A year or so ago, the idea that Barcelona’s current side was the best to have ever played the game was pretty popular. The ball was passed from world-class player to world-class player as Barca would patiently strangle the life out of opposition teams. One tricky season later and it seemed we had been...
We have reached the penultimate side on the list, and we are now in the rather odd position where the team we have named second best in history would probably be beaten by every team that came before it in the series. The problem with judging teams from different eras is that it is...
Football can be an extremely black and white game at times – goal or no goal; transfer or no transfer; injury or no injury. The butterfly effect can be tracked easier than in many other walks of life. Potential legacies thrown away because of one loss; sport-wide evolution in style disappearing on the back...
Total Football might well have been the worst thing to have happened to Dutch football. The greatness of Rinus Michel’s creation hung a weight around the necks of the generations that followed. Having experienced the teams of the seventies, those that followed not only had to win, but do so in style. With the...
There is a legitimate argument to be made for Adolf Hitler being responsible for one of the greatest sides football has ever seen. Germany never impressed under Nazi rule and they didn’t even have a professional league until 1963 – Hitler paid more attention to the Olympics, using football to his advantage but not...
The long term readers among you might notice that this isn’t the first time we have discussed Helenio Herrera’s Internazionale side. Seeing as we have already discussed this Inter side’s tactical set-up, there is little need to cover old ground, so we will look at some of the other reasons people believe they achieved...
A brief rekindling under Louis van Gaal aside, it has been a testing few years for Bayern fans, often playing second fiddle to a couple of clubs. Battling their way through to the Champions League final at their own stadium, things seemed to be boding well for Bayern: as well as the benefit of...
On the 18th of May 1994, Fabio Capello became a European champion for the first and only time in his career. Having spent the week listening to the taunts of his opposite number Johan Cruyff over the boring style he employed compared to his predecessor Arrigo Sacchi, Capello’s Milan took the more impressive Barcelona...
The best description I have heard of Sir Alex Ferguson’s strategising is that he is a tactical magpie. Some managers have gone down in history as greats thanks to their innovation as well as their success – the passing of Jimmy Hogan’s various sides, the movement of Gusztav Sebes’ Hungary, the universality of Rinus...
An interesting discourse in recent years has been that despite featuring a player who could legitimately be argued as the greatest of all time in Lionel Messi, there have been few people pushing the idea of Barcelona as a one-man team. Even when Barca have played poorly and escaped purely on a special moment...
