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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“First International: Scotland 0 England 0, Partick, 30 November 1872”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“The debate was long and furious but, after a fifth meeting at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, at 7:00 p.m. on December 8, 1863, carrying the ball by hand was outlawed, and soccer and rugby went their separate ways. 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.” Sports, he appears to have believed, were about pain, brutality, and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win. A joke it may have been, but that his words were part of a serious debate is indicative of the general ethos, even if Blackheath did end up resigning from the association when hacking was eventually outlawed.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

“British crowds soon grow tired of patient build-up, but in, for instance, Capello’s first spell at Real Madrid, crowds booed when Fernando Hierro hit long accurate passes for Roberto Carlos to run on to.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Between 1040 and 1745, only three English monarchs did not either invade Scotland or fight off an invasion from Scotland,”
― Jonathan Wilson, Two Brothers

“What became apparent in the writing of this book is that every nation came fairly quickly to recognise its strengths”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

“Over a million Hungarians applied for tickets for that game, and, although official figures have the attendance at a little under 105,000, the actual attendance may have been far higher. Many, it is said, having gained entry, used carrier pigeons to send their tickets to friends and relatives waiting at home.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe

“As the army club, Honvéd could conscript whomever they wanted and accordingly brought in Sándor Kocsis, Zoltán Czibor and László Budai from Ferencváros, Gyula Lóránt from Vasas and the goalkeeper Gyula Grosics from Teherfuvar. Sebes was effectively able to use Honvéd as a training ground for the national side.”
― Jonathan Wilson, The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Soccer Shaped the Modern Game

“If Matthias Sindelar represented the cerebral central European ideal, it was Arsenal’s Ted Drake – strong, powerful, brave and almost entirely unthinking – who typified the English model.”
― Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics