What Is Total Football

From front to back and back to front
The story of Total Football

The story of totaalvoetbal begins with its chief architect Rinus Michels, a taskmaster and a visionary who changed the landscape of football forever, making it infinitely more beautiful in the process.

Messi, Guardiola & Cruyff

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It’s a story that continues to the present day with the greatest player of his generation Lionel Messi bamboozling opponents and breaking records for fun while in England, Germany and Catalonia the greatest coach of his generation Pep Guardiola has installed a bewitching blueprint that will be copied by inferior sides for years to come.

Running through the whole gripping yarn, as its main protagonist and leading light, is a cleaner’s son from Amsterdam by the name of Johan Cruyff. He was a maverick. A chain smoking Mozart in boots. A bona fide genius. Take the conception and construction of Total Football out of the picture and just keep Cruyff in the frame and it would still be utterly compelling.

Like any great story it contains triumphs, tragedies and ultimately salvation and it is made up of a series of rip-roaring adventures with quite a few misdemeanours thrown in along the way. There were some brilliantly flawed characters that kept the plot moving forward and important too are the doubters of which there were many; critics who believed the new Dutch way of abandoning rigid formations in favour of players interchanging at will to be sheer lunacy. By the late Sixties you heard less from them. By the early Seventies they were silenced; the first and only casualties of Michel’s tactical revolution.

How it began, with the Austrian Wunderteam

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Before we turn to page one of toaalvoetbal’s development however and how it shook up the world let’s first debunk a myth, one that has accompanied the legend for too long. For Rinus Michels may have had the gumption and imagination to redesign the game from scratch but he didn’t invent the philosophy that enabled the seismic change.

He was no pioneer. Instead he found inspiration from the Austrian ‘Wunderteam’ of the 1930s, led by the slight and silky Matthais Sindelar and was heavily influenced too by the Hungarian ‘Mighty Magyars’ who enraptured all who saw them in the decade that symbolized a new beginning following the cessation of the Second World War. Mostly, on taking charge at Ajax in 1965 Michels built on the template laid down by his predecessor Vic Buckingham, an English coach who, more than anyone, was responsible for introducing a high level of professionalism and progressive thinking into Dutch soccer.

These two great teams and criminally under-valued manager dared to do things differently; looking beyond the conventional systems that were seemingly set in stone and instead embrace the wonderful truth that as much as football is a science it is also an art-form. They should never be forgotten.

Ajax dominate the Eredivisie

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Michels took these ideals and embellished them further, then further still and in doing so enjoyed enormous and instant success. His Ajax creation completely dominated the Eredivisie, winning the league on five occasions in his six years there and in 1969 they became the first Dutch team to reach a European Cup final. This was all achieved by Total Football.

What helped the reformist coach – and significantly so – was that his implementing of a whole new way of playing coincided with the emergence of a rare gift and unique mind; a teenager in Cruyff who wholeheartedly bought into the lofty ethos that footballers should not be restricted to a single role; one area of the pitch in which to parade their talents.

Indeed, it could be said that the opinionated, magnetic, and razor-sharp Cruyff perfectly encapsulated the model on which Ajax, Holland and later Barcelona would all abide by. With his skinny verve and mesmerizing ability he could play anywhere. He could do anything. He was a team in his own right.

In time other great players burst through the Ajax ranks; all imbued with the sincere belief that positions were mere suggestions and nothing more. Total Football dictated that only the goalkeeper had a specialist role while the ten outfield players swapped places freely, with forwards dropping deep and full-backs advancing and midfielders slotting into anywhere left vacant. It was fluid. It was poetry. It was an array of attacking and defensive patterns that perplexed the opposition.

Arie Haan, Ruud Krol & Johnny Rep

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Homegrown stars such as Arie Haan, Ruud Krol, Johnny Rep and the always magnificent Johan Neeskens were deployed in unfamiliar positions as kids, all the better to get to know how every component of a team best functioned and all too treasured the concept of space, making the pitch as big as possible when with the ball and – via a tremendous work-rate and capacity to close opponents down – as small as possible when deprived of possession.

This was football as chaos theory. This was an array of luminous colours splashed across a drab world previously informed by grey architecture, veg boiled to within an inch of their lives, and four four two.

It is difficult to pin down and accurately describe the likes of Haan, Krol, Rep and Neeskens; as difficult as it presumably was to mark them at the time. Krol was a sweeper but also a left-back. He was tough but also elegant. Neeskens was principally the energy of his side, as liable to take a rolled pass from his keeper and begin an attack as he was to close down an opposing centre-half up field. Together with Cruyff this quartet played a huge part in Ajax winning three European Cups in a row. They had versatility in their bones.

The 1974 World Cup

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Unsurprisingly, all of them too became a core of the Dutch side that ignited the 1974 World Cup. This was Total Football taking the global stage and their free-flowing, inventive fare that beat Argentina and Brazil on route to the final stunned the masses. Think David Bowie playing Starman on Top Of the Pops in 1972. In a pre-internet age with little information to prepare them for the sight, the Dutch rebellion of formerly sacrosanct ideas blew our dad’s minds.

In the final though against West Germany, the downside to this extraordinary new way of playing revealed itself because to Cruyff and co Total Football was not simply a concept based on pretty designs but an actual cause; a crusade. And causes are usually undermined by a good dose of piety or, if we’re being unkind, arrogance.

Two minutes in the Dutch took the lead following a typically mazy run by Cruyff resulting in a penalty. The Germans were there for the taking but it was not enough to simply beat them: they had to be humiliated. Until the equalizer inevitably came Holland toyed with their foe, taking liberties and prioritizing style over substance. They were punished accordingly.

It was Michels who presided over that World Cup campaign, having departed Ajax three years earlier to transplant his vision to the Camp Nou and Barcelona, a much bigger vehicle for his grand and laudable project. Later in the Catalan capital he would be reunited with Cruyff and history tells us of how profound this revived partnership was in the shaping of the game we know and love today.

From Netherlands to Camp Nou

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Without the DNA of Total Football running through Barca’s bloodstream would we have ever marveled at the glorious tiki-taka era of Iniesta, Xavi and Messi? Absolutely not, even if Guardiola’s all-conquering team and Spain’s Golden Generation allied themselves to a refined version of the philosophy that became known as ‘juego de posicion’ (a theory that has many similarities with Total Football but relies more on the retention of possession and the creation of overloads). Without one there would not have been the other, and just consider the goals, and the moments, and the unadulterated joy we’d have been deprived of.

History also makes clear the lineage that runs through the last sixty years, that has always ensured there is at least one team competing at the top of the sport that plays fluid, intelligent and attractive football.

From being Michels’ star apprentice Cruyff eventually became the grandmaster of the cause, taking to the dug-out and leading Barcelona to their first European Cup success in 1992. And who was stationed in midfield that evening as Sampdoria were downed and Barcelona claimed the honour of being continental champions? None other than Cruyff’s trusted executioner of Total Football excellence Pep Guardiola.

It is now of course Guardiola with his name in bold on the philosophies family tree: it is he who is the grandmaster and just as Michels was blessed to possess a formidable and fully formed genius to encapsulate his vision in Cruyff, Guardiola in turn had Messi. And so the dynasty will surely continue. Messi is a phenomenon. He is a hurricane of God-given talent who would have flourished and amazed in any era, for any team. As our unique system shows he is the total footballer.

Yet without Michels seeing the big picture, and Cruyff painting it in vivid orange, and Guardiola framing the masterpiece the diminutive superstar would have surely been plonked on the wing. Informed that his only function was to beat his full-back and whip in an early ball. What an enormous waste that would have been.