“What is football?” an interviewer asked the defender Lilian Thuram in a 2006 interview. Thuram responded simply: “It is the language of happiness.” Years earlier, in 1999, he described how he hoped, one day, to be able to play football the way Miles Davis plays jazz. “We’re not there yet,” he added. “But I haven’t given up hope.”1
While fans of many teams of course deeply appreciate a good, solid defender, such players rarely become icons. In some ways, defenders’ work is simply less accounted for, perhaps less visible than that of other positions. Goalies may be the loneliest players on the pitch, but their successes and mistakes are vividly remembered. Great defenders, however, are rarely given the kind of adulation or mythological status that is bestowed on great offensive players. There are few memoirs or biographies written about defenders. Yet defenders are pivotal to the structure of any team, and the structure of the game itself. There are long-standing debates about precisely what their role should be, debates that raise larger questions about what is most important about soccer. Should the focus always be on what is effective and assures victory? Or should the beauty of the game be prized, perhaps even above victory?
Thuram is one of those rare defenders who became a global icon because of the role he played at a crucial moment in the history of French soccer, the 1998 men’s World Cup. It began with a classic defender’s mistake. As the second half of the semifinal between France and Croatia began, he was out of position: too far to the left and too far back. Instead of catching the Croatian striker Davor Šuker offside, he left him wide open in front of the goal. Šuker did not hesitate. He caught a beautiful volley and powered the ball into the goal.
Croatia’s very presence in the semifinal match had something of the miraculous about it. The nation only became independent in 1991 after the breakup of Yugoslavia. This was the first time it had ever played in a World Cup tournament. The Croatian players surprised everyone, including themselves, by making it to the quarterfinal, where they met one of those teams you never want to have to play in a World Cup: Germany. Croatia’s coach, Ćiro Blažević—who was from Bosnia—had prepared a detailed pre-match plan that he intended to present to the players. As he later recalled, “I was on my way to the dressing room with my theories, and there are a lot of mirrors in every dressing room. I looked at myself in the mirror and I was a kind of green colour. So I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I going to die?’” The players, he noticed, “were the same green colour as me.” He quickly realized there was no way they would be able to pay attention as he laid out his plan. “They were more and more green.… So I crumpled my theories and I threw them down,” he said. “Fuck the theory.” Instead, he just said: “You have to go outside today and die for the Croatian flag and all the people who have given their lives.” Croatia beat Germany 3–0 in a riveting match. In the semifinal, after Šuker’s goal against France, it seemed like they might be on their way to an even greater upset. If they won, they would not only defeat the host of the tournament, but also earn a place in the World Cup final.2
It was an uncharacteristic mistake for Thuram, who is considered one of the greatest defenders of his generation. He was born on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe on January 1st, 1972—a local newspaper printed his photograph because he was the first baby of the year. He was small and sickly, which Thuram later attributed to his mother Mariana’s “difficult life.” They were poor, and during the last months of her pregnancy she had to continue working, harvesting sugarcane in the fields during the day and then traveling several miles to the island capital to clean houses. Thuram grew up in the village of Anse-Bertrand, and he started playing football games, which he remembers “stretched into the night,” in empty lots or the street in front of his house. When he was ten, his mother—like thousands of others from the French Caribbean—migrated to metropolitan France seeking a better life for her and her children.3
They settled in a housing project near the town of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, which was right next to a large forest. Thuram and his new friends “played the World Cup,” scoring goals by sending the ball through a broken slat on the back of a bench in a stretch of grass between the apartment towers. Thuram later described growing up in this neighborhood as a wonderful experience. He celebrated the “multiplicity of cultures”—a Pakistani friend taught him the rules of cricket, Congolese families introduced him to African politics—and the “intensity and freedom” of the relationships with others he crafted there. In a 2006 interview, he was asked about his memories of growing up in Fontainebleau and responded, “Mixing: Moroccans, Algerians, Zaïrois, Spaniards.… They are good memories.” His vision of his neighborhood runs strikingly counter to the usual media portrayal of such housing projects, which are often depicted as dismal and violent places. As a football star, he became a kind of spokesman for the communities, often of immigrant background, who live in these neighborhoods.4
Thuram had various dreams: as a child he wanted to be a priest, and he also has a long-running fascination with history. But he was an excellent soccer player, shining on a local youth team originally founded by Portuguese immigrants. He attended a local high school with a special focus on athletics, where one of his classmates there was Claude Makélélé, who would play with him on the French team and become a star midfielder. In 1989, Thuram was recruited by Arsène Wenger, who was then coaching Monaco, and began a professional career. He originally played midfield, but after a knee injury slowed him down, his coaches positioned him in defense. He was angry at first, but ultimately settled into the role. Thuram spent most of his career playing professionally in Italy—first for Parma and then for Juventus. Historian John Foot recalls that, in the midst of a period in Italian soccer rife with corruption scandals and fan violence, he found endless joy in watching Thuram as, “for the thousandth time in his career,” he “trapped the ball, looked up, and passed it elegantly to a midfielder.” Thuram, Foot writes, was always a reminder that there was something beautiful left in football.5
Defenders are not expected to be great at scoring goals, though the best among them can be dangerous in front of the opposing goal. Thuram, however, was notoriously bad at scoring. The only time he scored when he played for Monaco, he remembers, was when he accidentally sent the ball into his own goal when he made a bad pass backward toward his goalie. Goalie Fabien Barthez, who played with him for Monaco and later on the French national team, remembered that even when Thuram was right in front of an open goal, the defender would wait for someone else to come and pass it to him so he could shoot. But against Croatia in 1998, Thuram discovered some new capacity, perhaps buried within. He couldn’t be responsible for France failing to get into the World Cup final on its own soil, after all. So as soon as the game restarted after Šuker’s goal, Thuram streaked forward on the right wing, surprising the Croatian defenders. His teammate Youri Djorkaeff slid the ball forward to Thuram, who angled toward the goal and pummeled it in. It was a surreal moment; Thuram seemed transported in disbelief. It all happened so quickly that you can’t even see the first part of the play on the footage from the game—the feed was busy showing replays of the Šuker goal.
Over the next twenty minutes, Thuram was everywhere on the field, stopping shots by the Croatian forwards but also making streaking runs up the field. As he told his mother after the game, he watched as his teammates—including star midfielder Zinedine Zidane and the young striker Thierry Henry—sent ball after ball “everywhere but in the goal.” Twenty minutes before the end of the game, Thuram dribbled up the right side of the pitch. He gestured to Djorkaeff: I’ll pass it to you, you pass it back to me. The one-two worked, and Thuram was able to send another ball streaking into the net. It was 2–1 for France. The score stood. Thuram had put France in the final of the World Cup for the first time in the nation’s history and, in the process, redeemed his earlier lapse.6
His celebration of the second goal became an iconic image of the 1998 World Cup and of Thuram as a player. He slid to his knees and put his hand over his mouth, a finger posed on his lips, pondering, looking straight ahead. It was as if, in the moment, he was sitting there thinking philosophically: “What, exactly, is a goal?” Or, perhaps more precisely, “What is going on?” His teammate Marcel Desailly ran to him along with the rest of the team and asked him, “What is happening to you?” Thuram responded, “I don’t know.” For many of those who were watching in the stadium, in France, and around the globe, it felt like a miracle. His pose, wrote one observer, made it seem like “Lilian Thuram has risen out of this world.… Enlightened, inspired, Lilian Thuram is the messiah.”7
Thuram predicted after the game that it would be another twenty-five years before he scored two goals in a game for France. Actually, he never scored again for the French national team: at the end of a career with a record-breaking 142 appearances, those two goals against Croatia were the only ones he had ever made. But because they were scored in such a surprising way, and on the greatest stage in world soccer, they instantly made him an icon. Crowds chanted “Thuram President!” as they thronged the streets of Paris. For some, the goals were also a strike against the far-right, anti-immigrant Front National movement led at the time by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Starting in 1996, he had declared that he thought there were too many “foreign” players on the team. This was an inaccuracy and a sleight-of-hand trick: anyone who plays on a national team has to be a citizen of that country, and the French players in the 1990s had almost all been born and raised in France. Le Pen was really just trying to single out the players who looked different—the black players of African or Caribbean ancestry, and those of North African descent like Zidane. Le Pen suggested they were not truly French and were even unpatriotic, accusing them of not singing the national anthem before games. This politicized the players, many of whom spoke out against Le Pen, and it made the team, and Thuram’s triumph, a kind of symbol that suggested that France’s diversity could actually be a strength. The night of the French victory over Croatia, among the crowds celebrating in the streets was a man named Moussa, an immigrant from Ivory Coast, who told a journalist that for him the game was “a way of saying to Le Pen that we blacks are not what he thinks. It shows that we are French, that we’ll fight for France.” Moussa continued, “France’s battle is my battle.… This game was an act of vengeance against the Front National.” Meanwhile, in the neighborhood where Thuram had grown up, the celebrations were intense. Hundreds of revelers marched there into the center of Fontainebleau. One man climbed up the façade of the Hôtel Napoléon, one of the town’s monuments, and ripped down the French flag so that he and his friends could parade around with it in celebration.8
Starting in 1998, Thuram used his iconic status to become a political voice speaking out on behalf of racial minorities in France. After his retirement from professional soccer in 2008, he created an anti-racism foundation, curated an exhibit about the history of racial representations, and wrote a book about global black history called Mes étoiles noirs (My Black Stars). Thuram is relatively unique not just for his intellectual and political activities but also because he became a widely recognizable star despite the fact that he was a defender.9
The role of the defender—and of defense—has always been a troubling and troubled one in soccer. Among many players and fans, there is also a sense that when a team’s play becomes too defensive—that is, when the focus is on stopping the other team rather than on scoring goals—it can make soccer boring and even cynical. An overly defensive strategy feels like it is trying to stop everything that is beautiful and exhilarating about the game. Still, there is no way around the fact that defense is at the very core of soccer.
