Jonathan Wilson > Quotes

“Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrongheaded pseudointellectualism is far worse.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Many before have hailed the end of history; none have ever been right.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“That tension – between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d’arte and futebol de resultados – is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport, but also to life: to win, or to play the game well?”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Football is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“The danger all goalkeepers face is thinking too much, that the nature of their position gives them time to dwell on doubts.”
― Jonathan Wilson, The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper

“Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“In football,’ he said, ‘the tactics adopted must always be in relation to the ability of the men on the side to carry them out successfully. Because of this, it is hard to lay down hard and fast rules.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“In the beginning there was chaos, and football was without form.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“If you do away with [hacking],’ he said, ‘you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.’ Sport, he appears to have felt, was about pain, brutality and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Soccer,” Bielsa said, “rests on four fundamentals, as outlined by Óscar Tabárez: (1) defense; (2) attack; (3) how you move from defense to attack; (4) how you move from attack to defense. The issue is trying to make those passages as smooth as possible.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“the Scots achieve the same result as the English with less exertion,” wrote Looker-On in 1910 (although he was, of course, a Scot). That first-class football in Scotland is more calculated, more methodical, and consequently slower than English football is something which practically every Scotsman will admit, and I may say . . . that as a rule the Caledonians are very proud of the fact. Country clubs in Scotland play a game very like the average English League game, and in first-class circles in Scotland this is usually referred to with contempt as “the country kick and rush game.” Scotsmen apart from football are as quite fast as Englishmen, but when playing Soccer they seem to play a “thinking game” to a greater extent than the Saxons.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“They narrowly missed out on the league title in 1929, but did win the US Open Cup, Eisenhoffer’s goal giving them a 1–0 win over the Giants in the eastern section final before victory over the winners of the western section, St Louis Madison Kennel, in the first two matches of a scheduled three-game final. The second game, played at Dexter Park in Queens, drew more than 21,000 fans, the largest attendance at a US Open Cup final until Seattle Sounders beat Columbus Crew at their own stadium in 2010.”
― Jonathan Wilson, The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Soccer Shaped the Modern Game

“Various cultures can point to games that involved kicking a ball, but, for all the claims of Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Caribbean, Mexico, China or Japan to be the home of football, the modern sport has its roots in the mob game of medieval Britain. Rules – in as much as they existed at all – varied from place to place, but the game essentially involved two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch. It was violent, unruly and anarchic, and it was repeatedly outlawed.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand but over hacking; that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F. W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favor. “If you do away with [hacking],” he said, “you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“Maybe that’s why goalkeepers tend to be reflective types, prone to introversion, trying, perhaps, to rationalise why such unfair things happen to such undeserving people. The question, I suppose, is whether gloomy prognosticators are drawn to goalkeeping or whether goalkeeping makes them like that.”
― Jonathan Wilson, The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper

“Ceux qui n’ont jamais souffert ne savent rien; ils ne connaissent ni les biens ni les maux; ils ignorent les hommes; ils s’ignorent eux-mêmes.’1 (François Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque)”
― Jonathan Wilson, Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You

