In the beginning there was chaos, and football was without form. Then came the Victorians, who codified[1] it, and after them the theorists, who analyzed it. It wasn’t until the late 1920s that tactics in anything resembling a modern sense came to be recognized or discussed, but as early as the 1870s there was an acknowledgement that the arrangements of players on the pitch made a significant difference to the way the game was played. In its earliest form, though,football knew nothing of such sophistication.
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[2] 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[3] pitch.It was violent, unruly[4] and anarchic[5], and it was repeatedly outlawed[6]. Only in the early nineteenth century, when the public schools, their thinking shaped by advocates of muscular Christianity, decided that sport could be harnessed[7] for the moral edification[8] of their pupils, did anything approaching what we would today recognize as football emerge. Before there could be tactics, though, there had, first of all, to be a coherent set of rules[9].
Even by the end of the nineteenth century, when the earliest formations began to emerge, it was rare to subject them to too much thought. In football’s earliest days, the notion of abstract consideration of tactics, of charts with crosses and arrows, would have been all but inconceivable[10], and yet the development of the game is instructive in what it reveals of the mindset of football, the unseen,often unacknowledged hard-wiring[11] from which stemmed[12] British conceptions of how it should be played(and, for forty years after the rules were first drawn up, there was nothing but a British conception).
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[2] 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[3] pitch.It was violent, unruly[4] and anarchic[5], and it was repeatedly outlawed[6]. Only in the early nineteenth century, when the public schools, their thinking shaped by advocates of muscular Christianity, decided that sport could be harnessed[7] for the moral edification[8] of their pupils, did anything approaching what we would today recognize as football emerge. Before there could be tactics, though, there had, first of all, to be a coherent set of rules[9].
Even by the end of the nineteenth century, when the earliest formations began to emerge, it was rare to subject them to too much thought. In football’s earliest days, the notion of abstract consideration of tactics, of charts with crosses and arrows, would have been all but inconceivable[10], and yet the development of the game is instructive in what it reveals of the mindset of football, the unseen,often unacknowledged hard-wiring[11] from which stemmed[12] British conceptions of how it should be played(and, for forty years after the rules were first drawn up, there was nothing but a British conception).