The structure of a team’s defense is not always visible on television because the cameras usually focus on the ball, and all that is happening elsewhere on the pitch is harder to perceive. In a stadium, you can truly see the geometry of the game, the way the positioning of players far away from the ball might be stretching out the space on the pitch, creating openings. You can see the way that defenders are constantly working to reconfigure space by passing back to the goalie and therefore stretching out the game, or else moving out to the wings (the sides of the pitch) in order to move forward. When done well, such motion can make the game breathe and open up. And you can see how, conversely, when a team is focused on defending, packing players around the penalty box and goal in an attempt to stop the offensive work of a superior adversary, large stretches of the pitch begin to seem neglected, even lonely, with only the goalkeeper keeping watch.
Since its development in the nineteenth century, soccer has seen many waves of innovation in tactics. Styles of play that might now seem obvious, even natural—passing, organizing defensive players in specific positions on the pitch, pressuring players when they have the ball at their feet—actually had to be imagined and invented. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, English soccer mostly took the form of “kick-and-rush”: most of the players on one team ran forward alongside their teammate who was dribbling the ball. “Head-down charging” was the prized approach according to soccer historian Jonathan Wilson, and “passing, cooperation and defending were perceived as somehow inferior.” This was partly an inheritance from the versions of ball games that allowed players to carry and pass the ball with their hands. Soon, however, teams began to experiment with other ways of playing and arranging themselves on the field that allowed for a different kind of play.10
A formation is the arrangement of players on the field in a particular position. Formations are usually described with a numerical formula that explains where the ten players are to be located. The goalie is not included. The formation most common in the early days of soccer, to the extent that there was one, took the shape of something like a 1–2–7: one defender in front of the goal, two players in the midfield, and seven (if not more) in the attack. Since players tended to dribble forward, and in so doing had to physically confront opposing players, bigger and strong players had an advantage. Then, writes Wilson, in an 1872 game between England and Scotland, the smaller Scottish players “decided to try to pass the ball around England rather than engage in a more direct man-to-man contest in which they were likely to be outmuscled.” It was, in a way, a strategic decision by players trying to find a way to win against the odds. Yet it was a turning point in the history of the game, and the passing style caught on in part thanks to the presence of increasing numbers of Scottish players on English teams.11
The idea of passing rather than dribbling was revolutionary. It changed the way the game was played, and the kinds of players who could play it. Defensive and midfield players began to take on a more important role. These players sought to control the game in the middle of the field, where more and more of the action took place as teams used passing and overlapping runs—a move in which a player without the ball runs ahead to receive a pass from behind and then moves forward across the pitch. Formations rapidly evolved to versions of a 2–3–5, with two defenders in front of the goal, three players in the midfield, and five up front in the attack. Some observers groused about the changes: one journalist in 1882 made fun of teams that kept players near the goal, claiming their only purpose would be to chat with the goalkeeper. But team managers increasingly focused on training their players to play in certain positions as part of a larger tactical framework. One manager at Sheffield United used twenty-two lumps of sugar on a table to show his players where they needed to be positioned.12
The idea at the core of the passing game was to make the ball do the hard work of moving across the pitch, rather than the players. Passing quickly between players was seen as a more efficient way to get the ball moving forward, rather than having one player dribble as far as possible. The focus turned to retaining possession of the ball and using passes between players to keep the ball away from the other team. As the defender Frank Buckley explained it in the early 1900s, the forward players “tip-tap the ball here and there, making headway by short, sharp transfers from one man to another.” Soccer became a more cerebral and artistic game. A player for Newcastle United, Bob Hewison, described how the team’s passing game required players with “individuality, brains, adaptability, speed.” Only a “real artist,” he went on, was able to play this way. “But there is no reason,” Hewison added, “why there should not be a cultivation of the art, since it is the pure football.”13
This new style of play was perfected across the Atlantic, in the Latin American country of Uruguay. British expatriates brought the sport there in the late nineteenth century, and it was rapidly adopted throughout the country. Uruguayan writers and coaches have argued that their unique school of football developed thanks to the conditions of freedom in which it emerged, notably in rural areas. As the manager Ondino Viera, who coached the Uruguayan national team at the 1966 World Cup, describes it, his country developed their style “alone on the fields of Uruguay,” where a premium was placed on brilliant dribbling that made players “absolute masters of the ball,” intent on seizing it and “not letting it go for any reason.” It was, in the words of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, “a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling”—“chess with a ball.”14
The Uruguayan team won the gold medal at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, stunning European teams and earning the admiration of the crowds who watched. “A revelation!” wrote the French novelist Henry de Montherlant. “Here we have real football.” The French player Gabriel Hanot, who became the editor of the French sports newspaper L’Équipe, celebrated the Uruguayans’ “marvelous virtuosity” and the way they created “a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective.” This style of play also expanded all the spaces on the pitch, including the midfield—a center of contest between players. Defensive players took on an increasingly visible and important role in the tactics of the team. Fast, sophisticated dribbling was important everywhere, as defenders could, in one move, set up an attack by passing to midfielders, who in turn could outmaneuver or outflank their opponents to move forward or pass to roving forwards. The role of the defender became more than stopping offensive plays; it became intricately tactical in its own way, and dependent on many of the same kinds of dribbling and positioning skills that attacking players used.15
