There is much discussion in Spain and abroad, if Barcelona Pep Guardiola is the best football team of all time. For more entertaining than we find it is impossible to resolve a debate. It is even sterile. There are too many variations and we lack information. The game today is faster, players travel more miles per game, balls and boots are different from when they played Alfredo di Stefano at Real Madrid, the Brazilian Pele or Puskas and Hidegkuti in Hungary fifty. As champions of Europe and the Ajax of Johan Cruyff and Van Basten Milan and Baresi, or Souness and Dalglish Liverpool, judgments are necessarily subjective. If anyone ever seems to win the debate, never will be because there is a demonstrable scientific truth on the matter, but because, as a good lawyer, or perhaps better argued, simply because more shouts.
Also, when we make comparisons of this type we just talk about teams that appeared after the invention of television, such as Real Madrid of that of the five consecutive European Cups, which won 7 to 3 Eintracht Frankfurt-to delight of the first generation of viewers, in 1960. But what we know from before that time? The fuzzy films that left us, for example, Uruguay won the World Cup against Brazil in 1950-the famous "Maracana" - not the least useful as comparative material. So who is unable to refute the notion that the best team ever seen was that Uruguay, or world champions Italy in 1934 and 1938 that destroyed or Arsenal in the Premier League at that same time, or even a The two teams, England and Scotland, who played the first international match in history in 1872?
What we can say, however, is that the current Barcelona represents a milestone in the evolution of football. There is a before and after this equipment. It has redefined the game, has made the entire world of football coaches-from toddlers to the technical bodies of the biggest clubs in the world, back to the drawing board and reconsider its most basic premises. Beginning with the sacred concept of tactical position: that if that works best is the 2-3-5, or 4-3-3, or 4-2-4 or 4-4-2. Barca has condemned the mathematical rigidity in football to irrelevance. So has the old and venerable notion that central or center forwards have to be tall and burly. Or with that article of faith that says that every team needs a stopper, a specialist in destruction, in the midfield. Barca has been a democratic revolution in the sport. Has shown, with their successes, that the only condition necessary for a football player is to be able to prosper and go with the ball. Size does not matter, and the position of each field, either.
The germ was "total football" of Ajax Amsterdam, patented by the philosopher of sport Rinus Michels. His beloved disciple, Johan Cruyff, brought him to Barcelona, ​​first as a player and then coach. And out came the dream team in Barcelona. What we see today is the refinement of this model, purified by distillation of the ideology of Michels. What is more practiced than football Pepteam total football is all.
Let us further back in time, before Ajax Michels, whose principles he carried the great Dutch team of the seventies (like Barca did today with the Spanish world champion). Back to the first roots of the sport whose rules were written in a London pub in 1863 and try to trace its evolution as any change in the nature, as in that of humanity itself, which over the millennia has left behind him does not work and has adapted to what is needed, boosting efficiency.
That first international match in 1872 between Scotland and England was played on a cricket field (the national sport of the islands for more than one hundred years) before 4,000 spectators. The chroniclers of the time raised the positioning on the field in numerical terms, pointing out that England had played with a 2-8 formation, and Scotland, with a 3-7. Despite the predominance of strikers on both teams, the match ended 0-0, which proved a great truth not fully digested today: to fill the front of troops is not always the most effective way to score goals, that no congestion conducive to creativity. The other moral of the game, related to the first, was to leave more space allows more fluid game. The Scots 3-7, gameplay was defined by the possession of the ball and pass it by the balls and dribbling inefficient attempts of the English.
The leap came six years later, in 1888, when Wrexham won the Welsh Cup sporting a new 2-3-5, the "pyramid system" which would be imposed as inflexible orthodoxy for the next 40 years. Until in 1930, Herbert Chapman, Arsenal, patented the WM formation. And until the Italian coach Vittorio Pozzo invented 4-3-3, known as the "method". This was to put players in order to provide more room for maneuver. Meant to give the pastor a meadow. And so both the Arsenal and Italy caught his opponents off guard. These, disoriented, did not know decrypt Chapman and Pozzo approaches and, therefore, the Arsenal was the dominant team in England in the thirties and Italy won two World Cups in a row: 1934 and 1938.
