Inverting The Pyramid Paperback – August 6, 2024

I have been reading through this book which is almost the size of the bible. It's loaded full of detailed stories of soccer strategies and ideas. Really good to help a new comer be aware of what has come before. It also give me ideas for things we could try differently in various situations.

Great book, a must read for any coach as it will help them understand the evolution of tactics.

(Reviewing the U.S. version of the book) This is a wonderful book for someone of an intellectual mindset coming to soccer as an adult. Wilson explains the early development of the sport, how duties came to be assigned to particular positions, and how those duties and positions evolved over time. He also describes how national styles developed, with a particular emphasis on how England came to its particular directness and physicality, and how it has failed to learn many lessons.I had only two complaints. The first is that Wilson repeatedly will switch from talking about one club, manager, or strategy to another without clear transitions or set-up for the new topic. This gets very confusing at times. The second is that this book is a challenge for non-British readers. Wilson assumes that the reader has a fairly detailed historical knowledge of British soccer. He'll refer casually to managers, players, and incidents of 100 or 150 years ago on the assumption that everyone knows who or what they are. That can make it difficult to understand some parts of the narrative.And now a special note of derision for the U.S. version of the book. The publisher appears to have recognized that Americans are getting more interested in soccer, and responded by producing an edition that, as far as I can tell, did nothing but search and replace "football" with "soccer," including in the subtitle. It comes off quite oddly in some places, particularly in references to "Total Soccer" instead of "Total Football." To be clear, any American who has taken the effort to read this book is accustomed to hearing the sport we know of as "soccer" called "football." If they wanted to produce a book for the U.S. market, their efforts would have been better spent by producing a glossary or adding some footnotes explaining the things that every Briton knows.

This is not only the best soccer book i ever read (and i have read lots), it is one of the best books i have ever read. It is clearly aimed at the serious football fan or coach who actually cares about the subtleties of the game and also has an interest in the history that has underlain the evolution of the game. It is actually as much of a history of the ideas as it is about the ideas and tactics themselves. I just pulled it off my bookshelf now and i want to go read it again (that would be the fourth time i think). The global nature of the game and its influences are lovingly described from Rio to Moscow via Ipswich. A great book, a must-read for any serious-minded soccer fan. Jonathan Wilson has taken sports writing and soccer writing to a different level.....congratulations Professor Wilson!

Great book on the evolution of tactics in soccer. This book will give you ideas on how to create your own tactical innovations:

This book is admirable for its erudition and its focus on the evolution of tactics from the playing fields of nineteenth century public schools to the present. One really must admire a British specialist who digs into the entire global picture of football and comes up with a relatively comprehensible narrative out of what must have been reams of club histories and match reports that probably contain very little of the information the author seeks. It is readable, informative and occasionally funny. Here comes the "but". Quality really declines toward the end, as if the author was rushing to meet a publishing deadline or simply outsourced the job to a football fan with a bizarre form of Tourrette's that forces him to spout senseless combinations of numbers such as "3-3-3-1, 4-5-1, 3-4-1-2". The next-to-last chapter is completely unreadable. Whereas other chapters developed the story of a single innovator or the situation in a single country, this one just rushed through a myriad of modern formations and discusses sweeping issues such as the disappearance of the playmaker. Another late chapter devotes incomprehensible amounts of space to an obscure polemic between a football statistician and a future England coach. The central narrative is lost completely, which is tied to another central weakness: the lack of occasional paragraphs to sum up the evolution of tactics as the long procession of teams, coaches and players parade through the foreground of the book and just as quickly disappear from view. The title "Inverting the Pyramid" is a brilliant example of this: it sums up an immense amount of information into a neat little compact literary phrase, but that kind of brilliance is somewhat absent from the rest of the book. In short, I enjoyed the book, I learned a lot from it and I will probably return to it frequently after matches, but it really could have used a little more tidying up from an editor (hopefully in a future edition).

As a long time American soccer player, I was never taught much in the way of tactical nuance during my playing days. So I wanted to learn what i was missing (maybe I could teach my kids those things my own coaches didnt know about). This book is a fantastic history of soccer tactics. It is not a dry read either. If you are looking for a more techinical discussion of tactics, perhaps you need to read other books, but before you can develop into those learned treatises, it is important to understand the evolution of the modern systems and this book walks you through that history. Afterall, the logic of modern tactics is better understood when you see where they came from, historically speaking.