Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could quite dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.
That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the estimable Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of soccer analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.
The answer, as he found it, was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all of the other players combined. The best way to win in soccer, Jeandupeux had discovered, was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.
He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department, the part of soccer’s world governing body that looks after the actual soccer. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action. Jeandupeux had an idea of what that might be.
His timing, it turned out, was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organization, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.
A few months after that World Cup, Blatter had created what he called Task Force 2000, which is precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of identifying ways to make the game more appealing, more dynamic, more dramatic.
Jeandupeux’s letter, passed to Platini and his fellow Task Force members, crystallized many of their thoughts. Now they not only had empirical proof that soccer had grown slow, cautious and dull, but a recommendation as to how to change it. Jeandupeux had suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a soccer cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.
The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.
Everything in modern soccer flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.
It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at soccer’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League — an entire century — is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.
But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of soccer itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux sat down and wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The soccer that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.
It is important to remember that as,…
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