Inverting The Pyramid Deconstructed: Part II — ‘La Nuestra’ The Spread Of Football To Central Europe & South America

This is a continuation from part I

As Britain began to hold pertinent interest in countries abroad, the Brits took football with them and began sowing the seeds of the beautiful game in nations around the world. There was money to be made exporting copper from Chile, guano from Peru, meat, wool and hide from Argentina and Uruguay and coffee from Brazil and Colombia and apart from business and banking to be done everywhere, there was time to play football and spread the game in those countries.

By the 1880s, 20% of Britain’s foreign investment was in South America and by 1890 there were roughly 45,000 Brits living in the Buenos Aires area along with smaller communities in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Lima and Santiago. The foreigners established businesses and also set up newspapers, schools & sporting clubs in South America and so, South America was introduced to football, slowly and progressively.

Meanwhile, in central Europe, the story panned out similarly. If there was a British community — whether centred around business, banking, diplomacy or engineering — football almost instantly followed. The first Budapest club Ujpest was established in 1885 and MTK and Ferencvaros followed suit subsequently. Anglophile Dutch, Danes and Swedes also began to quickly adopt the game.

It was in South America and Central Europe that football began to truly evolve. The 2–3–5( covered in part I) was retained but what stood out was the way the game was played. While the shape essentially remained the same, the style of football contrived to develop as the anti-thesis of the British style of play. While the British emphasised on ruggedness and physicality, South America and Central Europe developed subtler forms of the game.

The Danubian School

In Central Europe the speed with which the game was adopted and began sparked fresh impetus for British former players and future coaches to move to those countries and spread the game.

Britons like Celtic inside-left John Madden and his compatriot John Dick formerly of Arsenal coached Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague respectively for prolonged periods in the 20th century.

Despite the English influence, the Scottish passing style of play was more appealing to the masses in Central Europe.

Another formidable proponent of the Scottish style of play in Central Europe, an Englishman of Irish descent named Jimmy Hogan, born and raised in Burnley, would go on to coach several clubs around Central Europe and had stints as manager of the Austrian, Dutch and Swiss national sides after his playing days in England were over. He went on to become one of the most influential coaches in the history of football.

“We played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us. When our football history is told, his name should be written in golden letters”

- Gusztav Sebes(Coach of the great Hungary sides of the 1950s)

Hogan would go on to meet another great mind of European football, the Austrian pioneer Hugo Meisl. Meisl was born in Maleschau in 1881 and worked his way up in Vienna to eventually get appointed by the Austrian football federation. Meisl and Hogan would have conversations long into the night about their ideas, philosophies and visions for football. Neither saw anything wrong with the 2–3–5 — which had after all, formed the basis of football for thirty years — but both concurred that movement was paramount and necessary and that teams were too rigid and thus predictable.

Both Meisl and Hogan firmly believed that it was essential to make the ball do the work, that swift combinations of passes were preferable to dribbling and that individual technique was crucial — not for the marauding dribbling runs that became a hallmark in South America — but for instant control of an incoming pass and to allow a quick, decisive and swift release.

Meisl was a romantic, while his counterpart Hogan was primarily a pragmatist but together the pair became the forefathers of a new model of football in Central Europe: the Danubian School.

The Beginning Of ‘Futbol’ in South America & The Foundation Of ‘La Nuestra’

While in the Danubian school’s model, technique was prized over physicality but harnessed into the team structure, the game would take another significant divergent path in South America. While technique was important, in Uruguay and Argentina, it was individuality and self-expression which were celebrated and lauded.

The English FA’s ‘Laws of the Game’ arrived in Argentina is 1867, published in an English-language newspaper The Standard and later that year the Buenos Aires Football Club was founded. Meanwhile, across the River Plate, in Uruguay the Brits founded cricket, rowing and also football clubs.

Gradually and inevitably, British influence waned and the Argentinian Football Federation(the AFA) was formed in 1903 and they adopted Spanish as their language of business while two years later in 1905, Uruguay would follow by setting up the Uruguayan FA. The AFA later became the Asociacion del Football Argentina in 1912 but it wouldn’t be until 1934 till football became ‘ futbol ‘.

The Uruguayans and Argentinians remained uninfluenced by British ideals of muscularity, strength and direct football and had no similar sense of those virtues when it came to playing the game.

Different conditions necessitate a different style and the physique, styles and philosophies of the South Americans lead to a new brand of football springing up in pockets in South America. In the tight, uneven, restricted spaces of the poorer areas of Beuons Aires and Montevideo other skills developed and a new style was born.

As Uruguayan poet and journalist Eduardo Galeano put it:

Like the Tango, football blossomed in the slums. A home-grown way of playing football, like the home-grown way of dancing which was being invented in the milonga clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile, and football players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and posses the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos,el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music

Eduardo Galeano

Uruguay travelled to Paris, France for the 1924 Olympics — the first Latin American team to tour Europe — and wrote one of the great stories of early football history by winning gold in Paris. It has to be noted that this was a team of amateurs, amongst whom were a meat-packer, a marble-cutter, a grocer and an ice-salesman.

As Ondino Viera, a later coach of Uruguay, recounted:

“We founded the school of Uruguayan football. Without coaches, without physical preparation, without sports medicine, without specialists. Just us alone in the fields of Uruguay chasing the leather from morning to the afternoon and then into moonlit night. We played for twenty years to become players, to become what players had to be: absolute masters of the ball…. seizing the ball and not letting it go for any reason…. It was a wild football, our game. It was empirical, self-taught, native style of football. It was a football that was not yet within the canons of the management of football in the Old World, not remotely…. That was our football, and that’s how we formed our school of play, and that’s how the school of play for the entire continent of the New World was formed.”

- Ondino Viera

In Paris during the ’24 Olympics Galeano was present and wrote about his beloved nation’s path to winning gold in France:

“Game after game. The crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.”

- Eduardo Galeano

And so grew the philosophy and theory of ‘ la garra charrua’ — ‘ charrua’ relating to the indegenous Charrua Indians of Uruguay and ‘ garra ‘ meaning literally ‘claw’ or, more idiomatically ‘guts’ or ‘fighting spirit’.

Argentina meanwhile, decided to stay at home for the 1924 Olympics but football within the country blossomed.

As a piece in the Argentine newspaper ‘ El Grafico ‘ asserted in 1928:

“They soon began modifying the science of the game and fashioning one of their own…. It is different from the British in that it is less monochrome, less disciplined and methodical, because it does not sacrifice individualism for the honour of collective values….River Plate football makes more use of dribbling and generous personal effort, and it is more agile and attractive.”

‘El Grafico’ circa 1928

The unleashing of dribbling prowess and close control gave rise to the unhinging of imagination and football got its first few bag of tricks.

Juan Evaristo was hailed as the inventor of the ‘ marianella’ — the volleyed back-heel. While Pablo Bartolucci of the diving header and slightly disputably Pedro Calomino of the bicycle-kick.

And so the inside forwards of South America became the key to creativity on the pitch and which gave rise to the cult of the gambeta — the slaloming style of dribbling.

By the 1930 World Cup, South American football finally entered the world arena and captivated the imagination of the world at the grandest global stage as Uruguay beat Argentina 4–2 in front of a previously unheard of attendance of 93,000 people in Montevideo, to become the first nation to win the World Cup.

Tactically, the South Americans tweaked the 2–3–5 with two forwards dropping back in front of the midfield three as shown in the image of both teams’ formations for the 1930 World Cup final below, Argentina’s inside-right Francisco Varallo recounted: “ It was the era when we had five forwards with the №8 and №10 dropping back and wingers sending in passes. “

It was clear by then that South American football was not to be dismissed or taken lightly and so began the most innovative evolution of the beautiful game in the 20th century and that was ‘ La Nuestra’ or simply ‘Ours’ or ‘Our game’ or ‘Our style of play’ which was rooted in the ‘ criolla viveza ‘ or ‘native cunning’.

So the Central Europeans professed their brand of football — likened to the ‘ Waltz’ — and the South Americans added their own flavour with their deeply rooted ‘ La Nuestra’ or the ‘ Tango’.

While the continents were thousands of miles apart, soon football allegorically became not just a sport but an art form that wielded dancers of the Waltz and Tango.

To be continued in part III…..