Is television holding back the evolution of football?

[Cunny]

Another cracking Jonathan Wilson article in The Grauniad.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/jan/05/is-television-holding-back-football-evolution

 

Television is football's demiurge. Depending on your view, it either brought the extraordinary wealth to the English game that allowed the Premier League to become one of Europe's two principal leagues, or it distributed those resources so unequally that the title race has become a procession of the weary old usual suspects. For better or worse, it sets the economics of the game, and dictates the rhythm of the footballing week.

 

So much is obvious, but what is rarely considered is that television could be shaping the way the game is played, and not necessarily for the better. It sounds, admittedly, a touch far-fetched, but two of football's most respected thinkers believe it to be true, and when Jorge Valdano and Arrigo Sacchi are in agreement, it is usually worth listening.

 

Killing the pause

 

For almost as long as football has existed, there have been complaints that it is too quick, that the skills of yesteryear have been supplanted by what, as early as the 1950s, the Austrian journalist Willy Meisl was terming "the fetishisation of speed". The likelihood is that the game will become ever quicker: Roberto Mancini, speaking at a conference in Belgrade, suggested that the tactical development of players was almost at its limit, but that the boundaries of their physical development were only just being pushed.

 

But for Valdano, the issue of speed is not merely to do with improved understanding of nutrition or physical conditioning. "I heard [the boxer] Carlos Monzón's trainer, Amilcar Brusa, explain that when a boxer fights on television, it's crucial he throw many punches, regardless of where they land," he said. "That's because television demands activity.

 

"It's the same with football. The game has become more intense than it needs to be. In South America we have the concept of the 'pause' in football, the moment of reflection which foreshadows an attack. It's built into the game, like music, which also needs pauses, drops in intensity. The problem is that this doesn't work in the language of television. A moment of low intensity in a televised football game is seen by some as time to change channels. So the game is getting quicker and quicker because television demands it."

 

Valdano is a romantic, and is evangelical about the importance of the pause, but here perhaps he has a point. It is probably not so direct a relationship as he makes out, but if television commentary and punditry creates - or at least reinforces - a culture in which thoughtful play is dismissed as boring and harum-scarum running and clattering tackles are praised as representative of the seductive hurly-burly of the Premier League, then ultimately that will have an impact.

 

The danger of the clip

 

Ask pretty much anybody to describe England's third goal against Holland in Euro 96, and they will speak of Teddy Sheringham dummying to shoot, then opening his body and laying the ball off for Alan Shearer to smash a controlled slice past Edwin van der Sar and into the top corner. Which is fine, in as much as Sheringham's lay-off demonstrated a fine awareness of his surroundings, great unselfishness and a deft touch, but the move began far earlier, and was glorious in its entirety.

 

Tony Adams won possession, anticipating and intercepting after Ronald de Boer had miscontrolled a Michael Reiziger clearance. He strode forward, before letting Paul Gascoigne take over 10 yards inside the Dutch half. He switched the ball left for Darren Anderton, and then received the return just in from the left touchline. As Clarence Seedorf closed him down, he rolled the ball back with the sole of his boot, creating room for a jabbed ball inside to Steve McManaman, who played an exquisite chipped return, arcing the ball over Reiziger and into Gascoigne's path as he made a forward charge. Gascoigne showed great strength to hold off Aron Winter, barrelling into the box and drawing Danny Blind before stabbing the ball back with the outside of his right foot to Sheringham, who sensed Johan De Kock closing in and pushed the ball right to Shearer.

 

The point is that every bit of the move was brilliant, and McManaman's chip to Gascoigne was a technically harder thing to do and displayed greater vision and imagination even than Sheringham's lay-off. But it is forgotten because of television's habit of focusing on the money shot. That is natural and understandable - the point of a highlight, after all, is to take only a few seconds - but the build-up, whether it includes a Valdanista pause or not, is vital, otherwise you end up in Charles Reep territory, focusing only on end results and not the processes by which they are achieved.

 

More damaging, though, is probably television's habit of focusing on skill: the moody close up of Cristiano Ronaldo performing step-overs or of Zinedine Zidane pirouetting. Skill is a good thing, of course, but it must be focused: there is no point in skill for skill's sake, and when context is removed the sense is lost of why a player produced a trick at that moment.

