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Inverting the Pyramid

The History of Football Tactics

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Inverting the Pyramid

By: Jonathan Wilson
Narrated by: Damian Lynch
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About this listen

Winner of the British Sports Book Awards

Football Book of the Year

The fifteenth anniversary edition, fully revised and updated, of Jonathan Wilson's modern classic.

In the modern classic, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing the global history of tactics, from modern pioneers right back to the beginning, when chaos reigned. Along the way, he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the sport, and probes why the English, in particular, have proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract.

Fully revised and updated, this fifteenth-anniversary edition analyses the evolution of modern international football, including the 2022 World Cup, charting the influence of the great Spanish, German and Portuguese tacticians of the last decade, whilst pondering the effects of footballs increased globalisation and commercialisation.

©2018 Jonathan Wilson (P)2018 Orion Publishing Group Coaching Football (American) Football (Soccer) Sports Portugal Thought-Provoking Game

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Critic reviews

"One of the most revelatory sports books of the year." (Scotland on Sunday)

"Masterful...it could be the best thing to have happened to English football in years." (Time Out)

"Gloriously readable, eccentric and informative." (Metro)
All stars
Most relevant
This is beautifully written history of football tactics. Self indulgent in all the best ways. I loved it.

A Beautiful Book

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An excellent roadmap of football history, and tactical innovations. It gives great insight into how environment and attitude mould footballing cultures

Football history

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This is definitely THE book about football tactics. Mind that it's not a manual, it's a story about different ideas of football and how they have been developing in time and why. So it is crammed with facts, anecdotes, names, and countries to the point it starts resembling a suitcase with a bit too much clothes in it. But the author does a good job keeping it all as accessible and structured as possible. And engaging, of course!

The pdf has photos from the printed edition but lacks tactical schemes for the matches mentioned in the book, which is inconvenient. And the narrator struggles with most of the non-English words, which this book is full of, and I do feel he could have prepared for this challenge more. Apart from these, the narration is good and the book makes a really good listen.

The story of the game through the story of tactics

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It’s a delightful insight to the history of modern tactics however - as it is a book on football tactics you don’t have the joy of any diagrams (apart from the visualisation in your head - which could be wrong)

I also feel there was too much time spent on the historical elements leaving me sometimes detached by the mention of unrecognisable names

Great book but...

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Excellent history of the tactical side of the game, updated recently to include Pep and also Gegen pressing. Well worth a listen.

Excellent

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