During the same period, soccer was also developing rapidly in Brazil. One of the great early defenders there was a man named Domingos da Guia. He was born in 1911 in the factory town of Bangu. His grandfather had been a slave, and he and his brothers all worked in a textile factory, which, like many others in Brazil at the time, had a soccer team that workers played on during their leisure time. Da Guia’s brother was considered the star of the team, but one day when the team’s defender was injured, da Guia got his chance. His brother, writes Wilson, urged him to draw on his skills as a dancer, and he invented “a short dribble” that was an imitation of “the miudinho, that type of samba.” Having played as a midfielder until then, da Guia brought a certain way of capturing the field in front of him, of understanding space and movement, to his role as a defender. Though it was a hard road, he carved out a professional career for himself, playing in Uruguay and Argentina before ultimately settling at the Brazilian club Flamengo. “He watched the patterns of a match develop, stepping in to intercept a pass or tackle an attacker at precisely timed moments,” writes historian Roger Kittleson. Da Guia admitted that his skill with the ball was partly a form of self-preservation. He had always seen black players like himself “whacked on the pitch,” and he knew he had to be a step ahead of the opposing team.16
The rivalries among Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil would become some of the most intense and influential in the history of the game, driving long-standing debates about tactics, as well as the relationship between national cultures and playing styles. At its core, this debate was about whether soccer should emphasize what is beautiful or what is effective. There have always been those who have understood that, if the goal is to win a game—especially against a team that is technically superior—a good strategy is to focus on robust defense. If a team keeps a lot of players in front of the goal, uses physical challenges to break up offensive play, and focuses on not conceding any goals, it can eke out a 0–0 game. Sometimes, with luck, a player can make a break for the opposing goal and even win. What this means, of course, is that the game takes the shape of one team trying to get around a packed defense and the other absorbing attacks and seeking to shut them down. This strategy can be effective, and it frequently leads to ties and a few scattered wins, but for many fans it is incredibly tedious and frustrating to watch. As the French soccer journalist Jean Eskenazi put it: “How shall we play the game? As though we are making love or as though we are catching the bus?”17
If you want to cultivate an attacking style of play on a team, you need to configure the defense in a particular way. Although defenders of course need to be ready to stop attacks from the opposing team, they also play a critical role in creating the conditions for their own team’s forward motion. This requires versatile defensive players who know not only how to stop the forwards from the other team. Just as important, or even more so, they need to know how to turn the game around, how to move forward and create space for midfielders and strikers toward the opponent’s goal. The potential problem, of course, is that if defenders are not talented enough to hold on to the ball as their team moves forward into attack, they make their team vulnerable. If the forwards of the opposing team can gain possession from defenders with an open path to the goal, the results can be disastrous. Many a goal has been scored when an adventurous forward manages to steal the ball from the last defender and streak toward the goal, pulling away from the other players, with only the goalie to beat. The key to having an effective defense on a team that is geared toward attacking, then, is to have versatile defenders. The tactics of the team, however, also have to be calibrated carefully to successfully orient everything toward a strong attacking formation. “The whole history of tactics,” writes Wilson, has been a “struggle to achieve the best possible balance of defense solidity with attacking fluidity.”18
The renowned Argentinean manager Marcelo Bielsa, citing his mentor Óscar Tabárez, summarizes the “fundamentals” of soccer in this way: “1) defense; 2) attack; 3) how you move from defense to attack; 4) how you move from attack to defense.” With these principles as the core, the issue becomes “trying to make those passages as smooth as possible.” Doing so requires constantly thinking about how players are positioned and move on the field. The position of defensive players is critical in this regard, because it effectively determines how much room other players have to maneuver on the pitch.
There is a rule in soccer that constrains and shapes where players can be on the pitch at any given time: the offside rule. It is perhaps the most influential and important rule in the game. Often misunderstood, and frequently infuriating to players and fans alike, the offside rule is one of the most fundamental pieces of the grammar of soccer. On the most basic level, it prevents attacking players from getting too close to the opposing goal too easily and creates limitations on when and where they can move. Negotiating the offside rule is one of the most complex and absorbing features of the game both for strikers and defenders, an intricate dance that involves positioning and timing of the most nuanced kind. To appreciate and understand this dance is, on a basic level, to appreciate and understand soccer.19
A player is offside when she has moved too far toward the opposing goal, ahead of either the ball or the defensive players from the other team. In the current version of soccer, if you are an attacking player with the ball behind you, there must be at least two players between you and the goal—the goalie and the last defender. But it took a while to get to this version of the rule, with a few twists and turns along the way.
The term offside comes from the military, where in the nineteenth century an offside soldier was one who was no longer serving in his unit. Similarly, a soccer player who is offside is not allowed to touch the ball, and therefore no longer an active participant on the team. In a way, an offside player may as well be on the sidelines—though once she gets back into position she can immediately join play again. This can lead to one of the more frustrating sights in soccer: a player is in a perfect position, perhaps in front of goal, but cannot receive a pass or even get in the way of the opposing defenders. The only thing she can do, essentially, is stay out of the way.
How did the offside rule come to be? During the early nineteenth century, before soccer’s rules were codified by the Football Association, most versions of games played at various English schools outlawed any forward passing of the ball, that is, kicking it ahead to another player. Therefore, the only way down the field was either dribbling the ball or passing sideways or backward. This is still how rugby is played: passes can only be made backward, which is why advances are often made in a diagonal line, with the ball being passed to the runner slightly behind as the formation moves up the field. In early soccer, if the ball was passed forward, anyone who touched it was considered offside and not allowed to participate in the game. As an early rule book from the University of Winchester put it, a player in such a position when the ball was kicked toward him was not allowed to “kick it himself nor try to prevent the opposite side from having a fair kick at it.” Any ball kicked “in transgression of this rule cannot obtain a goal.” According to the rules of Cheltenham College, an offside player must “immediately leave the ball alone” and could be kicked out of the game if he did not do so.20
The impact of these rules depended on other features of the game. It is not that hard to toss a ball backward as you run forward, because you can swing your arms backward. Doing this in a game where you can’t carry the ball, and are using your feet to pass, is more challenging. You can turn around and pass of course, but if you are running ahead full tilt and try to pass a ball toward someone a bit behind you—unless you are skilled at flashy back-heel passes—there is a good chance you will end up on the ground. Trying to picture a soccer game without forward passing is quite difficult today, because much of what we love about the game—such as the rapid forward development of plays through dribbling and passing—would simply be impossible. Without forward passing, notes soccer historian David Goldblatt, a kicking game would seriously lack a “measure of complexity, three-dimensionality and depth.”21
What was the solution? Simply allowing any kind of forward passing might lead to the opposite problem: players could just stand around in front of the opponent’s goal and wait for a teammate to lob a high, long ball to them and then push it into the net. The middle of the field would become irrelevant and depopulated, and the resulting game a boring spectacle of volleying the ball. The compromise between these two options, slowly crafted over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a set of offside rules that allowed players to pass forward, but only under certain conditions. These rules created a game in which you could move forward without the ball, and receive passes from players behind you, as long as there were still a certain number of players from the opposing team between you and the goal.
Probably the earliest version of the offside rule is in an 1847 rulebook from the elite Eton College. According to Eton’s rules, a player could run forward to receive a pass, as long as there were more than three of the other team’s players between him and the opponent’s goal. It evocatively used the term “sneaking” to describe any play that violated these rules. “A player is considered ‘sneaking’ when only three or less than three of the opposite side are before him and the ball behind him,” the rules said. “In such a case, he may not kick the ball.” Except for the fact that it didn’t use the term “offside,” this was close to what would become the established rule in the mid-nineteenth century. A similar measure seems to have been part of the 1848 Cambridge Rules, an early attempt to create a coherent rule book that could be used in games between universities. Here, too, there had to be “more than three” opposing players between the one who received a forward pass and the goal he was trying to reach. The rule stated clearly that the point was to avoid having a player “loiter between the ball and the adversaries’ goal.” What this meant concretely was that a player advancing up the field had to always be aware of the opposing players, and keep enough of them ahead of him to be able to receive a pass.22
It took some time before such rules came to be accepted across the board. The Sheffield Football Club, the first team created outside of a public school, did not have any rules against offside play in its 1855 rule book and allowed any kind of forward pass. Other schools continued to outlaw forward passing altogether. The rules agreed upon by the English Football Association after its founding in 1863 included an offside rule much like Eton’s, with the slight change that it required “at least three” rather than “more than three” players between the attacking player and the opponent’s goal. Once the position of goalkeeper developed in the 1870s, this meant that attacking players always had to keep two defenders, in addition to the goalie, between them and the opposing goal, unless they were in possession of the ball.23
The basics were in place, but there were plenty of refinements to come. In 1873, the rule was adjusted so that the determination of whether a player was offside was to be made not when they received the ball from a pass, but “at the moment of kicking.” This meant that a player could now start to run past a defender once the ball was moving toward them. This added dynamism to the game, though the rule—in place to this day—also required intricate judgment on the part of the attacking player, who has to time his run perfectly, and the referee, who must judge whether a player has moved into an offside position before the ball is kicked. Because the kick might happen far away on the pitch from where the receiving player is located, this can feel like it requires superhuman powers of observation. The offside rule, quips philosopher Paul Hoyningen-Huene, is so complicated that “the referees need two independently moving eyes” in order to apply it. In time, the referee would get the help of linesmen, assistant referees who stand on the side of the field, in making such determinations. Yet the offside remains easily the most difficult to apply in soccer.24