 

The danger is that players become focused on their showreels at the expense of the game itself, or that young players learn how to flick the ball over their heads rather than learning about the shape of the game (and shape isn't just a concern of defenders: I went to interview Samuel Eto'o once and found him watching what appeared to be a Middle Eastern league game on television. I asked what it was, to which he replied that he didn't know, but that he would watch any football to study the pattern).

 

The focus on tricks is a trend only likely to be accentuated by programmes such as Wayne Rooney's Street Striker, and the danger is that football produces a generation of posturing show ponies incapable of producing the incisive pass or making the right run. All young players should remember the example of Sonny Pike, who joined Ajax in 1996 at the age of seven, heralded by numerous clips of him performing complicated keepie-up routines, but never kicked a ball in league football. It is tempting, too, to wonder whether a player such as, say, Danny Murphy has suffered the opposite effect, never quite enjoying the recognition he deserves because he is not flashy enough.

 

Celebrity and the undermining of system

 

Sacchi maintains that tactics have not evolved since he led Milan to back-to-back Champions League successes in 1989 and 1990, something he says is "remarkable, worrying". That is possibly an overstatement, for since then 4-2-3-1 has been popularised, 3-5-2 has spluttered into semi-obsolescence, and the false 9 and strikerlessness have flickered towards viability, and yet he is right to the extent that nobody since has been so dedicated to system.

 

Both Sacchi and Valery Lobanovskyi demanded the sublimation of the individual to the needs of the collective. That took long, hard, boring hours on the training field, and players who were willing to perform unglamorous tasks for the good of the team. In that, Lobanovskyi was probably helped at Dynamo Kyiv by the prevailing ideology, but it was arguably Sacchi's greatest achievement at Milan that, at least initially, he persuaded the likes of Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit to put their egos to one side.

 

It seems logical that the increased sophistication of data collection since then should have led to increasingly sophisticated systems, but it has not. For that there are two reasons: firstly, the increased number of games brought about by the expansion of the Champions League has led to a general acceptance of the desirability – probably the necessity – of rotation; and secondly, the increasing self-importance and contractual flexibility of players means many are unwilling to so submit themselves to a manger's demands. Television, of course, has played its part in both developments.

 

Rotation means that players do not generate the same mutual understanding as they did when teams regularly went unchanged - or switched only a player or two - from week to week. It is far easier for 11 to achieve a mutual understanding when being selected from a basic pool of 15 or so than from 25. An effective system only comes about after months of intensive practice, a factor that hindered both Lobanovskyi and Sacchi at international level.

 

But it is celebrity players with puffed-up egos and the freedom to walk out on clubs that Sacchi sees as the real problem. "Today's football is about managing the characteristics of individuals," he said. "And that's why you see the proliferation of specialists. The individual has trumped the collective. But it's a sign of weakness. It's reactive, not pro-active."

 

That, he believes, is the fundamental flaw in the galacticos policy at Real Madrid, where he served as director of football between December 2004 and December 2005. "There was no project," he explained. "It was about exploiting qualities. 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.

 

"In my football, the regista - the playmaker - is whoever had the ball. But if you have [Claude] Makélélé, he can't do that. He doesn't have the ideas to do it although, of course, he's great at winning the ball. It's become all about specialists. Is football a collective and harmonious game? Or is it a question of putting x amount of talented players in and balancing them out with y amount of specialists?"

 

Whether the second galacticos era follows the same path as the first or not, any success they have will be down not to a tactical plan but simply to weight of talent, and it is that which saddens Sacchi. There is a sense that Real Madrid are a side bought not for how they will play together, but how they will look in the next advertisment. That may be a sad reflection of a world increasingly driven by financial demands, but there is a positive: so long as the richest clubs are playing the football of the individual, smaller clubs playing the football of the team still have a chance.

 

Perhaps it has always been the case that the lust for glamour has sat uneasily with the game's systematisation, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Sacchi is right. Football may have developed in other ways, but in terms of a systematised approach demanding self-sacrifice from the components within it, his Milan stands as the evolutionary end-point, and television has played its part in that.

