not label it as “snobbery” and dismiss it out of fear it will kill what makes football great. Because tactics is football, and vice versa; the two are inseparable. The best soccer writers should be wary of trying to divide them.
Richard Whittall is the author of the A More Splendid Life football media blog. He also contributes for Canadian Soccer News and Run of Play. You can follow him on Twitter at @RWhittall.
Excellent article. I couldn’t agree more.
Nice read. I particularly agree with the opening line – I think part of what gives ‘tactics’ a bad game is commentators (no doubt looking to ‘sell’ the match) describing shite 0-0s as ‘tactical battles’. Sometimes it’s just shite, no tactics to blame!
The argument that tactics is somehow ‘pseudo-intellectual’ or whatever baffles me. I don’t say anything on the site other than (a) someone stood in a certain place (b) someone ran in a certain way or (c) someone kicked the ball in a certain direction. That’s pretty much all it comes down to, so why there’s this perception that people who look at tactics take it all too seriously, or look down on others who don’t look at the game in these terms, I’ve no idea. I enjoy watching football, I hope others do in whatever way they like.
Another misconception is the idea that I think that tactics is the *only* thing that matters, that football = tactics and nothing else. That misses the point entirely – the site is about tactics because it’s an area of football I thought wasn’t covered particularly well. It’s no different from taking each area of a match individually (motivation? fitness? refereeing decisions? pure technical quality?) and saying how that area influenced the game, although obviously those things aren’t as easily quantified or analysed as tactics are.
The view put forward in the linked article would be entirely correct if tactical debate WAS football debate. If the entire football discourse consisted of geeks like me talking about how a left-back changed the game by playing twenty yards higher up the pitch, it would be a disaster. You need a much wider debate than that, for various reasons. But there’s no sign that this will happen, so for now it’s quite easy for people not interested to avoid my site or any others that cause offence!
Another feeble attempt at defending single minded reductionist “snobs” who invoke tactic as a solution to everything. Decontextualising Netherton article to serve your purpose and saying he was aiming at shot at Cox, just because he mentioned chalk board was unfair.
no wonder english-speakers can’t comprehend how to use the term tactics properly, anglo-football in general is for the most part completely devoid of it.
@ Richard – Good, reasoned article. I’ve followed football writing for years and it’s a once in a blue moon occasion if a match report contains any more tactical analysis than basic formation and substitutions. It’s clear that blogs like Michael’s were a needed resource, and to be honest, if he started incorporating too much analysis beyond the tactics, reading the articles would be too much of a slog.
@ Michael – The sad fact about the situation is that Netherton just doesn’t seem to like your particular site and thus felt the need to attack ‘tactic bloggers’ as a whole. As far as I can tell he’s trying to justify his own beliefs and possibly seeking to ensure that he never has to incorporate tactical analysis into a single piece that he writes.
The whole article he wrote just smacks of unprofessional, hype generation. Find the new boy in town and punch him in the face so everyone thinks your cool.
A really interesting argument, and well expressed. Cheers. I just wanted to raise a couple of points.
Firstly, I think the claim that tactics were of little interest to journalists in the past is a tad unfair. Go through the archives and you’ll find frequent – not numerous, admittedly – references to systems, positions, to men making runs, to styles of play. To take one example, who was it who dubbed Alf Ramsey’s team the ‘wingless wonders’, if not the press? That shows at the very least an awareness of tactics and an ability to describe tactical systems.
Could it possibly be, instead, that technology has made the discussion of tactics far easier, enriching the debate and allowing a broader range of ideas to be expressed?
Secondly, as someone who writes match reports quite regularly, I do think tactics have a role to play in any discussion of a football game. But – and Michael will surely agree with this – they can only tell you so much.
When it comes to assessing the result of a game, tactics are invaluable. ZM does it brilliantly. But a match report – I think, anyway – should do so much more than explain the outcome. It needs to convey the emotional consequences, the historical significance, the haptic impact. The nuts and bolts of who wins and who loses and why is just one part – obviously a pretty big part – of what makes football football. That’s maybe what Netherton was getting at – I don’t know – but I certainly agree that you can’t paint ‘tactics’ into a corner and deride it as pseudo-snobbery, any more than you can claim that it is the be-all and end-all of football.
I really wouldn’t read too much into anything written by Netherton. Every article he has written has been deliberately contrarian published with the sole intention of driving up ‘hits’.
See for example his last two pieces regarding Barcelona and Arsenal.
Balance, balance, balance… that’s what it all comes down to. You’ve got to have balance in all aspects of life, and football is no different.
This is a great article, and a great point….even the average coach or rec league player ought to welcome more tactical discussion when evaluating a match, because it gives them pointers that they can use in their own games.
I would say that the best combination of knowledge, stats and writing incombination with tactics would be Soccernomics, which has been well promoter by you guys at the Score
Abdullahi – if you’d seen Netherton’s childish, petty, frankly embarrassing Twitter activity that was literally aimed specifically at Michael, you’d also make the connection that this article makes.
I can’t agree more than with those who say tactical analysis is an important part of the footballing discourse; tactics are major part of the many-faceted battle of association football.
Jonathan’s point about advances in technology and the accessibility and presentation of that technology is also a strong one. It’s a wonderful thing that this level of analysis is so widely available and maleable – the coupling of these advances with the internet and the promotional/reactionary capabilities of Twitter bring us more information and better filtering of the available information than ever before. Feast!