By the 1880s, an attacking player was permitted to receive the ball, even if he was in an offside position, from what is known as a corner kick. A corner kick happens when a defending team, including the goalie, touches the ball last before it goes out of bounds behind the goal. In this case, the attacking team gets to kick the ball in from the corner of the field. Usually, teams try to volley the ball from the corner so that it will drop right in front of the goal, giving attacking players the chance to head or kick it in at close range. This is possible thanks to the exception to the offside rule, which makes it so that if a player heads or kicks a ball into the goal directly off a teammate’s corner kick, it doesn’t matter if the attackers are offside. Decades later, in 1921, the Football Association made a similar rule about the throw-in, allowing players to receive the ball in an offside position when it is thrown in from the sidelines. This rule, too, opened up new possibilities for attack. That is one reason why it can be useful to earn a throw-in—by kicking the ball off another player and off the pitch—when moving into attack. And though this is relatively rare, if a team has a player with a particularly strong throw, she can volley the ball from the sideline directly in front of the goal, in the same way as a corner kick, and players don’t have to worry whether they are offside if they can head or kick it in off the throw. In both cases, the exception to the offside rule is only for the first throw or kick. Once the ball is in play again, players have to pay attention to their position. This can end up being very complicated for both players and referees, because it can be hard to figure out everyone’s position in the tangle of players in front of a goal after a corner kick. As a fan, the application of the offside rule in these situations can be a bit bewildering, with goals scored but then disallowed by the referees. This is also a moment when referees often make mistakes, or at least calls that are hotly contested by those who feel they have been wronged in the seemingly never-ending struggle over the interpretation of offside.25
Originally, the offside rule applied to the entire pitch, which meant that defenders could move quite high up the field, even into the opponent’s half, and effectively compress the other team and throw everyone into attack. In 1907, however, the offside rule was changed so it would only apply in the opponent’s half. This created a new danger for an attacking team, opening up space for a counterattack. If a team throws all their players into the opponent’s half trying to make a goal, a defending team can leave a few players close to the halfway line, but still in their own half. If one of their teammates can stop the attacking team and pass the ball back to them, he can then break with it toward the opposing goal with no defending players between them and the goalie. Because of this rule, it does not make sense for the last defenders to move past the halfway line, because they have to be in a position to stop any breaks from the opposing team. This makes the midfield a key area of contest between players.26
One of the most famous ways that teams attempt to capitalize on the offside rule is what is called the offside trap. This is when defensive players move up the field in order to catch opposing forwards behind them, where they can’t receive the ball. One of the players who perfected this technique was a defender from Northern Ireland named Bill McCracken, who played for Newcastle United from 1904 to 1924. McCracken would stay close to the halfway line, keeping the attackers as far away as possible from the goal. A second defender from his team, in what was known as a sweeper position, stayed behind to catch any player who snuck past. McCracken was so good at catching players in an offside position that, as Wilson describes, contemporary cartoons depicted him “clapping his hands with glee at getting another offside call in his favor.”27
It was an effective technique for basically stopping attacking teams in their tracks, and it caught on. Once it did, the number of goals being scored began to drop, and by the mid-1920s fans were getting restless after seeing too many 0–0 draws, and attendance was falling. The Football Association decided that it had to do something, and in 1925 made the final major change to the offside rule. It was a significant one, decreasing the number of players that had to be between an attacking player and the goal from three to two. This gave attackers a clear advantage: they only had to keep one final defender, and then the goalie, between them and the goal. McCracken’s trademark trap could no longer be sprung. This rule change had an immediate impact, with a rapid increase in goals scored. The English Football League, founded in 1888 to organize games between professional teams in England and Wales, saw 6,373 goals scored from 1925 to 1926, after the rule change, compared to 4,700 the year before. Games were suddenly more surprising and unpredictable, to the delight of crowds.28
The period after this change in the offside rule produced tremendous and far-reaching innovation in how defense was organized. One of the main drivers of this was Herbert Chapman, who was born in Yorkshire and had a long career as a player and then as a manager. Chapman loved the beauty and spectacle of the game, and was worried that an emphasis on results was undermining what soccer was supposed to be. “The average standard of play would go up remarkably if the result were not the all-important end of matches,” he insisted. “If we would have better football, we must find some way of minimizing the importance of winning and the value of points.” Chapman worried—as have many fans, players, and coaches since—that as soccer became more institutionalized and tied to financial interests, there would be an obsessive focus on rankings and outcomes. In the process, the very things that made soccer beautiful and interesting—the dynamism and creativity of players, the possibility for experimentation with new styles of play that might be either brilliant or disastrous—would be taken over by a boring, industrial, and predictable way of playing the sport.29
As the manager of the Northampton Town team from 1902 to 1912, Chapman tried to find a way to make sure his team played with the “finesse and cunning” he valued while still winning matches. He realized that “a team can attack for too long,” and began encouraging his players to drop back into their own half, which encouraged the other side’s defensive players to move forward in support of their offense. This meant that, if an attacking play could be broken up and the defending players got possession of the ball, they could quickly mount a counterattack, moving into the space left open by the other team. Other managers were developing similar tactics, including a manager named Clem Stephenson who experimented with ways to render the offside rule less limiting by having players drop back into their own half “before springing forward.” The key was to pull as many of the players from the opposing side toward your goal, but then have the skill and speed to burst past those players and whatever defenders were behind them, dribbling and passing the ball quickly toward the opposing goal.30