After the Second World War, revolution, whose impact is felt even today, came from Hungary. A match at Wembley Stadium in 1953 between the Hungarian Olympic champions last year, and England shook the world of football. The English do not fit in the head about losing. They had never been defeated by a team from outside the islands and were considered the best in the world in fact, just as the teams that win tournaments, baseball or football in the United States call themselves "world champions" . But the Hungarian had a bath of humility devastating to the British. The commentators were forced to admit that Hungary had given a football lesson to the inventors of the sport. Using a philosophy based on possession and the exquisite individual skills of its players, the Hungarians, whose star player was the future Madrid-Ferenc Puskas used a secret weapon whose impact the English were unable to counter. The course Nándor Hidegkuti striker did not play as such occupied a rearmost position in midfield. It was what we would call a "false nine". Hidegkuti was neither one thing nor another, neither forward or midfielder, and the robust British defenses did not know what to do with it. I got sick. He scored twice and created the space for Puskas mark two. The final result was 3-6. When they returned to see the faces of the two selections, one year later in Budapest, the English continued equally perplexed. Or more. Lost 7 to 1. Real Madrid took over clocking to Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano using a version even more unpredictable and dynamic SUV that Hidegkuti. It was an unstoppable team. He imitated the Hungarian model, and as for victories on the field, got over it.
Italy, in particular the coach Helenio Herrera, he found the antidote to the early sixties. Not only against the Hungarian-style Real Madrid, but against the physical strength of another nation on the rise, Germany. Starting from the premise that the ball was expendable, the catenaccio was to wait and wait behind the opponent tangled in a web, taking advantage of your posting offensive and be attentive to the depletion of the rival and the opportunity for a counterattack that resulted in goal. With a little was enough. Herrera also invented the phenomenon of "sweeper", a defense playing behind the last line in an emergency, a life insurance. It was not, nor intended to be, a work of art, Herrera was no Michelangelo nor the San Siro stadium in the Sistine Chapel. But it worked. Herrera's Inter won the European Cup in 1964 and 1965.
The Germans were intrigued by the idea of ​​the libero, but in a more daring. They understood that if the player occupying that position was not to make any specific player, then no one would trouble him. Instead of merely firefighter operations, could infiltrate the midfield and incorporated into creating numerical superiority to attack the defense. For the first time, a player who by location in the diagram was active in defense added the virtues of a pin. Even knew how to shoot on goal. That was the role that Franz Beckenbauer patented and almost won the World Cup to Germany in 1966.
The team that beat them, England, made the first contribution from the islands tactic since the time of Chapman. Ended wing orthodoxy, whose mission specialist end was dribbling down the flanks, beat the lateral speed and cross the ball into penalty area, creating scoring chances for the striker. Alf Ramsey, the English coach, got rid of the wings. His 4-4-2 created a compact block consisting of eight versatile midfielders with unpredictable movements. The wings gave way to less technical players, fewer specialists, but better placed to partner with the ball.
The dominant team of that era, however, was Brazil World Cup winner in 1958, 1962 and 1970. They were the Harlem Globetrotters of football. A phenomenon sui generis and, by definition, unique, based on a technique never seen before and a philosophy of relentless attack. They played 4-2-4 and his plan was simple: if the other brand one, we scored two, if the other three, us four. In other countries, the left side, for example, a player was applied, rigid in his defensive principles, in Brazil was another attacker. Today, only the Brazilians produce players (Carlos Alberto, Roberto Carlos, Dani Alves, Marcelo) of these characteristics, assumptions defenses that run throughout the field, score goals and play as old wings.
