Barça evolution
By Michael Robinson and John Carlin
There is much discussion, in Spain and beyond, as to
whether Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona is the best football
team of all time. However entertaining the debate, it is
impossible to resolve conclusively. There are too many
variables and we lack information. The game is much
faster today than it was 40, 50 years ago, the players run
longer distances, the pitches are better, the referees less
indulgent towards hard tacklers, the boots and balls are
different from those Alfredo di Stéfano or Pelé used.
Furthermore, for a large part of the game's history
television did not exist. Who, then, is qualified to refute the
notion that the finest team ever seen was the Italy side
that won the World Cup in 1934 and 1938; or the Arsenal
team that regularly swept to victory in the English league
during the same era; or even one of the two teams that
contested the very first international match in 1872,
England and Scotland?
What we can say, on the other hand, is that the current FC
Barcelona mark a watershed in the evolution of the game.
There is a before and an after with this team. They have
redefined the way the game is played and caused the
entire football world – from coaches of children’s teams to
the technical staff of the biggest clubs on the planet – to
return to the drawing board and reconsider their most
basic premises, among them the concept of tactical
formation. Be it the 2-3-5, the 4-3-3, or the 4-2-4, or the 4-
4-2, Barcelona have consigned mathematical rigidity in
football to irrelevance. They have done the same with the
ancient and venerable notion that centre halves, or centre
forwards, should be tall and strapping. Also torn to shreds
is the article of faith that dictates all teams need a
“stopper,” a specialist in defensive destruction, in the
midfield. What’s more, Barcelona have signalled a
democratic revolution in the sport. They have shown,
through their success, that the qualities a football player
requires to prosper are technical skill and intelligence on
the ball. Size doesn’t matter; neither does the position of
each player on the pitch.
The seed of it all was the “total football” of Ajax
Amsterdam, patented by one of the sport’s philosophers,
Rinus Michels. His favorite disciple, Johan Cruyff, brought
it to Barcelona, first as a player and then as manager.
From there the Barcelona “Dream Team” of the early
Nineties emerged. What we are witnessing today is the
perfected version of that model, a purified distillation of the
ideology of Michels. What the “Pep Team” delivers is more
than total football; it is absolute football.
Let us go further back in time, before Michels’ Ajax, whose
principles the visionary Dutchman transplanted onto the
wonderful Holland team of the 1970s (mirroring the
relationship today between Barcelona and the World Cup-
winning Spanish national side). Let us return to the very
roots of a game whose rules were first committed to paper
in a London pub in 1863 and attempt to trace its evolution,
observing how over time football has discarded what
doesn’t work, adapting to a changing habitat, adopting
attributes that tend to ever greater efficiency.
That first international fixture in 1872, between England
and Scotland, was played on a cricket pitch before 4,000
spectators. The chroniclers of the time began the vogue of
setting out the formations on the pitch in numerical terms,
pointing out that England fielded a 2-8 and Scotland a 3-7.
Despite the predominance of forwards on both sides the
game ended 0-0, proving a great truth that has not been
entirely digested even today: that packing the forward line
with players is not always the most efficient method of
scoring goals; that congestion does not lead to creativity.
The other lesson from that encounter, related to the first,
was that leaving more spaces allows for a more flowing
game. Scotland’s 3-7 resulted in a style of play more
defined by possession and passing than the long ball
tactics and less-than-efficient attempts to dribble favoured
by England.
The qualitative leap came 16 years later, in 1888, when
Wrexham won the Welsh Cup with an innovative 2-3-5
formation, the so-called “Pyramid System,” which became
the inflexible orthodoxy for the next 40 years. The Pyramid
System’s hold on the game was smashed in 1930 thanks
to Herbert Chapman, the coach of Arsenal, who patented
the WM formation, and the Italy manager Vittorio Pozzo,
who invented the 4-3-3, known then as “the Method.” Both
consisted of setting up the team in such a manner as to
allow the players more room for manoeuvre, catching
static opponents by surprise. Rival players could not
decipher the formations devised by Chapman and Pozzo,
a large reason why Arsenal was the dominant side in
England during the 1930s, while Italy won consecutive
World Cups in 1934 and 1938.
After the Second World War revolution dawned in Eastern
Europe. A match between England and Hungary at
Wembley in 1953 shattered ancient premises. The
possibility of defeat never entered into the minds of the
English players. The Three Lions had never been beaten
by a side outside the British Isles and England considered
themselves de facto the best team in the world, in much
the same way that American teams winning baseball or
American football tournaments call themselves “world
champions.” Hungary, reigning Olympic champions,
humiliated England. English commentators had little
choice but to recognize that the Mighty Magyars had
handed the inventors of the game a footballing lesson.
Employing a philosophy based on possession of the ball
and exquisite individual technique – Hungary's star
performer was the future Real Madrid forward Ferenç
Puskas – the visiting side unveiled a secret weapon that
England were incapable of countering. The nominal center
forward Nándor Hidegkuti did not play as such; he
occupied a deeper position in the center of the field, what
in very recent times (thanks to Lionel Messi) we have
come to call a “false nine.” Hidegkuti was neither forward
nor midfielder and the robust English defenders did not
know how to deal with him. Hidegkuti scored twice and
carved out the spaces to allow Puskas to add two of his
own. The final score was 6-3 to Hungary. When the teams
met for a rematch the following year in Budapest England
proved even more inept, losing 7-1.
Real Madrid embraced the idea, signing Puskas and
finding in Alfredo di Stéfano an improved version of
Hidegkuti, even more dynamic, unpredictable and all-
terrain. Imitating the Hungarian blueprint, but taking it to
new levels, the resulting team proved unstoppable.
Italy, or more precisely the legendary coach Helenio
Herrera, came up with the antidote at the start of the
1960s; not just for the Hungaro-Madridista style but also
for the physical prowess of another national side now in
the ascendency, Germany. Eschewing the premise that
the ball is indispensable, catenaccio was all about falling
back and biding your time, ensnaring the opposition in a
defensive spider's web, taking advantage of the rivals’
single-minded attacking fixation and waiting to launch a
counterattack when the opposition had run itself into the
ground. One goal was often enough. Herrera also
invented the phenomenon of the sweeper, a defender
operating behind the last line of defense, in case of
emergency. Catenaccio was not, and neither did it pretend
to be, a work of art; Herrera was no Michelangelo and the
San Siro was not the Sistine Chapel. But it worked.
Herrera's Inter Milan won back-to-back European Cups in
1964 and 1965.
The Germans were intrigued by the notion of a sweeper
but they were more audacious in their scope. If the player
operating in that position did not have to mark a specific
player, neither would anybody be assigned to mark him.
Rather than limiting the sweeper to a fireman’s role at the
back, he could be deployed to infiltrate the midfield, joining
the attack to create numerical superiority against the
opposing defence. For the first time, a player whose
position on the tactical diagram was at the back assumed
the part of a playmaker. He was also capable of shooting
on goal. This was the role patented by Franz
Beckenbauer, whose West German team very nearly won
the World Cup in 1966.
The eventual victors, England, came up with British Isles’
first tactical contribution since Herbert Chapman. Alf
Ramsey dispensed with the orthodoxy of the winger, the
specialist wide player whose mission it was to take the ball
down the flanks, beat the full-back with tricker and speed
and then launch crosses into the opposition penalty area
for the centre forward to contest. Ramsey's side were
dubbed the “wingless wonders”: a team of versatile
players who made up for their lack of technical brilliance
by their controlled, intelligent deployment on the field.
The dominant team of the age, though, was without doubt
Brazil. World Cup winners in 1958, 1962 and 1970, the
Canarinha were the Harlem Globetrotters of football; a sui
generis phenomenon, and therefore unrepeatable, based
on a level of skill never before witnessed and a philosophy
of relentless attack. Brazil played a 4-2-4 and their plan
was a simple one: if the opposition scores one, we'll score
two; if they score three, we'll bang in four. In other
countries, the left-back, for example, was a diligent work-
horse, schooled only in the principles of defence. To this
day only Brazil consistently produces players like Carlos
Alberto, Roberto Carlos, Marcelo or Dani Alves who, while
nominally defenders, cover the entire length of pitch,
coursing up the flanks with the same attacking intent as
the wingers of old.
Following Brazil's exuberantly memorable exhibition of
football at the 1970 World Cup, the first time the
competition was broadcast on TV in colour, the sport
exploded as a cultural phenomenon, embraced by a vast
worldwide public. Next up was Holland, cradle of the great
revolution of modern football, one whose impact resonates
to this day. Rinus Michels, who led the revolution,
bequeathed a legacy that included three consecutive
European Cup triumphs for Ajax Amsterdam, from 1971 to
1973, and that took Holland’s “clockwork orange” team,
with Johan Cruyff as standard-bearer, to the World Cup
final in 1974 and 1978. Michels drew his inspiration from
the Hungarians who put England to the sword in the
1950s, but his Dutchmen took that model to a new level of
speed and refinement.
The system was based not on the manner players were
distributed on the field -- by a clear division between
defenders, midfielders and forwards -- but by a change in
attitude that led the entire team to perform, and think, in a
different way. The defender was no longer a mere stopper,
he had to be capable of distributing the ball as adeptly as
a midfielder. Possession was the indispensable
prerequisite. A player in a Michels team had to be
comfortable with the ball at his feet, whatever his position.
When he recovered possession, he would lift his head,
find a teammate and initiate another attack. The game
was suddenly being played at an entirely different rhythm.
Ajax and Holland appeared to play with more speed than
any other team in history. They gave this impression
because it was true. Next to how Real Madrid played just
a decade beforehand, or even the great Brazil a couple of
years earlier, it seemed as though Ajax were moving in
fast motion, like characters in an early Hollywood film.
Michels carried the orange torch to Barcelona, where he
was coach for two spells in the 1970s, failing each time to
make his model gel. He did, though, leave his mark,
notleast by his decision to sign Cruyff. Barcelona,
indefatigably indignant at what they considered to have
been Real Madrid’s ‘robbery’ of Di Stéfano in 1953 (it is
claimed to this day that General Franco interfered to
ensure Real signed him and not Barcelona), had tried to
balance out that perceived injustice by paying princely
sums for established world stars. But neither Ladislao
Kubala, Diego Maradona, Bernd Schuster nor Cruyff could
break the dominance of the Spanish capital’s big club. The
conquest of the European Cup remained the Holy Grail for
the Catalans. Maradona came and went but the goal
remained elusive.
The turning point came when Cruyff took over the team’s
reins in 1988. Suddenly the coach was king; his
philosophy would now become the key to success.
Cruyff’s first season at the helm was, however, a disaster.
Had it not been for his legendary name, and if he had not
believed so stubbornly in his own abilities, Barcelona
would have sacked him. Cruyff convinced the president of
the club, Josep Lluís Nuñez, to forget about the short term
and think strategically, allowing time for the concept of
total football that had captivated the world 15 years
previously to permeate the club. This was the path to
adhere to, this was the cause for which it was worth
fighting and, if need be, dying.
In a private conversation back then, on a particular
evening long on Heinken consumption, Cruyff confided to
one of his drinking companions, “I am going to change the
world of football.” How? “My defenders will be midfielders;
I will play with two wingers and no centre forward.” Cruyff’s
interlocutor assumed the Dutchman was drunk. He wasn’t.
Without a centre forward to preoccupy them rival centre
halves would be left bewildered, unemployed; with two
wingers the available space opened up enormously and
from such a tactical platform a team whose players were
all masters on the ball were free to play expansively.
An example of Cruyff’s philosophy was seen in the signing
of Miguel Ángel Nadal. At Mallorca, Nadal (uncle of the
tennis player) had been the midfield conductor, as well as
a goalscorer. Cruyff raised eyebrows by deploying Nadal
in the heart of defence, but there the player triumphed,
defending when he was required to defend but also
launching attacks. A year after the arrival of Nadal,
Barcelona won their first European Cup, at Wembley,
courtesy of a goal from Ronald Koeman, total football
made flesh; on paper the Dutchman played in midfield, on
the grass he played everywhere.
But Cruyff’s Barcelona never defined itself in terms of
European triumphs accumulated, like Real Madrid or Ajax,
or the team that usurped Barcelona on the continental
stage, Arrigo Saachi’s AC Milan, an incredibly effective
hybrid of the traditional catenaccio virtues of toughness
and guile in defence with the God-given talent of the three
Dutchmen who formed the spine of the team; the goal-
scorer par excellence Marco van Basten, the versatile
midfielder Frank Rijkaard, and Ruud Gullit, who could play
anywhere he liked.
