The W-M formation

The W-M took its name from the shape of the players on the pitch. The three forwards and two inside forwards together formed a W. The three defenders and two half-backs together formed an M. When the team was drawn out, the two shapes sat on top of each other, and the formation was named accordingly.

The W-M was the first widely used formation in football to have as many defenders as attackers. Where the 2-3-5 had given over half the outfield to attack, the W-M divided the outfield evenly. It dominated football in the 1930s and 1940s and remained common into the 1950s. Many later formations have been based on a similar balance between defensive and attacking lines.

In 1925, IFAB changed the offside rule. Under the old rule, an attacker needed three opposition players between them and the goal to be onside; from 1925 onwards, only two were needed. The change was meant to produce more goals — it was the second time IFAB had tinkered with offside in the previous decade — and it worked. In the 1925-26 English season, the average number of goals per match rose by more than a third compared with the previous season.

The clubs most exposed were those that continued to play 2-3-5 with two defenders. Forwards could now stand much higher up the pitch, and the existing defensive structure simply could not cope. Many leading clubs suffered heavy defeats in the first season after the change, and managers across English football began looking for new formations to limit the damage.

Herbert Chapman had been one of the most successful English managers of the early 1920s, winning consecutive league titles with Huddersfield Town in 1923-24 and 1924-25. He moved to Arsenal in 1925, just as the offside rule was being changed, and was as exposed to the new problem as anyone else. The first half of his 1925-26 season at Arsenal made the need for a tactical response obvious.

Chapman's solution was to pull one of the half-backs back to play as a third defender. The centre half — until then the team's creative midfielder — was withdrawn into the defensive line to mark the opposition centre forward. To replace the centre half's creative role, Chapman also pulled one of the inside forwards back to play deeper in midfield. The new shape, 3-2-2-3, was the W-M, and Arsenal began using it from late 1925 onwards. The idea is generally credited to a conversation between Chapman and his captain Charlie Buchan in the days after a heavy defeat to Newcastle.

The defensive line had three players — a right back, a centre back and a left back. The centre back, originally called the "stopper", was a defender first and last, with the specific job of marking the opposition centre forward. The two full-backs were responsible for the opposition wingers. This was the first widely used formation in football to have three permanent defenders.

Ahead of the defence, two half-backs played in front of the back three. Two inside forwards played further forward, just behind a three-man forward line of outside right, centre forward and outside left. The half-backs and inside forwards together made up a four-man midfield, but with a clear division — the half-backs were defensive midfielders, the inside forwards were attacking midfielders or creators. The split between defensive and creative midfield is a feature the W-M introduced and that has never really gone away.

Arsenal won five league titles and two FA Cups between 1930 and 1938, mostly playing the W-M, and other English clubs adopted the formation in response. By the middle of the 1930s, most English clubs used some form of W-M, and the formation had spread to Scotland and Ireland. From the late 1930s onwards, English coaches working abroad and continental sides copying English football adopted variations of it across Europe and South America.

The W-M did not arrive everywhere identically. Italian football developed a halfway version called the metodo, with a 2-3-2-3 shape that pulled one of the inside forwards back but kept only two full defenders. The metodo's main figure was Vittorio Pozzo, who won two World Cups with Italy using it in 1934 and 1938. The South American countries kept playing 2-3-5 longer than Europe, and some teams there only moved away from the formation after the Second World War.

The W-M's man-to-man marking was rigid by modern standards. Each defender had one attacker to follow, and the system worked best when the opposition stayed in their starting positions. As attacking play became more fluid in the 1950s, with players moving out of position to drag defenders out of theirs, the W-M's structure began to look brittle. The Hungarian national team's 6-3 win over England at Wembley in 1953 was the most dramatic demonstration of the problem — Hungary's deep-lying centre forward Nándor Hidegkuti pulled England's centre back out of position, opening space the W-M had no way to defend.

From the 1950s onwards, more flexible formations gradually replaced the W-M. The 4-2-4 used by Brazil to win the 1958 World Cup, the 4-3-3 that followed, and the various Italian defensive systems of the 1960s all moved away from strict man-to-man marking. By the end of the 1960s, the W-M was a historical formation rather than a living one.