The 2-3-5 pyramid

The 2-3-5 was the first formation to be widely adopted across world football. It was named after the way the players were arranged on the pitch — two defenders at the back, three half-backs across midfield, and five forwards in the attacking line. When drawn from goalkeeper upwards, the shape resembled a pyramid, and the name stuck.

The 2-3-5 was widely used from the 1880s until the late 1920s. Many leading teams in Britain, Europe and South America played some version of the formation across that period. It only began to be replaced after a change in the offside rule made it untenable, and even then it persisted in some parts of the world for years afterwards.

The earliest English football, in the 1860s and 1870s, was a dribbling game. Forwards ran with the ball as far as they could before losing it, with the rest of the team chasing in support. The Scottish game, especially at Queen's Park in Glasgow, developed differently. Scottish teams passed the ball between players, which required a more even distribution across the pitch rather than a pack of forwards.

The 2-3-5 was the natural shape for the Scottish passing game. With two defenders, three half-backs and five forwards, the team could keep its width and offer passing options at every level. As Scottish players moved south to play in English professional football in the 1870s and 1880s, they brought the formation with them. By the late 1880s the 2-3-5 had become standard in much of English football, and it later spread through organised football in mainland Europe and South America.

The goalkeeper played behind the two full-backs, who were called the right back and the left back. The three half-backs across midfield were the right half, the centre half and the left half. The five forwards were the outside right, the inside right, the centre forward, the inside left and the outside left. Eleven positions, in five lines, each with its own job.

The numbering of shirts that came in during the 1930s — goalkeeper as one, then full-backs as two and three, half-backs as four, five and six, forwards as seven to eleven — was based on the 2-3-5 line-up. Even though the formation itself disappeared, the numbering survived for decades and shaped how positions were referred to long afterwards.

Modern football uses "centre half" to mean a central defender. In the 2-3-5, the centre half played in the middle of midfield, between the two full-backs and the five forwards. He was the team's deep playmaker — responsible for breaking up opposition attacks, distributing the ball to the half-backs alongside him, and starting attacks from midfield.

The centre half was widely considered the most important position on the pitch in 2-3-5 football. The best centre halves of the era — players who dictated their teams' play from the middle of the field — were the creative engines of their sides. When the formation later shifted to the W-M in the late 1920s, the centre half was pulled back into defence, and a new position had to be invented to replace the creative role.

The 1925 rule change was meant to produce more goals, and it did — far more than the rule-makers had intended. In the 1925-26 English season, the average number of goals per match rose by more than a third compared with the previous season. Teams playing 2-3-5 found themselves chasing players who could now stand much higher up the pitch, and the two full-backs simply could not cope.

The response, within a couple of seasons, was the W-M. Arsenal under Herbert Chapman pulled the centre half back into a third defensive role and withdrew one of the inside forwards to midfield, producing a 3-2-2-3 shape with three defenders and three forwards. Within a decade, many leading teams in England had adopted some form of the W-M, and the 2-3-5 was no longer the main top-level formation.

The formation's most lasting legacy was the position numbering it produced. Football shirt numbers from one to eleven were assigned by the 2-3-5 layout — goalkeeper as one, right back as two, left back as three, and so on through to outside left as eleven. The numbering survived long after the formation itself, and the conventional associations between shirt numbers and positions remain recognisable in modern football.

The 2-3-5 also shaped how positions are spoken about in modern football. The terms "full-back", "half-back" and "inside forward" all come from the 2-3-5. Some of those terms have changed meaning since, but the basic vocabulary remains recognisable. The formation lasted long enough, and was used widely enough, that football's language never fully escaped its influence.