When he became manager of Arsenal in 1925, Chapman formalized what came to be known as the WM formation, so called because of the way Chapman arrayed his players on the field. In front of the goalie, he had three defenders, and then a bit farther up two more with defense roles. These became the M that made up the defensive formation. In front of them, in the W formation, were two additional players in the midfield, and then three attackers. The goal was to balance defense and attack, but also to provide strong control over both the center of the field and the wings. Though the formation featured four lines of players—it could be described as a 3–2–2–3—Chapman thought the W and M better captured the dynamism of the system.31
The defender in front of the goal, variously known as a center-back or center-half, played a critical role. He had to be very solid in protecting the goal so that other players could move more freely on the sides of the pitch. The key to the counterattack was in the wings, however, where players who could move quickly along the edge of the pitch stretched out before the opposing defense, and then had a better chance of dribbling or passing into the center so a goal could be scored. When first introduced, Chapman’s tactic left opposing teams befuddled—as new tactics usually do—breaking up the usual patterns of play. It worked as well as it did, of course, because Chapman had a particularly talented group of players on his team. Arsenal’s games became electrifying, involving rapid back-and-forth movement across the pitch as the team absorbed attacks and then created streaking counterattacks, often with players moving up the wings. The player Bernard Joy, who joined the team in 1935, wrote that the strategy consisted of “deliberately drawing on the opponents by retreating and funneling to our own goal, holding the attack at the limits of the penalty box, and then thrusting quickly away by means of long passes to our wingers.” The soccer that resulted was, according to Wilson, “twentieth-century, terse, exciting, spectacular, economic, devastating.” It was rapidly adopted by other teams and profoundly shaped the way the game has been played to this day.32
The tactic made its way to West Africa in the late 1940s, for instance, thanks to a Senegalese defender named Raoul Diagne. His father, Blaise Diagne, was an important political leader from the island of Gorée, Senegal, who served in the French Chamber of Deputies. Raoul Diagne began playing football in the elite schools he attended in Senegal, and at twenty moved to Paris to pursue his studies. There, he joined the Racing Club de Paris, a professional team, where he played as a central defender. He helped the team win a series of French championships during this period, and also played eighteen games with the French national team—the first black player to do so. A powerful defender, he specialized in sliding tackles, capable, as historian Bocar Ly writes, of “stretching out his leg and depriving an adversary who was already looking at the open space in front of him of the ball.” After World War II, he returned to Senegal and joined the team at Gorée, off the coast near Dakar. He introduced the WM formation to the team there. The tactic helped Gorée to a series of important victories in the Senegalese championship, a competition between the best professional teams in the country that had been formed in the 1940s. In the wake of Senegalese independence from France, Diagne became the coach of the national team. He coached Senegal to their first victory against France in 1963, and in doing so became a national hero. Diagne had talented forwards and midfielders on his team, but his background as a defender and his sophisticated deployment of defensive tactics were key to his success as a manager.33
While crowds, players, and coaches have often enjoyed flowing styles of play focused on moving and counterattacking, these approaches only really work well when teams have the technical talent required for swift passing and velocity up the pitch. More defensive play can sometimes be ideal for teams with less technically gifted players. Karl Rappan, the coach of the Swiss national team in the late 1930s, put it bluntly as he looked back on his career: “The Swiss is not a natural footballer, but he is usually sober in his approach to things. He can be persuaded to think ahead and to calculate ahead.” A team like Brazil could win, he noted, with “eleven individuals” with “sheer class and natural ability.” But Switzerland could also win with “eleven average footballers,” as long as they had a good plan. He developed a style of play called the verrou—translated literally as “bolt”—which focused on having a strong, solid defense. It worked: Switzerland defeated England 2–1 in a friendly match in 1938, a major upset, and made it to the World Cup that year. The tactic, however, was not actively adopted by many other teams at the time.34
It was in Italy that a more formalized and ultimately famous—and infamous—set of tactics focused around a highly defensive strategy developed in the second half of the twentieth century. The approach came to be known as catenaccio, which means “door bolt” in Italian, again using the metaphor of “shutting the door” on attacks. One of those who developed the approach was the Italian manager Gipo Viani. He had found inspiration from an unusual source: fishermen. One morning, taking an early walk past the harbor in his town in Italy, he watched a fisherman on a ship that had just come in from the sea haul in a net full of fish. Underneath it was another net, the “reserve net.” Seeing this, Viani had a eureka moment, realizing that while there were always some fish that slipped the first net, they would always be caught by the second. His team, as Wilson puts it, similarly needed “a reserve defender operating behind the main defense to catch those forwards who slip through.” This position became known as the libero. This player had the role of sweeping in front of the goal, usually remaining far back and providing an added layer of defense in front of the goalie, though the best players in this position were also versatile and able to effectively set up attacking plays.35
The power of this defensive style of play was on display during the 1970 men’s World Cup in Mexico, when Italy made it to the finals thanks largely to its remarkably strong defensive formation. They were “so patiently defensive,” wrote the Scottish journalist Hugh McIlvanney, that “they sometimes appeared willing to wait for opponents to grow old” before attacking the opposing goal. “Patience,” for the Italy team, was “a weapon in itself.” Though they ultimately lost to Brazil in 1970, Italy became men’s World Cup champions in 1982 when they defeated a brilliant West German team 3–1 during a tournament that again showcased their powerful defense. For supporters of catenaccio, the deployment of a perfect, impenetrable defense represents the height of the sport. “A perfect game,” wrote journalist Gianni Brera, a devotee of the style, “would finish 0–0.”36
Other fans in Italy and elsewhere, however, have lamented more defensive styles of play, which are sometimes described as “anti-football.” For soccer to remain interesting, they argue, there has to be dynamism, motion back and forth, and goals. More recent changes to the offside rule have made things a bit easier for forwards to attack. Traditionally, players were considered offside if they were exactly level with a defensive player. But in 1991 this was changed slightly, so that a player is only offside if he is actually in front of the defender. And since arms cannot be used in play, a player is only offside if his feet, legs, body, or head are ahead of the last defender. Though these seem like minor changes, they can have big effects, because calls for offside play often happen for very small infractions, such as a foot slightly in front of another player. Even a small advantage on the part of an advancing forward can open up space for a fast break in front of defenders. These changes, along with some other changes in the rules that more stiffly penalize various forms of tackling by defenders, have made it a bit riskier to try to use an offside trap against another team. This, in turn, has made attacking play more unpredictable and fluid.37
In the flow of a soccer game, the edge of play is often defined by the offside rule, and the way in which defenders use it in positioning themselves. It is there, in a sense, that possibilities are contained. Sometimes, if everything is timed right, a forward breaks at exactly the right speed, in just the right direction, as the ball is passed from behind. She has beaten the last defender, and ahead is a beautiful opening: just the goalie, and then the goal, beckoning. Then the geometry breaks open and everything is in motion, the forward rushing ahead, directly through the center of the pitch, or diagonally finding the right angle. The defenders, beaten, are rushing behind, but if they are just a moment too slow, and if the forward decisively hits the ball hard, or chips it over the goalie, the goal is made, the crowd erupts into cheers and groans, the decisive moment secured.
Sometimes, however, the defender has the last laugh. Perhaps the most infuriating and disappointing moment in soccer—a game with many such moments—comes when a beautiful run leads to a beautiful goal, and just as the spectators jump up, alight with joy, they begin to notice the referee on the sideline, holding up the dreaded flag that indicates the player was offside. The run may have been stunning, the ball kicked gorgeously, the net billowing and the goalie arcing to the ground, hands just a fraction too far away. It was perfect, ready to be replayed and remembered. But it doesn’t count, because at the instant the play began, the forward made a mistake, or the defender played things just right, and the offside rule, the ancient law as interpreted by the referee, has decreed the goal illegitimate. And so, play starts again, the defenders creating their lines, limiting movement, ready to stop the advance, and the forwards looking for the moment that will send them into open space.
Through all of the tactical twists and turns in soccer, the role of the defender has remained pivotal in shaping how a team uses the space on the field. The greatest defenders have brilliantly deployed the tactics of their teams, serving both as the last line stopping attackers and as the root for offensive play. The star Argentinean forward Diego Maradona describes the ethos of the defender perfectly in his autobiography, El Diego. As a young boy, he first played as a defender, delighting in the freedom and power of the position. “I always was and I still am seduced by playing libero,” Maradona writes. “You see everything from the back, the whole pitch is in front of you, and you get hold of the ball and you say… let’s go that way… let’s look from another perspective. You are the owner of the team.”38
Today, as David Goldblatt writes, the rules outlawing tackling from behind and a more assiduous policing of physical fouls by referees have made it so that defenders “move more and kick less.” They are organized to “defend space,” and many teams use what are called “attacking fullbacks,” who “are often the players who cover the most ground in the match, providing attacking options down the wing but also required to sprint back to return to their defensive duties.”39
At their best, defenders impart a kind of serenity and confidence to the players around them and in front of them. This is what made Thuram such a powerful defender: when you saw him there, you felt that the team was strong, that whatever came at him he would be one step ahead. In the 2006 men’s World Cup, during a semifinal against a Portuguese team showcasing the star attacker Cristiano Ronaldo, it at times felt like Thuram was literally everywhere at once, diving in front of the goal to block shots with his head, stopping attacks on the wings, roving around the back of the field as if he always knew what the opposing players were thinking. At other times, Thuram’s role was to create calm in the midst of chaos and slow down the game when it needed to be slowed down. This was also one of the things that, decades earlier, da Guia brought to the Brazilian teams he played with. As Kittleson writes, da Guia moved “in slow motion,” while “all around him whirled in a frenzy”—a kind of island, “serene” on the pitch. It is that quality, in the end, that makes a defender a force on the team, opening up the possibilities farther up the field, so that the other players always know that, if the attack fails and the tide turns—as it always does—the defenders will be there.40