Brilliant Oranje: 50 years on, the game is still in thrall to Total Football

Sérgio Markarián was the 30-year-old general manager of a fuel distribution company in Montevideo when he became aware of his mission. He had given up on his dreams of becoming a footballer 12 years earlier but, watching the 1974 World Cup, he realised his time in the game was not over.

As he watched the Netherlands outplay Uruguay, he knew that he had to become a coach so he could ensure his country would never suffer in the same way again. And it wasn’t just Uruguay. The Dutch went on to beat Argentina and Brazil as well, by an aggregate score of 8-1. Markarián had to teach the whole of South America how to deal with Total Football.

Whether seven league titles in three South American countries and a third place at the Copa América constitutes success on those terms is debatable, but what matters more is that Markarián was prompted to make the effort. He was not the only one inspired by the Dutch, even if they did go on to lose 2-1 in the final to West Germany.

Arrigo Sacchi, a shoe salesman at the time, said he felt his television set wasn’t big enough to appreciate what they were doing and, intoxicated by the potential, soon resolved to take the Netherlands’ hard-pressing game to Serie A. Within 15 years he would have revolutionised the Italian game and won the first of his two European Cups with Milan.

Other international sides may have made a similar impression, but none had such a lasting influence on how the game was played as the Netherlands at the World Cup in 1974. In part, it was an issue of technology.

The 1970 World Cup was the first to be broadcast live globally, the Telstar satellite beaming Technicolour images of Pelé and Tostão, Gérson and Jairzinho, Carlos Alberto and Rivellino, into homes across the world. But many of the games were played too late at night for a European audience; in West Germany they kicked off in the afternoon and evening in Europe, or in the morning and afternoon in South America. Far more people watched live. And what they saw was a team that had taken pressing and the possibilities it offered to new heights.

But there was also a sense, that only became apparent in retrospect, that 1970 had not been the great herald of a new age of attacking football it had seemed at the time. Rather it was a throwback, the heat and the altitude of Mexico making the sort of high-intensity pressing that had dominated in 1966 impossible.

Even Brazil, those who could look beyond the straight-off-the-beach stereotypes realised, had prepared meticulously using a Nasa-approved training course while their manager, Mário Zagallo, spoke of the need to remain compact.

By 1974, amid the persistent rain of West Germany, pressing was back. But whereas it had seemed a fairly functional tool for England and the USSR, in the hands of the Dutch it produced football of extraordinary beauty.

Again, hindsight shows that 1974 was the high point of Total Football. Vic Buckingham had planted in Amsterdam the seeds he had carried from Peter McWilliam’s Tottenham, and Rinus Michels had nurtured them from taking charge of Ajax in 1965.

The first indication football in Britain had that something special was happening in what had always been regarded as a backwater of the game came on an afternoon of thick mist in December 1966 when Ajax beat Liverpool 5-1.

Ajax had won the European Cup three times before the 1974 World Cup. Feyenoord had won it as well. But those were different times; the World Cup was the tournament that attracted by far the most viewers. It was there, far more than in the league or the European Cup, that legends were created.

Exactly how much of what the Dutch were doing was understood by non-specialists is unclear. Most of the talk surrounded the interchange of positions and the attacking possibilities that opened up. But positional shifts actually tended only to be on the longitudinal axis. In what was essentially a 4-3-3, the right-back might swap with the right-sided midfielder or the right-winger but he would rarely step into the centre of the pitch.

Besides which, interchanging positions wasn’t the revolutionary aspect. Plenty of teams, from Schalke to Uruguay, Independiente to Hungary, had done that before. What was truly revolutionary about Dutch football in the early 70s, what marked them out from, say, West Germany, was the aggression of its press, the use of the offside trap as an attacking ploy.

Brazil’s captain at the 1974 World Cup was Marinho Peres. He played in Brazil’s 2-0 defeat to the Netherlands. When he then joined Michels and Johan Cruyff at Barcelona, he was baffled by the demand to push up. In Brazil, a high offside line was known as a “donkey line”.

“What Cruyff said to me,” Marinho explained, “was that the Netherlands could not play Brazilians or Argentinians, who were very skilful, on a huge pitch. The Dutch players wanted to reduce the space and put everybody in a thin band. The whole logic of the offside trap comes from squeezing the game. This was a brand-new thing for me. In Brazil, people thought you could chip the ball over the line and somebody could run through and beat the offside trap, but it’s not like that because you don’t have time.”

Fifty years on, that understanding now feels like a basic of the game. Almost any side with any aspiration to be elite presses – at least to an extent. Everybody knows that the timing is vital, that a team steps up as the opposition passes the ball, that the player receiving then has to be put under instant pressure to prevent him measuring a pass over the advancing line.

That is now so central to so many coaches’ interpretations of football that it feels the game essentially falls into two parts: before and after systematised pressing, with the dividing line falling in the mid-60s.

It may be that it had to be the Dutch, a country without a strongly defined football culture to that point, without a predetermined way of doing things, who could embrace the future with such gusto. It probably helped that the football revolution in Amsterdam went hand in hand with broader societal change. Amsterdam transformed from Camus’s gloomy city in which pipe smokers watched the same rain coming down on the same canals to become the centre of the youth revolution. But 1974 reified in the public mind the idea of what Dutch football should be.

There is a sense in recent years that the harking back to 1974 has become restrictive. Bert van Marwijk’s aggressive side that lost in the World Cup final in 2010 was disowned by many of the canal-belt philosophers for not living up to the ideals of Total Football. Both Ronald Koeman, now back for his second spell as manager, and Louis van Gaal have committed the heresy of playing with three central defenders and wing-backs, diverging from the 4-3-3 orthodoxy.

But football is not a religion. Momentous as the summer of 1974 was for Dutch football, it was not a scripture. There are few absolutes. When the world plays your game, when it has adapted and refined it, the only way to get ahead again is to refine it better. That is Koeman’s mission.