HOW THE 4-4-2 BECAME BRITISH FOOTBALL'S MOST ICONIC FORMATION

A system of playing inspired the name for this very magazine - on these shores, for numerous reasons, it's football heritage

- Adam Clery

When Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman proudly declared that his revolutionary new WM formation was how all football should be played, he had no idea of the events he’d set into motion. Football, this game sprung from a medieval tradition of just pelting a bladder around, before evolving into a mob activity for an unlimited number of lunatics to loudly ‘wheeeey’ across their cobbled, scatspeckled streets… was now on its way to being an art form.

He’d turned carnage into chemistry. Brutality into ballet. Frenzy into the Football Manager series. But it wouldn’t really be until the 1990s that the science behind formations would reach the mainstream. The great innovators of the game had reinvented countless times over by then, but you go and ask your grandad how many pub arguments he saw over Mario Zagallo’s adaptation of the Brazilian 4-2-4. It’s none.

It wasn’t until the popularisation of the sensible and surprisingly lethal 4-4-2 system that Normal People really became aware of team shape. Such was its prominence in first the European and then the British game, that its existence quite literally became a byword for the sport itself.

So much so, in fact, that when a group of aspiring publicists wanted to launch the best football magazine on the planet, it felt like the right choice for the name.

01 FOREWORD