[Tosh]

Good, that

 

I was reading it wondering about Rafa's ethos of working hard as a team, not "building players up" too much and so on. Maybe that's reactive as he can't afford (never has afforded) Galatico players.... But overall some really good points made about the Sky generation and the idiots who pundit

 

That said, watch a game of Rugby from 15 years ago and it's played by a different species....

[johngibo YPC]

Interesting read that. I actually think foorball in this country has moved on alot tactically in the last 10 years, but maybe we are just catching up with Milan in 1990

[Pam]

that is a cracking article and raises good points.

 

i think TV exposure and the immediacy of phone ins etc has lead to new pressures. in the past you'd go to the pub after the game and wait for the pink echo whilst talking to you mates about what you'd seen. then you may see some highlights at the end of match of the day if you were lucky.

 

these days a fan from hundreds if not thousands of miles away watches the game on tv/internet, whilst posting on internet forums/twittering. then calls up some no-mark ex player on a phone in who is desperate to provoke controversey to keep the calls (i.e. revenue) flowing, everything is immediate and tremendously over emotional. a defeat is the end of the world, a poor game is disected, body language is analysed to fill the space created by tv/radio/internet for football to drive viewers/listeners/hits. they think we have the attention span of a 3 year old so everything is in nice easy to understand cliches:

Rafa rotates too much

zonal marking is the root of all evil

we are a two man team

oh no sorry 3 man team but then we sold Xabi

now we are a 2 man team again

Aquilani is rubbish cos he has not won player of the month, scored 10 goals and appeared as a pundit on sky yet

 

to move away from these universal truths is to move into dangerous waters as sometimes the other pundit/commentators doen't even understand! if something is repeated enough it becomes truth and too many people don't question what they hear. Too frequently i hear the insidious words of andy gray repeated by supposed liverpool fans. even my football hating partner has often commented that the tv pundits seem to really hate liverpool.

 

money is the other key thing for me. the top players are basically gods (in their own heads at least) they earn staggering sums of money. they do have to eat and live in a certain way but are richly rewarded for that. is there any need for players to be earning such huge sums of money? it is a bit chicken and the egg. tv bids the money, clubs want the money so want best players to guarantee the money so pay big wages/fees, clubs & tv then pass on cost to us fans. the cost has spiralled upwards through fear of missing out on tv/competition money and thru greed of players who seduced by the celebrity of football and being told how incredible they must be are incensed to "only" be offered £55k a week!!! it beggars belief.

[Damian_de]

Good read as ever from him. The stuff about Saachi is taken straight from his book if I remember rightly, and is a bit of hyperbole for me - tactics have moved on, certainly in the UK, but also in response to rules changes. Saachi's Milan could pass back to the keeper, played a different offside rule, and could tackle from behind, for example. So at the very least we see tactical changes to accommodate those changes in the laws.

 

Rafa is of course a big Saachi fan, and you can see that as has been pointed out already in his need for the individual to be subordinate to the collective, and it is interesting that Rafa has also spoken at length about the need for pace and power, and the need for skill, and that the players that are about both are the ones we can't afford (very often) - we bought Nando of course, players like Essien, Drogba, Rooney, Ronaldo, Eto'o and so on.

 

In the 'Brilliant Orange' book there's a great section about a Dutch guy who does his football photography from up in the stands to get whole pitch shots - what he calls 'moment of tension' - not the close up of the scorer celebrating, but the moment where the story on the pitch suddenly changes. He really loathes newspaper editors who only want the picture of the hero rather than the real art of the game as a whole. Same thing with the tele.

 

But yeah, I like to blame TV for a lot of what I don't like about footie these days, and there is a lot. I was recently watching a bunch of old world cup footage on youtube and the games just seemed more exciting some how. Holland - Brazil in 1974 WC was brilliant! It's true, you could clearly see that the skill levels were similar to now, but the physicality was a world away, although some of the tackling was absolutely brutal.

[Earl Hafler]

FIFA and the FA are holding back football.

 

And that part about reactionary football - remind anyone a little of Rafa ?

Edited January 5, 2010 by Earl Hafler

[Damian_de]

And that part about reactionary football - remind anyone a little of Rafa ?

