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Who Invented the Stepover?

What is the lowest number of penalties a team has scored in a shoot-out and still won?

Introduction

Who invented the stepover? The thought must have occurred to many of us while watching Cristiano Ronaldo taunt an opponent with this trick. Maradona, perhaps? Pelé? Surely some South American. I was editing Champions magazine, so did some initial research and traced the trick back to a Dutch footballer called Abe Lenstra in the 1950s. But there the trail went cold. Picking up the investigation for this book, the answer became much more complex and entertaining, touching on the careers of Bob Marley, a player celebrated as ‘Adam the Scissors Man’ and a Boca Juniors legend who played in espadrilles instead of football boots.

That question, inevitably, led to other conundrums – who invented the bicycle kick and the long throw, who had the hardest ever shot, what was the greatest of all great escapes, what is the point of corner flags and dugouts, and just where did all those football pop singles come from? I’d always found the New Scientist question and answer books, such as Why Can’t Elephants Jump?, curiously addictive and began to wonder if a similar approach would shed new light on the game of football – its origins, development and culture. When my co-author Uli Hesse suggested that one of the questions we could answer was ‘Can elephants take penalties?’, it seemed excitingly obvious that it could.

The selection of questions posed and, in general, answered here has led us into various corridors of uncertainty, sharpened our reading of the game and left us still pondering the connection between parrots, football and misery. They have also introduced us to a fascinating gallery of characters – the German coach who was shot in the jaw while sharing a bed with a suspected CIA agent, the striker who used to smoke dollar bills at half-time, and a doomed Dutch prodigy who learned how to beat defenders by watching people speed skate over frozen canals – who barely feature in the orthodox version of football’s rise to become the most popular sport in the world.

Along the way we also consider the synergy between tobacco and football, the mysterious origins of 4-4-2 and whether Argentina would have won the 1986 World Cup without Maradona. (Not the toughest question we had to answer.) The end result is a book that shreds shibboleths, challenges assumptions and could inspire a truly epic pub quiz – or possibly incite a riot at one.

Inventions

Who invented the bicycle kick?

If you believe Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Football In Sun and Shadow, this question has a straightforward answer. To quote Galeano: ‘Ramón Unzaga invented the move on the field of the Chilean port Talcahuano: body in the air, back to the ground, he shot the ball backwards with a sudden snap of his legs, like the blades of scissors.’

Galeano does not date this historic moment but popular tradition has it that Unzaga invented this move in 1914 in Talcahuano. A naturalised Chilean – he had emigrated from Bilbao with his parents in 1906 – Unzaga loved launching bicycle kicks both in attack and defence. After he showed off his trademark move in two Copa Americas (1916 and 1920), the Argentinian press dubbed the bicycle kick la chileña.

As comprehensive as that narrative might sound it finds no favour in Callao (Peru’s largest port), nor with Argentine journalist Jorge Barraza, whose investigations suggest the move was invented by a chalaco (as Callao locals are known) of African descent who tried out the acrobatic manoeuvre in a game with British sailors. Peruvian historian Jorge Bazadre suggests this could have happened as early as 1892. The Chileans could, Barraza speculated, have copied the bicycle kick from regular matches between teams from Callao and the Chilean port of Valparaíso. If you believe this theory, the bicycle kick is truly la chalaca (Chalacan strike).

In his 1963 novel The Time Of The Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa suggests that people in Callao must have invented the bicycle kick because they use their feet as efficiently as their hands. However, neither Chile nor Peru will ever relinquish their claim to have invented this spectacular move. Which, when you think about it, is strange, because a bicycle kick presupposes that somebody else has not done their job properly. German scientist Hermann Schwameder, an expert on motion technique, says what you need is ‘instinct, a lot of courage – and a bad cross’. Klaus Fischer, who scored with the most famous bicycle kick in World Cup history (it tied the 1982 semi-final between France and West Germany at 3-3 in extra time) agrees: ‘By and large, you have to say that every cross that leads to a bicycle kick goal is not a good cross.’

The much-decorated Chilean Ramón Unzaga, putative inventor of the bicycle kick. The equipment, right, is not recommended for home use.

