In INVERTING THE PYRAMID, 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'. This fifth-anniversary edition of a football modern classic has been fully updated to include an investigation of the modern-day Barcelona and how their style of play developed from Total Football, which itself was an evolution of the Scottish passing game invented by Queens Park and taken on by Tottenham in the 1930s. It also analyses different styles in the early British game and the changing mentality of South American football in the 1970s, as well as looking at the birth of the 3-5-2 system so prevalent today.

Author Biography

Jonathan Wilson is the author of a critically acclaimed biography of Brian Clough, a book on Eastern European football, The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches, Sunderland: A Club Transformed, The Outsider: A Complete History of the Goalkeeper and The Anatomy of Liverpool. He writes for the GUARDIAN, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and WORLD SOCCER, and he is the editor of THE BLIZZARD. Inverting the Pyramid won Best Football Book at the BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDs and was shortlisted for the WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD.