Football Writers' Week: Jonathan Wilson on How Tactical Analysis Went Mainstream

It's 'Football Writers' Week' at Bleacher Report, and Day 4 brings insight from revered tactics writer and B/R contributor Jonathan Wilson, author of Inverting the Pyramid.

Day 1—Duncan Castles on the dark arts of the transfer window

Day 2—Kristian Sturt on the secrets of freelance success

Day 3—Ollie Holt on the joys of interviewing Thierry Henry

Tactical journalism is a weirdly controversial subject. In fact, it’s a weird subject full-stop. Twenty years ago —in Britain at least—it barely existed, and now it’s everywhere, in every newspaper, in countless blogs, on television.

Sky’s Monday Night Football with Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher is brilliant, an entertaining and informative hour-long dissection of the weekend’s action before the live game itself, but take a step back. Imagine telling television executives of the past what it entailed: "Two former defenders stand by a giant computer screen, move coloured circles about and draw lines, for an hour?”

It would never get commissioned and yet, for a certain type of fan, it’s an essential part of the week’s football.

For a certain type of fan…that’s where the controversy comes in. There are many ways of consuming and enjoying football and there is—to me—a strange antagonism between them. There are those who want, above all else, the team they support to win. There are those who want to be entertained. And there are those who want to take the game apart and understand why what happened, happened.

You’d think there’d be space for the many approaches to co-exist harmoniously (most people, I’d suggest, are a combination of all three), yet elements of the first two schools regularly attack the third. As somebody who writes tactics columns, I’ve been accused of ruining the game, taking the fun out it. I understand if people don’t like it; what I don’t understand is the hostility. If you don’t like it, don’t read it; football still happens.

(The oddity is that I agree with some of the critics; I think some tactics writers do go too far. Not everything is explicable by tactics. Rather tactics are one of a number of intertwined strands—along with talent, fitness, motivation, luck and probably several others—that go toward determining how a game turns out.)

One of the accusations those who hate tactical journalism regularly cast is that I’m "a post-Euro 96 fan." I went to my first Sunderland match in 1982 when I was six and by 1990 was going every week—but even if I were, so what? That tournament, which stood at the middle of a huge boom in football’s popularity in England, was 18 years ago. Fans who discovered the game then and are still watching have served their time.

The issue, fairly clearly, is class-based. There is a sense that the influx of middle-class fans in the 90s—post-Gazza, post-Taylor Report, post-Fever Pitch—has let to an intellectualisation of the game. There may be some element of truth to that: Certainly the glut of high-quality football literature over the past decade is partly inspired by the fact that publishers have realised that there is a constituency with disposable income who wants to read about football.

But my suspicion is that there’s always been a small core of fans who’ve been fascinated by how the game works: What has happened is that modern technology has allowed them a space. The proliferation of television channels means coverage has become increasingly specialist, and so what would have been seen as niche markets in the eighties when there were only four channels can now be catered to. The internet allows anybody to talk about anything, and so communities emerge.

The more we talk about tactics, the more we understand and the more sophisticated the discussion becomes.

A virtuous circle emerges, fertilised by the variety of football we can watch. In the days where the only televised football available to a viewer in England was Saturday night highlights and perhaps a dozen live league games, tactical awareness was inevitably limited. Now we can watch games from Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, Brazil, Ireland, the U.S. and Belgium as well as the Champions League and the Europa League.

Football is increasingly one enormous melting pot, but differences of approach still exist, and that in turn prompts tactical analysis: Why and how is football in Spain or Germany different to the game at home?

I was lucky enough, with Inverting the Pyramid, to write a book that caught the wave of the boom in interest in tactics. But that wave had been a long time coming. The interest in tactics has always been there, it just needed modern technology to unleash it.