Yet, on one famous occasion, a not very good penalty led to a bicycle kick goal. In May 2010, in the Hungarian top flight, Honved were 1-0 up against their great rivals Ferencvaros, when they won a penalty. Italian striker Angelo Vaccaro stepped up to seal the victory. He struck the ball at a perfect height for the keeper who punched it into the air. Vaccaro waited for the ball to come down and, with half an eye on the on-rushing defenders, flicked it over his head (and the keeper) and into the net.

Even if you don’t miss a penalty first, a good bicycle kick is a shortcut to glory – though sometimes that glory is short-lived. Zlatan Ibrahimović’s overhead wonder goal against England in November 2012 was feted as one of the greatest ever. That same month, trying to replicate his effort in a French Cup tie for PSG against Saint-Étienne, he missed the ball completely.

Wayne Rooney’s spectacular overhead kick in the Manchester derby in February 2011 was voted the best goal in the history of the Premier League. The player didn’t romanticise his achievement, saying: ‘I saw it come into the box and thought, why not?’ Therein, perhaps, lies the secret of the move’s enduring appeal: it is rare in life that we see human error (a bad cross) so swiftly redeemed by human genius.

Even a missed bicycle kick can have unforeseen consequences. At USA 94, with the hosts minutes away from a 2-1 victory against Colombia, Marcelo Balboa startled the Rose Bowl crowd with an inspired bicycle kick that flashed just over the left-hand corner. If it had gone in, it would have become one of football’s most famous YouTube clips. It didn’t but it still inspired Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz who vowed: ‘That’s the guy I want to play for my team.’ Balboa was signed by Anschutz’s Colorado Rapids and the billionaire became such an enthusiast he invested in the Chicago Fire, New York/New Jersey Metro Stars, the LA Galaxy, DC United and the San José Earthquakes – six out of ten Major League Soccer franchises. So you could say Balboa’s bicycle kick launched the MLS.

Rooney pulls it off. His great bicycle kick against City was improvised from a mis-hit cross from Nani. The move is said to have been introduced to England in the 1960s by United’s Denis Law, who had picked it up at Torino.

There are other, less convincing, claimants for the honour of inventing the bicycle kick. Legendary Brazilian striker Leônidas, whose elasticity earned him the nickname Rubber Man, claimed the move was his creation. But he first used it, records suggest, for his club Bonsucesso in 1932 – more than a decade after Unzaga. Chronology counts even more decisively against Carlo Parola, the Juventus centre-back who used the trick so often he was known in Italy as Signor Rovesciata (Mr Reverse Kick) and Doug Ellis, the ‘deadly’ Aston Villa chairman who claimed to have invented this move while playing for Southport during World War II.

By then, though, the bicycle kick had achieved international notoriety. In 1927, Chilean club Colo Colo toured Europe and their 24-year-old striker, captain and founder David Arellano performed the trick so often he was the toast of Spain – until he was killed, struck down by peritonitis after colliding with another player during a match in Valladolid. The black line above Colo Colo’s club emblem is a memorial to a flamboyant striker whose memorably premature death is a grim warning about the perils of showboating.

Who recorded the first celebratory football song?

Regal Records in 1932: the first FA Cup final souvenir disc was a 78rpm record commemorating the clash between Arsenal and Newcastle. This first entry in a genre we might call FA Cup vinyl was very different to its successors. For a start, the record was released before the final. And instead of the catchy, platitudinous pop songs that became obligatory, this record consisted of interviews with the players. Each finalist had a side of the record to themselves.

Controversial it isn’t. The announcer, who sounds as if he’s killing time before narrating his next Pathé newsreel, introduces the Gunners ‘popular captain Tom Parker … the right full-back, a wholehearted player, who is respected by his colleagues and opponents throughout the football world, and is equally as a good a fellow.’ Parker then describes the recording as a greater ordeal than anything that Wembley has to offer before promising that his team will play the game and play it well. (In the event, they lost 2-1, with Newcastle equalising controversially from a move during which the ball had gone out of play.)

There was then a strange lull before the vinyl baton was picked up in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Before the Bundesliga was founded in 1963, the national championship was decided by a cup final. In 1959, a composer called Horst Heinz Henning decided to celebrate the fact that local rivals Eintracht Frankfurt and Kickers Offenbach had reached the final by releasing a record which had an Eintracht song on one side and a Kickers tune on the other. A one-man hit factory with more pen names than Jonathan King, Henning never showed a trace of humour in his songs but, in 1977, surprised everyone by releasing a record called ‘The House At The Arse End Of Nowhere’.

Neither team were involved in this commemoration of a ‘dream final’, but a point had been proved. In 1965, Borussia Dortmund won the Cup Winners’ Cup, the first time a German club had won a European competition, and the team were inspired to record two songs. One was the Dortmund club song ‘Wir Halten Fest Und Treu Zusammen’ (which translates as ‘We stick together firmly and faithfully’) while the other was a popular carnival song from the early 1950s.

Two years later, French singer Antoine was so inspired by Ajaccio’s surprising promotion to Ligue 1 he wrote and released ‘Le Match De Football’. After a downbeat opening in which the football-supporting farmer wishes his cows would give him wine instead of milk, the song mysteriously notes that life is sweet, going badly, yet will be redeemed by the football on Sunday which he will watch on TV, dreaming of the fantastic day when the Corsicans win the Olympics. The song was the main attraction on an EP with a lovely old-school cover featuring a classic team photo.

In 1970, as the tuxedoed members of the England World Cup squad were singing ‘They’ll be thinking about us back home’, Feyenoord celebrated winning the European Cup with their own single. The golden – if that’s the appropriate metal to be invoking – age of the celebratory record had just started. Arsenal, Brighton, Bristol City, Cardiff City, Chelsea, Coventry City, Crystal Palace, Everton, Leeds United, Lincoln City, Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Nottingham Forest, Scotland, Spurs and Yeovil have all graced – or disgraced – the charts with their ditties. So popular were these singles that Chelsea recorded ‘Blue Is The Colour’ in 1972 just to celebrate the fact that they had reached the League Cup final (which they lost to Stoke City). ‘Blue Is The Colour’ has since been adapted (although the colour has often changed) by the Vancouver Whitecaps, Norwegian champions Molde and Finnish giants HJK.

Apart from the classic ‘Anfield Rap’ and the almost-credible ‘World In Motion’ (New Order with John Barnes), most of these cash-in singles were cheesily predictable. It took the Belgians to show Britain how these things should be done. In 1985 Belgian singer Grand Jojo, best known for his drinking songs, cut ‘Anderlecht Champions’ with the Mauves squad that had just won the Belgian title. The first verse features the usual platitudes about growing up as a fan but in the second verse, the song takes a bizarre, entertaining diversion in which the singer complains that he went to see another team, but there wasn’t even a cat nearby and the car park was deserted. The baffled fan sings: ‘But in front of me there were three turnstiles open. At one of the turnstiles I said: “Has the match been put off until Easter or Christmas?” The bloke in front of me said, “Don’t worry mate! As you’ve come on your own, we’ll start whenever you want!’”

It’s an old gag but it is surely better than, for example, ‘And we’ll play all the way for Leeds United’.

Who invented 4-4-2?

The orthodox view is that the classic 4-4-2 formation was invented by Victor Maslov. Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid makes this case eloquently, noting: ‘[Sir Alf] Ramsey is regularly given the credit (or the blame) for abolishing the winger and, given the lack of communication between the USSR and the West in those days, there is no suggestion he did not come up with the idea independently, but the 4-4-2 was first invented by Maslov.’

This invention was perfected at Dynamo Kiev, coached by Maslov from 1964 to 1970. Looking at the 4-3-3 with which Brazil had won the 1962 World Cup with forward Mário Zagallo falling back on the left, Maslov decided to go one better and pulled back his right-winger too. The idea was to give his players, especially his playmaker Andriy Biba, the freedom to create. But just as Ramsey dispensed with tricky wingers (because they held on to the ball too long), so Maslov parted with his gifted winger Valeriy Lobanovskiy. The 4-4-2 Maslov created was, in part, a formal shape that made it possible for his players to interchange because they knew which shape they had to keep. A defender pressing forward in this system knew a teammate would cover the space he had left. Without that structure, the team could not be creative and remain competitive.

Coaches whose experiments succeed are regarded as deep thinkers, those whose ploys don’t pay off are derided as ‘tinkerers’. Yet as Maslov’s reign in Kiev shows, great coaches are usually both. By October 1967, when his team knocked out European champions Celtic in the first round of the European Cup, Maslov had his side playing 4-1-3-2 with Vasili Turianchik as a holding midfielder sitting in front of the back four.

