Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea team can keep dangerous opponents at arm’s length, an unusual asset in the modern era
Step back from football and amid various ups and downs, backs and forths, check-backs and dead-ends, the first 100 years of its development after the modern laws were first drawn up in 1863 can be seen as comprising roughly linear development. We started with seven forwards and one defender and we slowly moved players back until we had four defenders and two forwards. We went from a chaotic charging game, through man-marking to zonal marking. By the mid-1960s, football was mature.
The changes since have been incremental. There is far less sense of forward momentum. A style of play or shape becomes modish and enjoys success, and then a system arises to combat it. At elite level in particular, tactical development can seem cyclical, although our knowledge of what has gone before means there is still forward momentum: football’s tactical evolution is perhaps best imagined as resembling a corkscrew – although one subject to the whims of geniuses and to technological advances in boots, balls, pitches, nutrition, physical training and, perhaps most pertinently today, data analysis.