Michael Cox - The Mixer - The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines

HarperCollins Publishers

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Michael Cox 2017

Cover design Simeon Greenaway © HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com, DariuszPa/Getty Images

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Michael Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008215552

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008215569

Version: 2020-01-02

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Part One – In the Beginning

1 A Whole New Ball Game

2 Cantona & Counters

3 The SAS & The Entertainers

Part Two – Technical Progress

4 Between the Lines

5 Arsènal

6 Speed

Part Three – Expansion

7 Euro Progress & Squad Rotation

8 The Foreign Revolution

9 Big Sam & Long Balls

Part Four – Universality

10 One Up Front

11 Invincibles & Convincibles

12 The Makélélé Role

Part Five – Reactive Strategy

13 Iberian Influence I

14 Iberian Influence II

15 The Midfield Trio

Part Six – Direct Attacking

16 Roonaldo

17 A Wet and Windy Night at Stoke

18 Inverted Wingers

Part Seven – Possession

19 The Italian Job

20 Tiki-Taka

21 Assisters & False Nines

Part Eight – Post-possession

22 Rodgers’ Reversal

23 Pressing Issues

24 Leicester

25 Three at the Back

Postscript

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

‘Get it in the mixer!’

These five words represent the simplest tactic in football: launch the ball into the penalty box, take advantage of the ensuing chaos, perhaps following a goalmouth scramble, and hope to pinch a scruffy goal.

It’s an approach rightly ridiculed today, but as recently as the 1980s it was English football’s most popular tactic. During this period tactical thinking was influenced heavily by Charles Hughes, the Football Association’s director of coaching, who clumsily employed statistics to illustrate the value of launching the ball quickly downfield. He effectively formulated English football’s national coaching curriculum, as well as working alongside England managers Bobby Robson, who was sceptical about Hughes’s methods, and Graham Taylor, who was altogether much keener.

Hughes was obsessed with players thumping the ball into the ‘position of maximum opportunity’ (POMO) – inside the box, level with the far post – as often as possible. Hughes did have other, more sophisticated ideas, but his obsession with POMO dominated, and harmed, English football by creating predictable, simplistic teams and one-dimensional, brain-dead players. At the time of the Premier League’s formation in 1992, therefore, English football was considered to be about long balls, about route one, about POMO, about getting it in the mixer.

But this was a darker period for more significant reasons, as an overwhelming hooligan problem meant English football was derided both in the national media and across Europe. The nadir came with the 1985 European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium, when Liverpool supporters charged at Juventus fans, resulting in 39 people being killed by a collapsing wall. English clubs were subsequently banned from European competition for five years, and English footballing culture, traditionally slow to embrace tactical innovations from abroad, consequently became even more insular.

There were other tragedies. A fortnight before the Heysel disaster, 56 people were killed at Bradford City’s Valley Parade by a fire that engulfed an entire stand within minutes. Four years later, grave policing errors at Hillsborough resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a tragedy subsequently blamed, consistently and incorrectly, upon supporters.

In the aftermath of the Bradford fire a leading article in the Sunday Times described football as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people’. It was a desperately distasteful description, but serves as a useful low-water mark for measuring English football’s subsequent development. Slum people? The problem of hooliganism was largely defeated in the years that followed. Slum stadiums? The Taylor Report recommended all-seater grounds, and the Premier League’s formative years were dominated by new or dramatically renovated stadiums. Slum sport? English football changed enormously during the Premier League era, its popularity rising dramatically, first within England and then across the world.

While the Premier League was identical in its basic sporting structure to its predecessor, the old First Division, England’s top flight benefited from something of a rebrand considering the aforementioned problems, and 1992 isn’t an entirely arbitrary start date for football’s modern age – as explained in the opening chapter.

The concept of the Premier League enabled top-flight clubs to gain independence from the Football Association and the Football League, allowing them to negotiate lucrative broadcast and sponsorship contracts. The broadcasting aspect proved most significant; a bidding war between ITV and Sky ensued, with the latter securing TV rights in a move that completely transformed its previously loss-making satellite subscription service. Incidentally, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was one of the fiercest critics of the Premier League, ridiculing the concept as a ‘piece of nonsense’ that would ‘sell supporters down the river’. But Ferguson would define the division more than anyone, winning 13 of the first 21 titles before his retirement in 2013.

This book isn’t an account of the Premier League’s business development, but it’s impossible to ignore the extraordinary surge in TV revenue. The Premier League received £51m per season in broadcasting rights between 1992 and 1997, then considered an astounding amount. This sum increased exponentially over the next two decades, reaching £2.75bn per season by 2016, 50 times more than in 1992. Sky were effectively paying over £11m to screen each live match, a staggering figure when you consider rights to the entire final old First Division season cost less than £15m. A division essentially created to provide televisual entertainment has proved successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

It’s worth remembering, too, that these figures weren’t plucked out of thin air. Broadcasters could justify paying these eye-watering sums because of the huge public demand, which was fuelled by the Premier League becoming such a fantastic spectacle, the world’s most thrilling league. Set against the dark days of the 1980s, it represents an incredible turnaround. How did the football – the ‘product’, as the marketing men would say – become quite so good?