Milan spoilt Barça’s party. As did the memory of Real
Madrid’s achievements. Yet Cruyff’s trophy haul was not
inconsiderable: four consecutive Spanish Liga titles, a
King’s Cup, a Cup Winners’ Cup, European and Spanish
Super Cups and that one, coveted European Cup. The
“Dream Team” impressed the football world, transcended
frontiers. The Cruyff blueprint became emedded in the
club’s DNA. The seductiveness of the Cruyff playing style
captivated the fans, the Catalan press and the youth
players, none more so than the most intelligent and
receptive of them all, Pep Guardiola, who rose to the first
team captaincy under Cruyff, where he remained after the
Dutchman’s departure in 1996. Two Dutch coaches, Louis
van Gaal and Frank Rijkaard, perpetuated the club ethos,
with varying success but unwavering fidelity.
When Guardiola, Cruyff’s protégé, ascended to the first
team bench, he coincided with the emergence of a group
of players who had been immersed in the in-house
philosophy from adolescence, among them Xavi
Hernández, Víctor Valdés, Gerard Piqué, Andrés Iniesta
and Leo Messi. What they had been taught, as their chief
article of faith, was that the ball was sovereign; possession
the primary – practically the only – priority. It was the polar
opposite of catenaccio, the thesis of which was to let the
opposition have the ball. It was also diametrically opposed
to the robust athleticism favoured in English football,
embodied in the sergeant-majorish figure of the Chelsea
captain John Terry, who is a great defender, a great
stopper, for the simple reason that he has to be; not
blessed with great technique, he and his clones in the
English game deliver the ball back to the opposition with
such frequently that they need to be always performing at
the very limit of their abilities, in a state of continuous
emergency.
The same may be said of Liverpool’s Jamie Carragher, so
admired by his fans and English football in general for his
martial qualities. Watching the likes of Terry and Carragher
on a football pitch, it is not hard to understand how Great
Britain managed to carve out an empire on which the sun
never set; it is also easy to see why the England national
team isn’t setting the world on fire and why it hasn’t won
anything in half a century.
Barcelona, by contrast, have Piqué, a striker in his youth,
playing at the back and Javier Mascherano, a former
midfielder who dramatically breaks the mould of the burly
central defender, as his frequent partner. The striking thng
about Guardiola’s team is that, while tactical discipline is
strict, one is never sure exactly what position on the pitch
at least three quarters of the players are supposed to
occupy. The images showing the nominal formation of the
starting 11 flash up on the television screens at the start of
each match but when the whistle is blown the Barça
players pop up everywhere, defying the game’s ancient
orthodoxies. Dani Alves is listed as a right back but he
often plays more an attacking midfielder or a winger; it has
never been made clear whether Iniesta is a right or left
winger, or whether his natural position is in the centre of
midfield. Alexis Sánchez is a centre forward – the smallest
target man in the history of the sport – but disguises
himself as a winger. Messi is a “false nine” and much
more, a direct descendant of Hidegkuti and the goal-
scoring, goal-creating, all-action machine he has been
compared to, his Argentine compatriot Di Stéfano.
As for Cesc Fàbregas, the former Arsenal captain defies
all analysis of the position on the field he is supposed to
occupy. It is his superior football brain, and his years in the
Barcelona youth teams, that have allowed him to impose
order, under Guardiola’s watchful guidance, on the
apparent chaos of his role. The players who scored
Barça’s goals in the first leg of the Spanish Cup match
against Real Madrid in February (to choose one not
untypical example) were Carles Puyol, a central defender,
and Éric Abidal, who plays as a left back, and also as a
centre back, but who slotted home his goal with the
aplomb of a veteran centre forward and the mercurial dash
of an old-fashioned winger.
Xavi Hernández is, of course, the conductor of the midfield
orchestra, but he tackles back in much the same way
Mascherano used to when he played in the Premier
League for Liverpool. Messi also wins back possession; if
it were ever necessary he could perform perfectly ably as
a full back. Valdés, the goalkeeper, is more comfortable
distributing the ball out of defence – passing is a job he
performs more often than shot-stopping – than Terry or
Carragher. Guardiola requires his players to pass the ball,
even in defensive extremis, because the cardinal sin is to
play a random long ball, to reduce football to an anarchic
game of chance. It is the dream that Cruyff aspired to and
Guardiola finally transformed into hard, trophy-winning
reality. Possession is the sacred principle, as much in
defence as in attack, because if the opposition is deprived
of the ball, there is no need to defend. The team’s forward
movement operated on the principle of a wave in the sea,
gathering momentum until it breaks on the shore of the
opposition penalty area. Even if a goal is not the outcome,
even if the ball is lost, the rival team recover control so
deep in their own half that they have a long and winding
road ahead before they can mount an effective threat on
the Barça goal. The opposition are obliged not only to
cover the entire length of the field to mount a threat, along
the way they have to thread a way through a team under
orders to chase the ball like a pack of rabid dogs. Barça
are artisans, but workers too.