“Weirdly, the former Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis also claimed to have invented the bicycle-kick, even though he never played football to any level and was not born until ten years after the first record of Unzaga performing the trick.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Ángel Cappa era. Cappa preached a doctrine of skillful soccer that appealed to traditionalists. For him, soccer offers an opportunity for the poorest to climb the social ladder, a way out of poverty, both metaphorical, in the way a gifted player can achieve some kind of artistic transcendence irrespective of background, and literal in the way a good player can earn vast sums of money and gain general respect.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“Maradona was quick to try to make capital. ‘For 364 days of the year,’ he told the fans who supported him every Sunday, ‘you are considered to be foreigners by your own country; today you must do what they want by supporting the Italian team. By contrast, I am a Neapolitan for 365 days of the year.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“And there, in a moment, was laid bare the prime deficiency of the English game. Football is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment. (I should, perhaps, make clear that by ‘tactics’ I mean a combination of formation and style: one 4-4-2 can be as different from another as Steve Stone from Ronaldinho.) The Argentinian was, I hope, exaggerating for effect, for heart, soul, effort, desire, strength, power, speed, passion and skill all play their parts, but, for all that, there is also a theoretical dimension, and, as in other disciplines, the English have, on the whole, proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Pope Francis is a San Lorenzo fan, of course. He was born in December 1936 in Flores, the barrio immediately to the west of Almagro, where Father Lorenzo had founded the club three decades earlier. His father played for San Lorenzo’s basketball team, and as a child he would go with his mother to watch matches. There’s always a suspicion with public figures that their professed support for soccer clubs is skin deep, but not with Francis. If he sees somebody wearing a San Lorenzo shirt or carrying San Lorenzo colors in the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square, he makes a point of acknowledging them. If San Lorenzo have won their previous game, he will usually signal the score with his fingers. At his public audiences, there are always groups draped in Argentinian flags, looking less like pilgrims than a soccer crowd. Those who work regularly with Francis roll their eyes when asked about his love of the game; apparently, he talks incessantly about soccer.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“Reinaldo ‘Mostaza’ Merlo, the former River midfielder with the mustard-coloured hair, ordered that the concrete moat around the pitch be ripped out. When it was, the skeleton of the seventh cat buried by Independiente fans in 1967 was discovered. Later that year, Racing won the league,”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“Van Gaal was red faced, dogmatic, and given to crudeness and sudden outbursts of temper. At one point when he was Bayern Munich manager, for instance, he made the point that he was unafraid of his big-name players by dropping his trousers in the dressing room. “The coach wanted to make clear to us that he can leave out any player, it was all the same to him because, as he said, he had the balls,” said the forward Luca Toni. “He demonstrated this literally. I have never experienced anything like it, it was totally crazy. Luckily I didn’t see a lot, because I wasn’t in the front row.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“It seems telling of the respective fortunes of the two nations that while six of Germany’s squad went on to win the World Cup, seven of the England squad they beat in the final went on to play for Sunderland.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“Johan Cruyff, explaining his profound aestheticism, once said that he preferred to hear the noise of the ball striking the post to scoring a goal.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“The young have aspirations that never come to pass; the old have reminiscences of what never happened. Saki, Reginald at the Carlton”
― Jonathan Wilson, Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You

“the sporting club gave the people of a barrio something to rally behind, a projection of their area and by extension themselves in the wider world.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“the B sample was positive fell on the twentieth anniversary of Perón’s death. They were two figures in whom many Argentinians continued to believe, excusing their faults long after their powers had waned.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

“Head-down charging, certainly, was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general. In the public schools, thinking tended to be frowned upon as a matter of course. (As late as 1946, the Hungarian comic writer George Mikes could write of how, when he had first arrived in Britain, he had been proud when a woman called him “clever,” only to realize later the loadedness of the term and the connotations of untrustworthiness it carried.)”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“كان مينوتي شخصية رومانسية بشكل يفوق الوصف. كان نحيلا كقلم رصاص، ومدخنا شرها يتدل شعره على ياقته، أشيب السوالف، وله نظرة محدقة كصقر، بدا كما لو كان تجسيدا للبوهيمية الأرجنتينية، كان جناحأ أيسر ومفكرا، وفيلسوفا، وفنانا. يقول: «أدافع عن فكرة أن الفريق فوق الجميع»
«وأكثر من كونها فكرة فهي .بمثابة التزام، وأكثر من كونها التزاما فهي اعتقاد جلي ينبغي على المدرب أن ينقله للاعبيه للدفاع عن تلك الفكرة»
«لذلك فاهتمامي أننا معشر المدربين لا ندعي لأنفسنا الحق لنزيل من المشهد المرادف لكلمة الابتهاج، لصالح القراءة الفلسفية التي لا يمكن أن يطول بقاؤها، وهي تجنب المخاطرة، وفي كرة القدم هناك مخاطر لأن الطريقة الوحيدة التي يمكنك بها التغلب على المخاطر في أي لعبة يكون عن طريق عدم اللعب»
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313/314ص”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics