The subheading of this non-fiction book is ‘The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines’ and had been on my radar for a while, having heard good things about Cox’s other books. I’m pleased to say that it did not disappoint, working as both a nostalgic overview to the first twenty five years of the English Premier League, and also as a summation of how football has evolved in that time, picking out the various players and managers whose contributions helped shaped the game.

The book is broken down into 25 chapters, each one roughly categorized by the key events of a particular year in a decidedly chronological order, beginning with the inception of the Premier League – and with it the money and razzmatazz that Sky TV brought with it. It’s easy to forget such facts like out of the 242 players who started a Premier League match on that opening weekend of 1992, only 11 were foreign. It’s easy to forget how changing the back-pass rule in 1992 (making a goalkeeper forbidden to handle a ball played back to him from one of his own players) took the safety play out of the way and made the sport infinitely more exciting. There are many items of trivia in this book, and they help illustrate how English football evolved from being rather staid and old-fashioned to eventually become one of the most-watched leagues in the world.

There are chapters focusing on players like Eric Cantona, the SAS (Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton), Gianfranco Zola, Dennis Bergkamp, Michael Owen, Nicolas Anelka, Thierry Henry and Ruud Van Nistelrooy, as well as iconic managers and tacticians like Sir Alex Ferguson, Kevin Keegan and his ‘we’ll outscore you’ policy, Arsene Wenger’s influence in bringing modern methods of diet and conduct to English football, the long-ball game of Sam Allardyce, etc.

If you have an interest in football tactics and team formations, this is a fascinating book. It also works as a way of reliving the key moments of the sport over the last quarter of a century. I found myself recalling incidents I had forgotten and remembering the names of players that had since slipped my mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to catching more of the work of Michael Cox. As such, it comes highly recommended.

A fascinating read given the rather dry title. Published last year when the Premier League had it’s 25th anniversary, this substantial tome describes the evolution the game underwent once the new league was founded. The title suggests a focus tactics, and that’s certainly a significant part of the book, but there’s also detailed discussion of the managers and players who were the catalysts of change. Author Michael Cox runs the website www.zonalmarking.net and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian. He’s been smart enough to see that the human story is what makes this readable, not just tactics and statistics.

As a fan in the 90’s I’d always check the results on a Sunday and catch Match of the Day whenever I could but the emergence of the Premier League, tucked away on BSkyB meant a lot of what is described in the early sections here is less familiar to me until we reach the more recent years. Whilst not strictly chronological the book has 25 chapters each with a different theme, and spans Cantona to Conte finishing with a neat analysis of Leicester’s Premiership success.

Cox is particularly adept at relating how managers such as Wenger, Ferguson, Mourhino and Benitez changed the game without taking anything away from the players who actually made it happen on the pitch, making them seem quite human and fallible in the process. Whilst some of the stories are familiar – the way Wenger changed players diet and fitness at Arsenal for example, there’s a great deal I’d never heard of before. For example, although I knew Sam Allardyce had been an innovative user of player performance data and an early adopter of ProZone, Cox explains how much wider than this Big Sam’s thinking went, having had his eyes opened to physical and mental preparation techniques as yet unseen in the UK by a brief spell playing for Tampa Bay Rowdies who shared facilities and methodologies with their NFL brethren the Buccaneers. Despite his refusal to give up route one, Bolton’s performance under his management remains remarkable even if they way they got results wasn’t pretty.

There’s no attention given to the wider impact that Sky have had on the game; the wage inflation, the lack of real competition outside the tops teams, the disregard that the Premier League and Sky have for fans who still watch their football live. This may seem to make the book a little imbalanced but to be fair to Cox, the focus was always going to be what happened on the pitch rather than off it.

Despite being a football fan for over 50 years this book has made me realise how little I noticed of some aspects of the game; reading this has provided me with a lot of insight, brought back a wealth of memories, dug up acres of interesting facts and a fair few laughs. A book that gives 110%, and will leave you over the moon. Brian.

Fascinating insight into an aspect of the game that is often overlooked. It gives you the chance to delve into the inner workings of the premier league and to understand how some of the biggest names in the game changed their approach over the years.

Certain chapters drag a little bit and you're not always given an unbiased view but on balance it's well written and very interesting.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in the tactical aspects of football in the last twenty years.

Michael Cox is the author of the football tactics website Zonal Marking and a freelance football journalist, particularly featured in the Guardian.

This book is effectively a tactical history of the UK Premier League, based presumably on his years of analysis for his website supplemented by many hours of re-watching of past matches, and also (from the index) based on scouring footballer’s (auto)biographies and contemporary newspaper reports.

Each season is featured in its own chapter, which proceed chronologically but are also aimed to identify emerging ideas and themes.

A theme that underpins the book is universality. Universality of tactics, with players in all positions becoming all-rounders rather than specialists. Universality of the players and managers in the league: Cox traces almost all of the tactical evolutions to the influence of foreign players and managers – at one stage arguing that Rio Ferdinand and Brendan Rogers are the only two real exceptions to this rule. He even goes further to argue that in later years a number of tactical evolutions were from foreign teams which were then adapted into the Premier League.

One of Cox’s key opening contentions is that the timing of the Premium League fortuitously (particularly given its link up with Sky, its rebranding, and the systematic live broadcasting of matches) co-incided with a rules induced change in football tactics – the banning of the back pass after the bore-fest that was the 1990 World Cup. Further this itself meant that goalkeepers were the early harbingers of the universality theme – the back pass rule meant they suddenly needed to learn to kick, and while only 11 of the 242 starting players on the opening weekend of the Premier League were foreign, 4 of those 11 were goalkeepers – with 1 year later 10 of the starting goalkeepers being foreign.

The book then proceeds to trace how tactics and counter-tactics evolved over time – and the players and managers who influenced those changes.

Another area Cox delights in is the use of empirical data to overturn received wisdom or established legend. For example from the very early years of the Premier League: Blackburn in 1994/5 “bottled” the league to the same extent as Newcastle in 1995/96 (the difference being solely Manchester Utd’s relative levels of “bottle” in each season); Newcastle’s defensive record in 195/96 was in line with the general goals conceded record of the title winners in that (and the next 5) seasons – the problem was a lack of goals which stemmed from a complete lack of any tactical plan

I also enjoyed his standback perspective on other events, looking for the story behind the better known story and in some cases the role of serendipity. In this case, picking some example from Arsene Wenger’s impact at Arsenal. Firstly Bruce Rioch’s unheralded role in “setting the wheels in motion for the Wenger revolution” both by introducing a concept of passing out from the back, and reducing the goalscoring reliance on Ian Wright. Secondly the crucial impact of Tony Adams declaration of alcoholism and David Platt’s Italian inspired practices meaning that Wenger found a more accepting environment for the health, fitness and lifestyle changes he introduced than Alex Ferguson did at Manchester United, where eventually Ferguson “was forced to sell the two chief culprits, Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside, who were among United’s star players and fan favourites” – something which may have played a role in the far more immediate revolution Wenger was able to introduce (and the resulting much quicker success he attained).

I also enjoyed how Cox picks out crucial turning points in tactics and what lead to them. Here I will pick a more recent example from the two last years of the Premiership – where Cox points out that the last two Champions (Leicester and Chelsea) owe their titles to complete tactical switches they made early in the season after heavy and deserved defeats by Arsenal (5-2 and 3-0 respectively – in Chelsea’s case a switch actually executed at half time in that very game).

Finally, I found as I read the book, that I was continually highlighting passages of insight – the above is only a very small sample.

For the intelligent football fan (and as part of the changes the game has witnessed over the last 30+ years, this is now far from an oxymoron) this book is a fantastic read. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Harper Collins for an ARC provided via NetGalley.

One of the best researched and most comprehensive analysis of modern English football.