Chapter 1 4 PIONEERS Managing a soccer team is a difficult job at the highest levels Club managers have to game-plan each week for new opponents stay up with the current trends in tactics and help the sporting director identify which players to sign The manager then needs to mold those players who might
Managers can experience a lot of stress during games come from all over the globe into a winning team Meanwhile national team managers get very little time to work with players They also have a limited pool of players to pick from since the players all have to be from that country Often national teams get to practice only a few weeks per year But when big tournaments such as the World Cup or Women’s World Cup roll around all eyes are on them Because of that pressure many managers don’t last long But those who are successful can stay with a club or national team for many years And some of them gain truly legendary status in the sport THE GREAT INNOVATOR Soccer as we know it today started in the mid-1800s in England Though some women played in the early days for a long time the sport was mostly limited to men And by the early 1900s athletic clubs began forming men’s soccer teams to represent them Usually members of the club recruited players they wanted on their side Managers didn’t have much say in player selection Thanks to managers such as Herbert Chapman that began to change Chapman managed four teams in England from 1907 to 1934 He was one of the first managers to focus on the 5
Herbert Chapman far left poses for a team photo with Huddersfield Town in 1922 importance of physical fitness in his players He was also a big supporter of a competition among European teams At the time teams mostly played opponents from nearby cities Even the tradition of opposing teams walking onto the field side by side was Chapman’s idea Chapman also had a great impact on the field In soccer’s early days the game was relatively disorganized Few teams used set lineups like those seen today Chapman knew that his 6
players would be more successful if they had more structure on the field He invented what became known as the W-M formation In the W-M the five attacking players form a W shape with three forwards at the top and two midfielders behind them The defenders form an M shape with three players on the back line and two midfielders in front of them The formation has changed and grown in the decades since However one popular formation used today known as the 3 4 3 is similar to Chapman’s original idea Chapman won two English First Division titles with Huddersfield Town in the 1920s He then won two more in the early 1930s with Arsenal He might have won more but Chapman died suddenly in January 1934 The Arsenal team he built won three more titles in the 1930s including the year he passed away THE METHOD Italian Vittorio Pozzo put his own stamp on the sport in the 1930s Pozzo managed top club teams such as AC Milan and Torino but he was best known for his time leading Italy’s men’s national team Pozzo fell in love with the game while studying in England And some of the tactics he used were similar to the English game Pozzo became famous for the Metodo or Method alignment It was similar to Chapman’s 7
