WE ARE TOLD THAT HISTORY IS written by the victors and that may well be true, which is why Ulysses stands taller than Hector, Mao is greater than Chiang Kai-shek and, before DVDs came along, most lived in a VHS world where Betamax was a distant memory. But football is different. Ask most historians to name the three greatest World Cup sides ever and they’ll probably mention Hungary in 1954, Brazil in 1970 and Holland in 1974. Yet only the Brazilians actually lifted the cup. The other two were defeated, in both cases by West German sides whose memory is largely forgotten.
Their greatness is based not so much upon what they achieved, but how they achieved it and the social and historical conditions in which they existed. Hungary in 1954 were the first dominant side from behind the Iron Curtain, a team which introduced innovations in terms of training and tactics. At a time when the Soviet brand of communism still had plenty of admirers in the West, portions of the media naturally had a weak spot for them. Two years later, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian revolution, Sandor Kocsis, Ferenc Puskas and Zoltan Czibor all defected and they became poster children of the anti-Soviet camp.
The Holland of Rinus Michels, who died this week, similarly saw its legendary status amplified by a unique set of social and cultural circumstances. They were natural countercultural icons in an era of public protests, flower power and social upheaval. Their freewheeling creative style, with the constant switching of roles and duties on the pitch and defenders given licence to attack like strikers, seemed like an attempt to subvert the natural, conservative order of football, freed from the rigidity of tactical schemes and even the banality of positions. For the first time, the players weren’t defined by their positions — right back or inside left — but rather by who they were and what they did.
The fact that Holland had not even qualified for a World Cup since 1938 and went into the tournament as underdogs only contributed to their legend. They became everyone’s second team as they knocked off the traditional powers one by one. Their image off the pitch was just as important. Michels allowed wives and girlfriends free access to the Holland camp, at a time when most managers seemed to model themselves on drill sergeants. With their unkempt hairstyles and funky sideburns, they looked more like rock stars than athletes. Even their shirt numbers, with Johan Cruyff’s incongrous No 14 and the No 8 of Jan Jongbloed, the goalkeeper, smacked of the era’s iconoclasm.
All this contributed to what came to be known as “Total Football”. In the week of Michels’s death, he has been hailed as a revolutionary, an innovator, a man who helped to reinvent football. Yet there are still legitimate questions as to the true legacy of Total Football and whether its impact is a myth worth debunking. After all, if it was so brilliant and innovative, why didn’t others emulate it successfully? And why did it not provide a lasting footballing blueprint?
Indeed, Total Football’s trophy haul is limited to less than a decade, from 1965 to 1974. In that time Ajax won six Dutch titles (four with Michels, two with Stefan Kovacs, his former assistant, who replaced him in 1971 when he moved to Barcelona) and reached the European Cup final four times (winning once under Michels and twice with Kovacs). Michels also led Barcelona to the Liga crown in 1974. And then, as suddenly as it burst on to the scene, it disappeared, despite numerous attempts by other clubs, particularly in Germany, Italy and Spain, to implement it.
In the sciences, particularly in mathematics and physics, a theory becomes law once it is proven and that proof is empirically replicated by others. Total Football has remained just that: a theory. Nobody was able to replicate it, not even Michels himself, once its heyday had passed.
Franz Beckenbauer, captain of the West Germany side that defeated Holland in the 1974 final, was famously unimpressed and offered his own theory to explain Total Football’s demise. “It owed more to the element of surprise than to any magic formula,” he said. “They got away with it for so long because the opposition could not work out what tactics they were facing. It never dawned on them, certainly not until it was too late, that there were no tactics at all. Just brilliant players with a ball.”
It is a provocative theory and one which has its merits. Michels’s system afforded players near-total freedom to follow their instincts in terms of movement and actions. A full back could storm forward and remain up front for as long as he saw fit, while a striker could drop deep and patrol the back line if he felt it helped the team. The balance of power, at least on the pitch, shifted almost entirely in the hands of the players.
Jorge Valdano, the former Real Madrid and Argentina giant and an avowed admirer of Total Football, described it like this: “The manager, a single individual, no matter how intelligent, can never outsmart 11 intelligent, creative, thinking footballers. That’s what made it so special. Sadly, few people think that way today.” And there’s a reason they don’t. There is a very fine line between freedom and anarchy. Total Football’s strength, its freedom and unpredictability, was also its undoing as it took a tremendous toll on the players. It wasn’t just the opponents who had no idea where, say, Ruud Krol was going to go next, it was his team-mates as well. This meant that rather than simply focusing on the ball and their own tasks, players had constantly to be aware of what their team-mates were doing as well. And the slightest slip could prove very costly.
One of the factors that helped Total Football initially was that Michels’s sides were — perhaps unwittingly — one of the first systematically to apply the offside trap. Each of the four defenders, Krol, Wim Suurbier, Arie Haan and Wim Rijsbergen, pushed up the pitch as far as possible. Since most other teams tended to defend deep, opposing strikers weren’t used to being left alone and regularly strayed offside.
Pushing up the back four had another effect. It compressed the play in a small, congested area of the pitch, making life very difficult for opponents used to space. Yet this suited the Dutch just fine, as Michels’s team was packed with players who were comfortable on the ball in tight spaces, even at the back, where Haan was a recycled attacking midfield player.
Indeed, the side was filled with men who seemingly could do everything well, which is what allowed them to switch positions so effectively. Cruyff, who had the freest of free roles, was the epitome of this, of course, a man equally comfortable tackling back as he was bombing up the wing.
