Inverting the pyramid

What Hacker News says

1. jablAug 2021
   If anyone is interested in the historical development of football tactics there's a pretty good book that covers it called Inverting the Pyramid, by Jonathan Wilson.

   The title of the book refers to the broad trend going from a few defenders and lots of strikers to the modern game with the opposite.

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2. lordnachoOct 2016
   If you're going to interpret stats, you need a lot of them. Reep obviously could not gather everything required to make a sensible conclusion by himself.

   For one thing, Swindon Town has been a middling team since forever. No particular innovation in strategy would be happening there at the time when Reep was watching them. So he was probably not sampling nearly widely enough to notice anything.

   If you look at Wilson's book called Inverting the Pyramid, there's a great history of football strategy.

   There's no particular thing to do that will win you the game. There's always been a tug-of-war between pressing, passing, sitting back, and pressuring. Ukrainian coaches IIRC started to do high pressure, where you try to annoy the opposition into making mistakes high up the pitch. The riposte to that is that opponents who are comfortable on the ball will just... not lose the ball so much. And you'll get tired running after it, and you'll lose. This sort of balance thing comes and goes. Witness Barcelona passing it dozens and dozens of times to win a huge trophy haul a few years ago. And then they ran into a combined 7-0 beating by Bayern. Look at Mourinho, he somehow won the CL with Inter, parking the bus infamously against possibly the greatest Barcelona team of all time.

   There's a big issue with using stats for adversarial games. It may be fine -though non trivial- to use stats to judge players by (tackles, red zone shots, etc), but you don't know how the opposition will react to your strategy. It's even more non trivial to work out how the other team will reshape itself given what you do, which depends on what they do, which depends...

   It will be interesting, though. Stats is seeping into soccer steadily. We'll see better analysis and innovation, for sure.

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3. Ar-CurunirJan 2015
   I would recommend Inverting the Pyramid, it is a fascinating journey through the history of footie tactics.

   Also, often it's difficult to gauge what's happening in a football match from watching on TV. Going to a game allows you a clearer view of how the match is progressing.

   However, after watching enough matches, you can pretty soon see patterns and tactics and styles of each team, and it gets pretty fascinating.

   And then of course there's the ability of the players to dazzle individually, either via great passing or with tricks or great tackles or an outstanding save.

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4. philwelchJun 2012
   Another good resource for soccer, less in-depth but a good survey of the history of soccer tactics, is "Inverting the Pyramid" by Jonathan Wilson.
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5. walthamstowMar 2023
   It's not going to be that relevant to many people here, but there is a longform soccer writing magazine called The Blizzard which is excellent. It's edited by Jonathan Wilson of 'Inverting the Pyramid' fame.
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6. vyshaneOct 2014
   Recently read:

   Programming Elixir - Dave Thomas

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   Functional Programming in Swift - Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra

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   Sipping from time to time:

   Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics - Jonathan Wilson

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