The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines. Michael Cox
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‘Get it in the mixer!’
These five words represent the simplest tactic in football: launch the ball into the penalty box, take advantage of the ensuing chaos, perhaps following a goalmouth scramble, and hope to pinch a scruffy goal.
It’s an approach rightly ridiculed today, but as recently as the 1980s it was English football’s most popular tactic. During this period tactical thinking was influenced heavily by Charles Hughes, the Football Association’s director of coaching, who clumsily employed statistics to illustrate the value of launching the ball quickly downfield. He effectively formulated English football’s national coaching curriculum, as well as working alongside England managers Bobby Robson, who was sceptical about Hughes’s methods, and Graham Taylor, who was altogether much keener.
Hughes was obsessed with players thumping the ball into the ‘position of maximum opportunity’ (POMO) – inside the box, level with the far post – as often as possible. Hughes did have other, more sophisticated ideas, but his obsession with POMO dominated, and harmed, English football by creating predictable, simplistic teams and one-dimensional, brain-dead players. At the time of the Premier League’s formation in 1992, therefore, English football was considered to be about long balls, about route one, about POMO, about getting it in the mixer.
But this was a darker period for more significant reasons, as an overwhelming hooligan problem meant English football was derided both in the national media and across Europe. The nadir came with the 1985 European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium, when Liverpool supporters charged at Juventus fans, resulting in 39 people being killed by a collapsing wall. English clubs were subsequently banned from European competition for five years, and English footballing culture, traditionally slow to embrace tactical innovations from abroad, consequently became even more insular.
There were other tragedies. A fortnight before the Heysel disaster, 56 people were killed at Bradford City’s Valley Parade by a fire that engulfed an entire stand within minutes. Four years later, grave policing errors at Hillsborough resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a tragedy subsequently blamed, consistently and incorrectly, upon supporters.
In the aftermath of the Bradford fire a leading article in the Sunday Times described football as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people’. It was a desperately distasteful description, but serves as a useful low-water mark for measuring English football’s subsequent development. Slum people? The problem of hooliganism was largely defeated in the years that followed. Slum stadiums? The Taylor Report recommended all-seater grounds, and the Premier League’s formative years were dominated by new or dramatically renovated stadiums. Slum sport? English football changed enormously during the Premier League era, its popularity rising dramatically, first within England and then across the world.
While the Premier League was identical in its basic sporting structure to its predecessor, the old First Division, England’s top flight benefited from something of a rebrand considering the aforementioned problems, and 1992 isn’t an entirely arbitrary start date for football’s modern age – as explained in the opening chapter.
The concept of the Premier League enabled top-flight clubs to gain independence from the Football Association and the Football League, allowing them to negotiate lucrative broadcast and sponsorship contracts. The broadcasting aspect proved most significant; a bidding war between ITV and Sky ensued, with the latter securing TV rights in a move that completely transformed its previously loss-making satellite subscription service. Incidentally, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was one of the fiercest critics of the Premier League, ridiculing the concept as a ‘piece of nonsense’ that would ‘sell supporters down the river’. But Ferguson would define the division more than anyone, winning 13 of the first 21 titles before his retirement in 2013.
This book isn’t an account of the Premier League’s business development, but it’s impossible to ignore the extraordinary surge in TV revenue. The Premier League received £51m per season in broadcasting rights between 1992 and 1997, then considered an astounding amount. This sum increased exponentially over the next two decades, reaching £2.75bn per season by 2016, 50 times more than in 1992. Sky were effectively paying over £11m to screen each live match, a staggering figure when you consider rights to the entire final old First Division season cost less than £15m. A division essentially created to provide televisual entertainment has proved successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
It’s worth remembering, too, that these figures weren’t plucked out of thin air. Broadcasters could justify paying these eye-watering sums because of the huge public demand, which was fuelled by the Premier League becoming such a fantastic spectacle, the world’s most thrilling league. Set against the dark days of the 1980s, it represents an incredible turnaround. How did the football – the ‘product’, as the marketing men would say – become quite so good?
This book seeks to explain how. Although the 25 years are represented by 25 chapters, this is a thematic rather than a literal season-by-season account. The focus is upon the revolutionaries: the innovative managers, the game-changing players, the inspirational teams, the new tactical concepts, the off-field developments that influenced playing styles. The story is about the Premier League becoming universal, in two different ways.
First, it became universal on a tactical level. In the early 1990s there were very specific demands for every position – defenders simply defended, attackers simply attacked. But gradually positions became more all-encompassing, with defenders expected to start attacking moves and attackers encouraged to start defensive pressure. Players were increasingly all-rounders rather than specialists.
Second, it also became universal on a geographical basis, as English clubs broadened their horizons and became increasingly dependent upon foreign players and managers. Amazingly, on the Premier League’s opening weekend in August 1992, just 11 foreign players started for the 22 clubs combined, and there were no foreign managers. By its 25th season, the majority of Premier League players and managers were foreign – and almost every major footballing nation on earth was represented. Of the top 25 countries in the FIFA rankings, only Mexico didn’t have a Premier League representative in 2016/17.
The combination of these two factors saw Premier League sides abandon ugly, straightforward, direct football and embrace a more cultured, continental, technical style. This is the story of the Premier League’s remarkable tactical evolution – from pie to paella, from route one to false nines.
Part One
1
‘The back-pass law is the best rule change ever – it has changed the game.’
Peter Schmeichel
We are constantly reminded that ‘football didn’t start in 1992’ in response to Premier League-centric historical records, but 1992 effectively marked the beginning of modern football. It was the beginning of a new, exciting, more entertaining era of the game, the watershed moment that prompted sweeping changes to create a more fast-paced, technically proficient sport.
However, it had absolutely nothing to do with the formation of the Premier League.
The introduction of the back-pass law in 1992 had a transformative effect upon football. Not since 1925 – when the offside law was altered so that only two opponents, rather than three, needed to be goalside of an attacker – had a law change been so effective at improving the spectacle of the world’s most popular sport. There have been minor alterations to the Laws of the Game during the Premier League era: different interpretations regarding offside, stricter laws governing tackles, revisions to kick-off. But 1992 was literally a game-changer.
The law change was simple. Previously, goalkeepers were allowed to