Oddly enough, as Wilson points out in his book, this is probably the most accurate description of the formation with which Ramsey’s England won the 1966 World Cup final. In front of the back four was Nobby Stiles, playing behind a midfield trio of Alan Ball, Bobby Charlton and Martin Peters, with Geoff Hurst and Roger Hunt as the attacking two.

Yet tactically the most significant matches in that tournament might well have been in Group 1. The scoreline in England’s routine 2-0 win over Mexico was a tactical triumph for coach Ignacio Trelles. In May 1961, Mexico had lost 8-0 on their first visit to Wembley. Desperate to avoid such humiliation, the players agreed to emulate Uruguay (who had held the hosts to 0-0 in the opening game) and play for a draw. ‘We played them using a 4-4-2 which we weren’t used to and was considered super defensive,’ said Trelles. ‘We gave the English a lot of work to do. Only a great goal by Bobby Charlton opened us up.’ Defender Jesús del Muro, who shrugged off injury to play that game, recalled later: ‘That was the day they said Nacho Trelles put out the “formation of fear”, because he played 4-4-2. Imagine – in 1986, they were all playing it.’

Uruguay, under coach Ondino Viera (the man who famously observed ‘other countries have their history, Uruguay has football’), also set out to play 4-4-2 against France, although this changed when they went a goal down after 15 minutes. So what we have is the spectacle, in one round of games halfway through Group 1, of two sides, Mexico and Uruguay, playing 4-4-2 for some or all of their World Cup match in 1966 – just two years after Maslov had begun experimenting with this formation in Kiev.

It is extremely unlikely – given the lack of communication between East and West that Wilson acknowledged – that either Viera or Trelles had consulted with Maslov, let alone Ramsey. The timeline may still favour the Russian coach, yet Trelles was a great tactical innovator (and was often criticised for it by the Mexican media) so it is hard to settle this argument definitively. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson points out that four different scientists in four different countries all ‘discovered’ sunspots in the same year, 1611. His theory of innovation is that they are created not by lone geniuses but by a process he calls the ‘adjacent possible’. This is his way of saying that only certain kinds of next steps are possible – you can’t invent the printing press without moveable type, ink and paper.

So applying this theory, 4-4-2 became an adjacent possibility as soon as a team proved you could succeed playing 4-3-3. At its simplest, the distinction between the two is merely the positioning of one winger. Which means that almost any reasonably intelligent, open-minded coach could have studied what Brazil did in 1962 and drawn the same conclusions as Maslov, Ramsey and Trelles.

Who was the first attacking full-back?

On 15 May 1949, Arsenal beat the Brazilian side Fluminense 5-1 in the Vasco da Gama stadium in front of 60,000 excited fans. As comfortable as that margin of victory sounds, the Arsenal defenders endured much discomfort. As full-back Laurie Scott recalled in Aidan Hamilton’s An Entirely Different Game: ‘Suddenly, a bloke comes dashing through and he’s had a shot at goal and the ball went wide. And we started looking around to see who we’d got to blame for this. We found out it was their full-back. See, they didn’t care. I never went up there like that. I used to go down the sideline, yes, but never like that.’

As the great Dutch coach Rinus Michels famously said, the problem is not persuading full-backs to go forward, they all want to do that, the problem is to persuade them to track back. This is especially true in Brazil. So the honest answer to this question is that it could have been any Brazilian full-back at any time from the 1930s onwards.

Then again it could have been an Englishman. In the 1930s, left-back Samuel Barkas won five England caps while on Manchester City’s books. In Douglas Lamming’s stuffy but compelling An English Football Internationalists’ Who’s Who, he quotes a contemporary appraisal of Barkas which sums him up as ‘clever and stylish with a liking for an occasional foray upfield’. It’s worth noting that Barkas could have indulged this liking as a left-half and inside-right – he was good enough to play in most positions – but there is at least a possibility that he was given licence to enjoy this role.

