“I don’t know if they’ve read my books, but I think they might have done,” said Charles Hughes, the FA’s director of coaching.
He was speaking in 1994, just after Brazil’s triumph at the American World Cup – a tournament notable to Englishmen for the absence of the English – and the FA’s director of coaching, it seemed, was taking the intellectual credit for Brazil’s victory at arguably English football’s lowest ebb.
“Which team do you think scored 11 goals, with none of them involving more than three passes? Brazil! And who scored one from a move consisting of 14 passes? It’s not who you would think . . . the Republic of Ireland!”
Graham Taylor’s limited England side had been eliminated from the World Cup before the tournament had even begun, but Hughes’ job description didn’t cover the senior national side, just the more grassroots levels of the English game. And they were in good health, or so it appeared.
Between 1990 and 1994, England won the prestigious Toulon tournament four times, and in 1993, the U18 team won the European Championships. But theses successes don’t tell the story of the rot beginning to set in under the surface. Over 20 years on, it’s clear that England’s performance in reaching the semi-final of Euro 96 was the best it would get for quite some time; the ditches either side of the path to glory are filled with waylaid Golden Generations wearing Three Lions on their shirts.
The 1990s in English football was a time of rapid modernisation, from the rise of Sky Sports and football on commercial TV, to the Premier League and a whole new ball game, the English response was either to embrace it or rail against it. A time which often pitted the intellectual against the traditional was also true for those fighting over ownership of the identity of the national team.
But this story doesn’t go in the direction you might think it should. Hughes, the FA’s director of coaching was one of the so-called intellectuals of the game. Building on the statistical analysis of Charles Reep years before, he noted that the vast majority of goals comes from moves which involve three passes or fewer, but whilst it may be an oversimplification of his theory to suggest that his conclusion was to hoof the ball to a big man up front, it isn’t a big one.
If fewer passes lead to more goals, directness is key, but so is positioning. ‘Positions of Maximum Opportunity’, to be exact, were to be where the balls should be aimed, and the aftermath of the long pass would yield more attempts on goal from these positions than from any others.
It would be difficult to portray this as anything other than a catastrophic misinterpretation of data. After all, as Jonathan Wilson points out in Inverting the Pyramid, it doesn’t take anything into account other than the ball hitting the back of the net: passing moves which lead to penalties, corners and free kicks are all discounted, even if goals come from them. Nor does the theory allow for broken passing chains which bring a team into position where winning the ball back results in a chance to score in three passes or fewer. It seems to miss the fact that even if most goals are scored in three passes or fewer, those moves don’t always involve starting from scratch.
Applying this unthinkingly to youth coaching is arguably the single greatest reason for English football’s fall from grace in that period.
As a result of boiling football down to these sorts of basics, England may well have lost out more than is even imagined today: creative decision making, on-the-spot thinking, quickness of mind and, damningly, any kind of imagination were absent from many of the English footballers formed at the centre of excellence at Lilleshall, and that was all down to the extremism of their coaching.
In the end, of course, there are two sides to every story, but as England’s U20 side lifted the World Cup aloft in South Korea, it seemed like the perfect time to reflect on the fact that, between 1996 and today, England have failed miserably despite English teams reaching the Champions League final eight times between 1999 and 2012: at exactly the sort of time you’d expect those graduating from England’s centres of excellence in the mid-to-late 1990s to be reaching their peak.
The point, though, isn’t to go over old wounds, or to bemoan England’s lack of victories over the past two decades. It isn’t about pointing to a so-called Golden Generation and claiming mismanagement. It’s about warning of what to expect of the new crop of youngsters who are currently showing a similar kind of promise.
Just weeks ago, Chelsea’s title victory brought out the folly in such hard-heading thinking. When compared to Carlo Ancelotti, it’s clear that current boss Antonio Conte is at the polar opposite end of the managerial spectrum, despite being schooled on the same coaching course.The Italian managerial finishing school that is the Coverciano coaching course is capable of producing two managers cut from vastly different cloths, and yet still successful in a variety of ways. English football in the 1990s taught its young players to adhere to a strict philosophy, Coverciano taught its young coaches how to create one.
And in the end, free-thinking is the root of the successes for both men. Having been taught that football is for the creators, and that, inside the confines of 22 players kicking a ball around a field, the possibilities for creativity are almost limitless. But that’s not what English youngsters are taught – or at least, not what they were being taught when Charles Hughes was claiming Brazil’s World Cup triumph as his own.
Militant devotion to one tactic runs contrary to the egalitarian ethos of a game with few certainties. But beyond all else, applying that method to youth coaching selects only for certain types of player, while others – perhaps even more talented – fall by the wayside and are discarded as of the wrong type.
And yet, there’s a final twist, too.
Whilst Charles Hughes was taking credit for Brazil’s World Cup victory, the Brazilian public was questioning whether or not they even wanted to win if winning meant sacrificing beauty for something altogether more grotesque. The media furore at the style of play even caused the captain Dunga to lash out, in an expletive-laden rant, at the photographers getting shots of him lifting the trophy. England, however, weren’t even there to witness it.
And as the national team is once again stuck in a low ebb, it is looking to its youthful age groups expectantly once again. But if they aren’t to look at the U20 side, but the U21s, they’ll find a scenario throwing out similar vibes to the 1993 failure to reach the next year’s World Cup under Graham Taylor.
Aidy Boothroyd’s U21 side have already, after just one game at the European Championships, been accused of being a ‘long-ball’ team. And after the euphoria of the U20 World Cup victory, and the hope that maybe this generation could be different, there are already signs that Boothroyd, nicknamed Hoofroyd by disgruntled fans of former clubs, feels as though he is red-pilling yet another generation with long-ball tactics.
With successive winning Premier League managers having been taught specifically that the strict philosophies favoured by the likes of Charles Hughes are dangerous when it comes to football management, you’d think that the English national set-up might take a leaf out of their book, especially with the promise Paul Simpson’s U20 side has shown.
Not learning from the mistakes of the past make another wasted generation of promising talent look more and more likely.
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