 

In context it was Saachi talking about the individual trumping the collective, and was reactive because of the team dynamic with too many marquee players, quite the opposite of what you are intimating I think?

[Earl Hafler]

In context it was Saachi talking about the individual trumping the collective, and was reactive because of the team dynamic with too many marquee players, quite the opposite of what you are intimating I think?

 

It doesn't multiply the players' qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplying effect on the players' abilities

Playing Aurelio at left mid to cover Insua at left back is not trying to " achieve this multiplying effect on the players abilities "

[johngibo YPC]

It doesn't multiply the players' qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplying effect on the players' abilities

Playing Aurelio at left mid to cover Insua at left back is not trying to " achieve this multiplying effect on the players abilities "

 

I don;'t think thats why he plays Aurelio at left mid. If he had so little faith in Insua, he'd just play Aurelio at left back instead.

I agree with Damian, that the context is completetly the opposite of what Rafa is trying to achieve

[Maldini]

It doesn't multiply the players' qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplying effect on the players' abilities

Playing Aurelio at left mid to cover Insua at left back is not trying to " achieve this multiplying effect on the players abilities "

 

Really don't want to turn this into another repetitive Rafa thread, but that's really not what he did. He clearly played him there because Yossi isn't fully fit, Babel is a joke and Riera is injured. I didn't see too many people moaning about our "reactive" tactics when Aurelio played left-mid against the Mancs.

 

I don't think you actually understand the sentence you've bolded. It means that players should be able to cover each other's positions effectively, that they should have the skill set to adapt and contribute effectively to attack or defence no matter where they find themselves on the pitch. Aurelio fits pretty well into that description I think.

 

Mascherano, Carragher and to a lesser extent Gerrard would be better examples of how we don't fully adhere to Sacchi's universality principle.

[growler]

Interesting in the context of what people see and learn. Personally, I really enjoyed some great 0-0 in the past, and watching the famous arsenal back 4 and their offside trap was a joy to watch.

 

The thing is, the changes to the rules regarding tackles, pass back, throw ins and destroying the offside rule have had an impact on the tactics too, in that teams have no choice BUT to attack.

 

Also, with the money men taking over football worldwide, the skill, fun and in it for the game mentality has been replaced by a machine based approach, where those that are athletic and fast are taught to pass the ball. Any natural instinct is killed off by the need to conform. Players like Cantona would struggle to break through and could be the reason he came to fore so late in his career.

 

I think a whole group of players, Ronaldo (new and old one), Zidane, Messi could be the last of their kind, best case there may be 1 in a generation, whilst those that work hard to get in, Carra, Fletcher for example would just disappear.

 

A bit doomsday I know, but with the current ownership of our club, the disrespect for Referees, the disconnect of players to fans, and the price out of real fans is destroying our game and no one seems to care.

[Earl Hafler]

 

 

I know what he means by multiplying effect, Maldini !

Our sides of the 80's were close to what he's talking about. Out of our current crop, Kuyt at his best is that type of player, and Xabi would fit into any side because of those qualities.

Damn shame that his Milan and Dalglish's Liverpool never met in the European Cup.

[Crazy Horse]

They'd have creamed us, I'm glad they didn't meet.

 

Enjoyed the article, his stuff is always thought-provoking. One thing that struck me is that in a few years we'll probably be reading stuff like this with Rafa as the expert quoted - he is the heir of Saachi. I do wish he'd articlulate a bit more of his footballing vision to Liverpool fans, I think it'd be useful for those who are prepared to listen. I'm a little concerned that he'll disappear off abroad, destined to be forever misunderstood in the UK, and that'd be a shame.

Edited January 6, 2010 by Crazy Horse

[Coyler]

One thing that struck me is that in a few years we'll probably be reading stuff like this with Rafa as the expert quoted - he is the heir of Saachi. I do wish he'd articlulate a bit more of his footballing vision to Liverpool fans, I think it'd be useful for those who are prepared to listen. I'm a little concerned that he'll disappear off abroad, destined to be forever misunderstood in the UK, and that'd be a shame.

I would love the offal or someone to organize something like that. A quality Q & A with lots of thought being put into the selection of questions beforehand.