The first gifted pioneers to make an impact on a World Cup as attacking (or overlapping, as they were called back in the 1950s) full-backs were the Hungarian right-back Jeno Buzanszky and left-back Mihály Lantos. The Hungarian duo were such paragons of virtue that even Michels would have approved. Steady, reliable and strong in the tackle, they were primed to launch counter-attacks. Buzanszky loved to dribble up the wing and cross into the centre, while Lantos had a powerful driving shot.

Hungary should have won the 1954 World Cup with their attacking full-backs. Four years later, Brazil did just that with the unrelated Djalma and Nilton Santos on the right and left of their back four. The latter had made his mark as a prolific striker, been bought by Botafogo as a reserve centre-half and then made his debut at left-back. He never really regarded his new role as purely defensive and, sweeping up the flanks like a frustrated striker, he perfected the attacking full-back role. He overlapped brilliantly with Djalma who was slightly less enterprising but still provided the cross for Brazil’s third goal in the 1962 World Cup final.

By proving that goals could be made or scored from almost any position, the Santoses liberated the game tactically. Paradoxically, the most compelling proof of their enduring influence was offered by Helenio Herrera’s Inter Milan, who dominated European football with their counter-attacking catenaccio in the 1960s. When Herrera was criticised for his team’s sterile tactics, he would point to the Nerazzurri’s elegant attacking left-back, Giacinto Facchetti.

Brazil’s World Cup winners, 1954. Standing, from left: Djalma Santos, Zito, Gilmar, Zozimo, Nilton Santos, Mauro. Squatting: America, Garrincha, Didi, Vava, Amarildo and Zagalo.

Facchetti was a full-back who wanted to be a centre-forward but put his frustration to good use, becoming, in 1971–72, the highest-scoring full-back in the history of Italian football. ‘It was a trait I brought with me from my days playing at the church youth centre,’ Facchetti said once. ‘I didn’t like to sit back, I preferred to follow the action and finish it.’ Among his legion of admirers was a young centre-back called Franz Beckenbauer. ‘He inspired me to play in my own style,’ said the Kaiser. ‘He was one of the few who turned a defensive role into an attacking one. As a left-back, he went up and down the entire wing, which made him unpredictable. He even scored goals. His options were limited – in his position he could move only straight ahead or to his right – whereas for me, in the centre, everything was possible.’

Today, football seems to be teeming with full-backs who look better going forward than running back. Some fans still pine for the old-school full-back who tackled like a beast and believed the only appropriate use of the ball was to belt it into Row Z. For the diehards, the man who must shoulder the blame is Djalma Santos. Not only was he supremely effective in attack, he was one of the first, great full-backs to prove that scything tackles were overrated, showing that you were usually better off shepherding the attacker into such a useless part of their pitch that, in their demoralised state, they could be dispossessed with ease.

Which goalie first wore gloves?

One of the great old-time goalies, Heiner Stuhlfauth, who played for Nuremberg and Germany in the 1920s, recalled: ‘When it was raining, I would wear gloves made of rough wool. A wet ball will stick to such gloves. It was something I learned from life – I knew you cannot hold an eel with your bare hands, that you have to grip him using a rough piece of cloth.’

His contemporary, the Spanish keeper Ricardo Zamora, rarely stepped onto the pitch without gloves, though they may have primarily been a fashion statement. The man they called El Divino was very fastidious about his appearance. His trademark accessories were his legendary white V-neck sweater and a black turtleneck. Zamora smoked 65 cigarettes a day in the latter stages of his career and liked to calm his nerves at half-time with a quick ciggie. He never went anywhere without his good luck charm – a crude doll in a dark frock. So perhaps the well-dressed superstar simply considered gloves part of a gentleman’s proper attire. However, Zamora’s gloves weren’t of much use on his blackest day, when Spain lost 7-1 to England in December 1931. So many balls slipped out of the divine one’s grasp on a muddy Highbury pitch that one newspaper complained that Spain might as well have put Zamora’s lucky charm between the sticks.

Stuhlfauth and Zamora pre-date two famous keepers who are often credited with pioneering the use of gloves in the 1940s: Charlton’s Sam Bartram, and Argentinian keeper Amadeo Carrizo, both of whom are pictured with and without gloves. One famous contemporary of Carrizo’s always wore gloves, the great Lev Yashin. Dubbed the Black Panther because of the colour of his kit, he looked fashionably monochrome with black gloves. Yashin wore tight leather gloves, not ones made of wool, so he wasn’t wearing them to warm his hands. Indeed, after the 1956 Olympic final, Yashin approached the Yugoslav keeper, Petar Radenković, urged him to switch to wearing gloves and gave him a pair to use.

Yet none of these gloves were the special custom-made products that spread like wildfire in the 1970s. Germany’s Sepp Maier is widely considered the first to wear oversized gloves with padding and rubber inlays. The move towards modern gloves began when Maier took up wearing gloves made of terry cloth instead of wool or leather. ‘One day I was drying the ball with a towel and noticed it stuck to the ball,’ he recalls. ‘So then I had gloves made from this material.’ Ultimately, Maier’s experiment led to the huge gloves that became his trademark. Bob Wilson once said: ‘I remember making fun of the big gloves Maier wore at the 1974 World Cup. Within a year, everyone was wearing them.’

Cap, check. Gloves, check. Lev Yashin lines up, fully prepared, for the USSR, 1958.

John Burridge, easily as eccentric as the renowned practical joker Maier, says: ‘I was the first keeper in England to wear gloves. I’d seen Sepp Maier wearing them. I had to get them from Germany; you couldn’t get them in England. Pat Jennings and Peter Shilton rang me for pairs.’

Maier collaborated with Gebhard Reusch, whose father had founded a company that was producing winter sports equipment, including skiing gloves. In 1973, Reusch introduced a range of goalkeeping gloves bearing Maier’s name. At roughly the same time, Wolfgang Fahrian, West Germany’s goalkeeper at the 1962 World Cup, had been experimenting with cutting up the rubber sheets used on table-tennis racquets and glueing them onto gloves for a better grip. Fahrian teamed up with sportswear entrepreneur Kurt Kränzle and put out his own range. Fahrian had the same nickname as Yashin – the Black Panther – and fought Radenković for a place in 1860 Munich’s goal.

Who invented the league?

No one’s going to like the answer to this, so let’s delay the inevitable for a while and start with some linguistics. The term ‘league’ comes from the Latin word ‘ligare’, meaning to bind, and refers to a group of people, nations or institutions bound together for and by a purpose. What we now call league football began, in 1888, when William McGregor of Aston Villa invited several professional clubs to a meeting to create an association that would organise regular, scheduled games. This organisation could have been called the Football Association, but since that name was already taken, McGregor and his associates settled on the Football League. In its inaugural year, the league was contested by twelve clubs from the north and Midlands: Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke F.C., West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. The winners were Preston, who were unbeaten, and also won the FA Cup.

The first-ever football league winners – Preston North End, 1889.

This derivation explains why there are football leagues that don’t really play league football. Consider, for instance, the ACDV League. ACDV stands for Attività Calcistica dei Dipendenti Vaticani and refers to the Vatican City State FA. There are normally 16 teams in this league (one is called, and we’re not making this up, North American Martyrs). The precise championship format varies, but usually the teams are divided into groups, from which the best teams qualify for a knock out cup tournament, the Clericus Cup, fittingly played after Easter.

But forming a league is only the first step. The next one for McGregor and his allies was designing some kind of system for a competition. We all know how it eventually turned out – each team played the other once at home and once away; two points were awarded for a win and one for a draw – but these are just details, as the number of games, where they are played or how many points are distributed is ultimately of no relevance to what we consider a league system.

The best and shortest description of what we are looking for is this: ‘A league uses a prearranged schedule of games to decide on a championship from among its members.’ This definition comes from The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, a book that should know what it’s talking about, because the league system was invented in the United States and first introduced in baseball. In America, the National League was already into its twelfth season when McGregor and the others formally created the Football League at the Royal Hotel in Manchester.

The National League, the oldest existing professional team sports league in the world, was founded on 2 February 1876, but the first professional sports league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, was formed five years earlier. This association originally comprised ten clubs, nine of which fielded a team for the inaugural season. The clubs played between 27 and 35 games against each other (scheduling was still a problem). Philadelphia Athletics won the most games (22) and were declared champions. This was a league, as we understand this today, in all but name, and it was born in the same year as Marcel Proust and Orville Wright.

Of course, a league is not always a straightforward thing. In Argentina, a truly arcane system determines the clubs to be relegated, based on their average points per match over a three-year period. (Relegation, introduced by way of playoffs in 1894, was the great English innovation, as it remains unknown to baseball.) And between 1991 and 2012, Argentina had a somewhat unusual method of deciding the title, with the country producing two champions per calendar year, the winners of the so-called Apertura and Clausura seasons, respectively. Though the homeland of Maradona and Messi has since switched to a league with one champion a season, this system remains popular in Latin America and some countries, such as Venezuela, then crown an overall champion through a two-legged final between the winners of these tournaments. A bit like baseball’s World Series.

Sometimes, the oddities are subtler. This final table in Morocco in 1965–66 is famous as one of the most competitive leagues ever, with only eight points separating the champions from the two relegated clubs.

Yet it’s also notable because of the points system. Morocco awarded three points for a win (15 years before that was adopted in England and 28 years before it was first used in a World Cup), two for a draw and – oddest of all – one point for a defeat. The innovative idea of rewarding losers has never caught on and Morocco now awards three points for win, one for a draw and nothing for a defeat.

Who invented the long throw?

Not Rory Delap certainly. The devastating monotony with which the Stoke City legend hurtled the ball to the far post so infuriated Arsène Wenger that he proposed FIFA should replace throw-ins with kick-ins or abolish the rule that players can’t be offside from a throw-in. If either of Wenger’s proposals were adopted, Delap and his fellow practitioners would have to find a new trick and the beautiful game, for which the French coach has appointed himself moral guardian, would be a little less ugly. But Wenger is blaming the wrong man.

If you assess the quality of a long throw purely on distance, the king of the flingers is Dave Challinor who, while on Tranmere’s books, threw a record 46.34 metres. But Chelsea fans insist that, in terms of sheer effectiveness, it is hard to beat the great Ian Hutchinson. Hutch’s most famous throw, launched into the penalty area at Old Trafford in the 1970 FA Cup final replay, caused such havoc in the Leeds United defence that Dave Webb rose home to head the winner.

Hutch’s prowess was exceptional but he was hardly unique. Hennes Weisweiler, who coached the great Borussia Mönchengladbach side of the 1970s, complained in 1978 that: ‘Every English team has one player who is expert at the long throw.’ Fulham and Spurs certainly did. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fulham left-back Jim Langley’s ability to wind himself up for throws and launch the ball on to the head of striker Maurice Cook created many goals for the Cottagers. At White Hart Lane, as one Spurs fan noted, ‘long throw by Chivers to Alan Gilzean who would flick the ball on with his strangely pyramid-shaped head for Martin Peters to ghost in at the far post to volley home. Worked every time!’

Where some see art, others look for science. In 2006, researchers of Brunei University found that the optimal angle to release the ball for a long throw was 30 degrees. That maximises height while minimising air resistance. In the summer of 1933, a promising young right-half called Bill Shankly was doing his own experiments. Having just broken into the Carlisle United first team, he returned to his home village Glenbuck for the summer and spent days trying to perfect this tactic, throwing the ball over a row of houses and persuading local boys to fetch them back for him.

Shankly may have been inspired by Samuel Weaver, a left-half whose throw-ins were said to reach distances of 32m when he was at Hull City in 1928–29. In August 1936, Weaver joined Chelsea and there is a famous photo of him showing off his technique to his new team-mates. They don’t look like they’re taking the demonstration that seriously. They certainly wouldn’t have dreamed that, 34 years later, the club would win the FA Cup with that very technique.

Chelsea’s long-throw specialist Sam Weaver could also throw himself over his team-mates. It was unclear what match-winning ploy he had in mind.

Why do football matches last ninety minutes?

Nobody really knows. The laws of the game did not evolve with Darwinian efficiency. Although Ebenezer Cobb Morley, the first secretary of the FA, published an approved list of the laws of the game on 5 December 1863, those laws did not mention the duration of a game or even specify how many players constituted a team.

Who Invented the Stepover?

Contents

Introduction

Inventions

Who invented the bicycle kick?

Who recorded the first celebratory football song?

Who invented 4-4-2?

Who was the first attacking full-back?

Which goalie first wore gloves?

Who invented the league?

Who invented the long throw?

Why do football matches last ninety minutes?