Why there is no such thing as a perfect football tactic | Jonathan Wilson
In this mailbag edition of his newsletter, Jonathan answers questions about the evolution of tactics, heat and World Cup outsiders
Do you believe playing styles are developing incrementally or cyclically? Will things naturally come back around, or is it more a matter of rock, paper, scissors where one style counters another for a short while, as the current style gets broadly adopted? - Paul
I dislike the term cyclical" for tactics because it implies inevitability. Winter, spring, summer, autumn is a cycle; what happens in football tactics is not. When older ideas are repurposed for the modern age, they come with knowledge of what went before. So, to take an extreme example, when Pep Guardiola started fielding teams in a sort of 3-2-2-3 shape, it wasn't the W-M used by Herbert Chapman in the late 1920s, because in the 100 years since, football has changed enormously: players are fitter, pitches are better, kit is better, we understand pressing, we have data and sophisticated analytical modelling.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he'll answer the best in a future edition.
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