Tactical evolution in football

When the FA wrote down its first Laws of the Game in 1863, there were no formations in the modern sense. Most outfield players were attackers, the offside rule was strict, and matches were chaotic by later standards. The game's tactical history is the story of how that loose, attacker-heavy game settled into the more balanced and structured football of the modern game.

Each tactical era was a response to the one before. Defensive systems forced more inventive attacking play; attacking systems forced new defensive shapes. The major shifts in football tactics — from the 2-3-5 pyramid to the W-M, through catenaccio and total football to the pressing era — all sit within that ongoing exchange.

In the 1880s, as the game moved away from packs of forwards chasing the ball, teams began to spread out. The 2-3-5 — two defenders, three midfielders and five forwards — was a Scottish innovation that paired the new short passing game with a more even shape across the pitch. Within a few years it had become a widely used formation across organised football, and it kept that position into the 1920s.

The 2-3-5 was suited to a particular version of the offside rule, in which three opposition players had to be between an attacker and the goal for the attacker to be onside. With the offside rule shaped that way, having five forwards and only two defenders made sense. When the offside rule changed in 1925 to require only two opposition players, the 2-3-5 stopped working — and a new formation appeared to replace it.

The 1925 change to the offside rule made defending much harder. Teams that kept playing 2-3-5 conceded heavily in the first few seasons after the change. Herbert Chapman, the manager of Arsenal, responded by pulling one of his forwards back into midfield and one of his midfielders back to play as a third defender. The new shape — three defenders, four midfielders and three forwards — looked like the letters W and M stacked on top of each other when drawn on a tactics board, and the name stuck.

The W-M dominated football into the 1950s. It introduced the idea of a centre half as a third defender rather than as a creative midfielder, and it gave attacking play more structure. Many of the modern conventions of football — including identifiable defensive, midfield and attacking thirds — became standard during the W-M era.

The Hungary side managed by Gusztáv Sebes and captained by Ferenc Puskás was unbeaten from 1950 until the 1954 World Cup final. Their 1953 win against England at Wembley — known as the Match of the Century — was the first English home defeat to a continental opponent, and it forced a reckoning across English football about how the game could be played.

Hungary's tactical contribution was to break the rigid W-M positions. Their centre forward, Nándor Hidegkuti, played deeper than was usual, dragging the opposition's third defender out of position and creating space for the inside forwards to attack. The principle — that players should move out of their starting positions to disrupt the opposition's shape — would feed directly into total football twenty years later.

Catenaccio — Italian for "door bolt" — developed in Italian football across the 1950s and 1960s. The key innovation was the libero, or sweeper, a free defender stationed behind the rest of the defensive line, with the job of covering anything that got past them. Around the libero, a tight man-marking system meant each opposition attacker had a defender assigned to follow them everywhere.

The system's most famous practitioners were Helenio Herrera's Internazionale, who won two European Cups in the 1960s. Catenaccio earned a reputation for being a negative, defensive style — particularly because Inter often used it to defend a small lead — but its tactical contribution was real. The libero became a long-term feature of European football, and the principle of having a free defender behind the line shaped how teams thought about defensive cover for decades.

The total football developed at Ajax under Rinus Michels in the late 1960s, and carried into the Netherlands national team by the early 1970s, was an attempt to use space differently. The basic idea was that outfield players could move into different positions when the team structure required it. When a full back moved forward, a midfielder dropped to cover; when a forward moved wide, an inside forward came across; when a defender stepped into midfield, someone else dropped back.

The result was a team that could keep its shape without keeping its players in fixed positions, and that pressed high to win the ball back quickly when it lost possession. Total football reached its peak with the Netherlands national team's run to the 1974 World Cup final, where they lost to West Germany. The ideas behind the system — flexibility, pressing, and players who could play more than one role — fed directly into modern football and into possession football in particular.