10. Re-Inverting the Pyramid

“I promise you that we’ll work hard. I don’t know if we’ll win, but we will try very hard.

Fasten your seat belts, you are going to enjoy the ride” – Pep Guardiola (2008)

10/04/2012 FC Barcelona 4 Getafe 0

If you ever happened to read the Jonathan Wilson's book 'Inverting the Pyramid' you know what this is all about. He expalins there how football has been played and how they have formated themselves on the picth since the mid 19 century since today. Rougly it'ssomething like that - the game that was played about 150 years ago is ofcourse like a day and night, but in the early days, they put bascily all their players up front to score as many goals as possible and leavin as few men behind as possible. So the first formation was basicly a 1-2-3-5, used by Scotland in 1870's. If you look at it on paper, it looks like a pyramid, start with a goalkeeper and end with 5 men up front. Since then, the managers have become progressively more concerned about defence and how not to outscore tho oppponent, but how not to concede more goals that your opponent. As a result, by the time the pyramid, slowly but surely, began to invert. It started with 1 at the back and ended up with one at the top



As you have read the previous posts, Guardiola has been always very innovative and progress minded. In a very naive way he went to re-invert the pyramid against Getafe. He has always shown that football in Barcelona during his era has been very beautiful and attacking and so it's a nice way to end this series with this foramtion and also his era. Hope he comes back with new ideas to show the beautiful game to the world.

Re-Inverting the Pyramid

Pyramid