And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
Peter the Great
- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Sixteen
Total Football was a combination of five things. Firstly, there was the requirement for players to be able to be comfortable in, if not all positions, then most on the field. Second was the highly-organised use of the offside trap. Thirdly was the need for those players to be fit enough to be able to press for an hour and a half. Fourthly, they had to be of the highest technical quality and fifthly, it was necessary for them to have an understanding not just of moving but of space and not-moving.
The fourth element is a necessity of all great teams, and in Johan Cruyff Ajax had one of the very best ever. The first element is said to have come from the necessity for Ajax under Jack Reynolds with a numerically-limited playing pool for that pool to be confident in several roles. The second came from Colin Veitch and Bill McCracken at Newcastle in the 1910s and was a ploy, of which Reynolds must have been aware as a player in its original form and as a manager its present version, when the requirement was changed from three to two in 1925. The third also came from Newcastle in the same era. It was really only the fifth that was modern, the application of zonal, even abstract thinking to a green-sward canvas a hundred by fifty metres.
In fact Total Football, it has to be said again, largely in all but the last element sounds remarkably like that same undoubtedly skilful Newcastle side in that first decade of the 20th Century with Peter McWilliam one of its required elements, able to be most flexible of all and constantly moving position but with an addition, the constrained goalkeeper, and two obvious, tactical developments, one attacking and one defensive.
The problem of the goalkeeper constrained by the penalty area was not one Newcastle had to face, at least not until 1912 with McWilliam no longer a player. It was also the one problem that Total Football did not think necessary to address. That came with the modern development of the sweeper-keeper, a tactic that itself had its origins with Scotland's goalkeeper a century ago, Harry Rennie.
As for the differences, firstly, Newcastle's full-backs were not required to join the attacking party. In Ajax and in Total Football they were, as a prerequisite. At Newcastle integration was not complete. Total Football almost completed it. Only the role of the 'keeper still remained somewhat nebulous. Secondly, Newcastle set up as a notional 2.3.5, whereas Ajax played 4.3.3 with the back four and not a back two required to operate off-side.
The main criticism of Total Football is that when it was put to its greatest tests in one-off games it came up short. Curiously it was the same as was said of Newcastle, winning only one of four FA Cup Finals, and then only just and certainly troubled by the muscular approach of certain other teams, but could not be of the concept's real jewel, Ajax. It would be runners-up in the European Cup in 1969, win it outright in 1971, both under Rinus Michels., then in 1972 and 1973 retain it, making over the four years eight changes of on-field personnel, who knows how many of on-field position and one of manager, with Michels' departure in 1971 to Barcelona. In fact the run was only brought to an end by Cruyff following him to Catalonia in 1973 and sealed by Neesken's doing the same a year later. And even in Dutch national team terms it was arguable. It has been suggested that it would have been better if the team Rinus Michels had sent out to face West Germany in the World Cup Final in 1974 had been Ajax from one to eleven. That was, of course, impossible. Horst Blankenberg was himself German. It meant an enforced change at half-back with Feyenoord's Wim Jensen coming in and therefore opened up the possibility of changes elsewhere strengthening rather than weakening. In the end the majority of the team were from Ajax, six in all, with as well as Jensen, Rijsbergen at full-back, Jongbloed in goal and both wingers draw from outwith. Indeed it might even have been eight had Keizer and Piet Schrijvers, who joined Ajax that same year, been included and not just reserves. And in any case, having not qualified at all for the 1970 Final in Mexico, a defeat by the odd goal in three, whilst disappointing, especially given the opponents, was hardly a thrashing.
Ajax were, however, not the only proponents of Total Football. In England ten years earlier the flag-bearer had been Burnley. Under Harry Potts the club took the League championship in 1960, the year before Tottenham under Bill Nicholson, and reached the 1962 FA Cup Final, losing to none other than Spurs. Moreover, in spite of team selection in the late thirties being by committee it also had or had had a seemingly successful youth development scheme. Certainly a sixteen year-old had already come through and played for the first time for the First team in 1936. He was given a professional contract a year later and that same season sold to Everton. His name was Tommy Lawton and would go on to play a total of four hundred and twenty league games and win twenty three official England caps, twenty-three more in wartime and one for Great Britain.
However, why Potts embraced a Total or Total-like style is hard to fathom. He was born in County Durham in 1920 so saw nothing of Newcastle before the Great War. He had joined Burnley in 1939, a club that had no manager at the time so no influence there. His playing career had been shortened by the Second World War and then was spent at Turf Moor and with Everton, a club not known to be at the forefront of radical football thinking. The only clue is that before selection by committee Burnley for three years had had its first professional manager. He was the former Liverpool and England player, Tom Bromilow, so no Total Football pedigree there but after he retired from playing in 1930 he had coached what was described as the “Amsterdam” football club, perhaps the Amsterdamsche Football Club. Might he when in Holland have seen what was in place at Ajax, be it from Reynolds or Castle? Might he then have decided to replicate it organisationally at an equally ambitious but cash-strapped Burnley during his time there from 1932 to 1935 and on moving on to Crystal Palace also left it stylistically for Potts to profit from initially as a player at the club and later still there to develop as a manager? It is a long shot but all there is.