What Barcelona have done is to invent a new language, or
what Cesc Fábregas, since his arrival from Arsenal this
season, has described as the Guardiola “software”. It is
hard to assimilate for those who have not been raised
from an early age at the club's La Masia academy. Some,
such as Abidal and Mascherano, have managed to pick it
up. But it is a measure of how tough the challenge is that
two such reputed superstars as Thierry Henry and Zlatan
Ibrahimovic failed to adapt, each ending up as awkward
misfits, only fitfully effective, in the Camp Nou ballet.
This new football idiom was what Sir Alex Ferguson,
the Manchester United manager, failed to identify
after his side’s loss to Barcelona in the 2009
Champions League final. Ferguson was convinced
his team had lost because they had played below
par. When Barcelona inflicted a similarly humbling
experience on England's finest at Wembley last
May, the Scottish knight was forced to proffer his
sword in surrender. Ferguson understood that he
had not just duelled with the best club team in the
world but one that also represented a changing of
the guard in the history of a sport to which he had
dedicated his life. Another of the game's living
legends, Pelé, was confident ahead of last
December's World Club final in Japan that Santos
could beat Barcelona. Neymar, whom Pelé had said
was better than Messi, corrected the old master
following the 4-0 battering his team received when
he declared, in a manner reminiscent of what the
English had said after losing to Hungary in 1953,
that he and his fellow Brazilians had been taught a
footballing lesson.
It is a lesson that has not been lost on the English,
who have been sending emissaries to Barcelona's
training complex all season long. The coaching
staff of Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and
other major European teams have been keenly
observing the training sessions of the Barcelona
second string teams, notebooks in hand. But the
influence of this Barcelona team extends across
the six continents. Today in Liverpool, for example,
(although it could equally be Guatemala or
Madagascar we are talking about), children can be
seen playing on windswept fields on the outskirts
of the city wearng not just Liverpool or Everton
shirts, but Barça ones too. The coaches of these
young players, long accustomed to urging their
charges to “get stuck in” and “tackle ‘em hard”,
can now be heard repeating a new mantra: “pass,
pass... pass the ball.”Bobby Charlton, England's
most revered player, said in an interview with the
Spanish sports daily AS last month that “every club
in football should learn to play the Barcelona way”.
Everybody who follows and loves the game knows
exactly what Charlton means. Barça have
imprinted an instantly identifiable picture on
football’s global consciousness. Physicality and
athleticism have bowed to refinement and
technique, the warrior spirit remains but has been
leavened by intelligence and the killer grace of the
champion swordsman, or the matador. It does not
matter if a player is tall or short, wide or thin, so
long as he knows how to caress the ball.
The Barcelona team of Pep Guardiola -- the radical
extremist of the Cruyff school of philosophy -- feeds the
dreams of every small boy who plays football. The
team’s bloodlines can be traced to the beginnings
of the sport in the 19th century, through the
innovations of Chapman and Pozzo – the concept of
space as the key to victory; the 2-3-5, the 4-3-3
and the 4-4-2, catenaccio, the seeds of total
football sown by Hungary, later patented by
Holland, via the Ajax model perfected by
Guardiola's Barcelona, and from there to the Spain
national side, the reigning World and European
champions. They have a link, even, to that
Scotland side that held England to a goalless
stalemate in 1872: today, in a surprising
evolutionary twist, Barça also play, at times, with a
3-7 formation (against Santos, for example), but
with a fluidity and order and purpose that the
game’s pioneers would have found hard (we would
imagine) to countenance.
Will Barcelona’s triumphant run last? Who knows?
Guardiola may leave the club; Messi might suffer a
career-diminishing injury, or simply run out of
steam; a rival coach might come up with the
antidote, as Herrera did to Real Madrid in the early
Sixties. For whatever reason, Barça may fail to lift
any more trophies. They may not add to the 13 out
of 16 they have won in the past three seasons. But
whatever the future may hold, they have left an
indelible mark on the game and its history. Nothing
will ever be the same again.
--
www.johncarlin.eu
