Understanding football
A great introduction to the development of football tactics, making this a very valuable supplement to understand parts of this great game.

Scarily True
I read this book during the 2010 Football World Cup and it really shows how little has changed with regards to the English attitude towards football. Some of the debate about the changes needed for the future development of English football. It offers compelling tactical insight into the game and charts the tactical developments since the advent of the game. A truly great book for those wanting to understand the development of tactics and for those looking for tactical innovations for Football Manager.

Great read and highly recommended

Best football book I've read
Anyone who didn't rate this as 5 stars is a moron. It is quite simply a masterpiece. Not just a complete history of the game's tactics, it's like a vivid narrative of how the game developed. If you love football you have to read this book. If you hate Andy Gray, Richard Keys and Sky's moronic interpretations of the game then you have to buy this book.



Tries to do too much
For anyone who has been watching, talking about and reading about football for 25-30 years much of this will be like stating the bleeding obvious, but in a dry pseudo-academic manner (it adds nothing to the by now cliched stories of Watford under Taylor and rise of Wimbledon). I'm afraid that I found it much duller than many of the other readers. It tries to do too much - covering the entire history of football, and providing profiles of various characters and explaining various tactical systems. The blurb is also misleading: We are led to believe that we'll get an insight into the people and personalities, why Venables stayed up in bed worrying about tactics for example. Instead, he gets a brief, cursory mention. Much of it is predictable, and with due respect to other reviewers, I think Alan Hansen does provide more inisights (and even better insights are in the sports pages of The Independent - the only reason I sometimes buy that newspaper).

Brilliant
I thought the author's first book, Behind the Curtain, was superb, but this is even better. The amount of research in phenomenal, and yet Wilson has boiled it down to a coherent theory of about 350 pages that seems to explain just about everything about the tactical side of the game. Every time I've been watching a game on TV and thought 'I wonder why that is' it seems he's already provided the answer. And yet it's also a marvellously readable book that seamlessly wanders from the central thesis of the shift to a single striker to tell you about the characters involved, the geniuses who shaped the game.

Hide Reviews