The dominant style of football’s hyper-capitalistic age has its origins in the unlikeliest of placesA training field near Ostfildern, in the forest south-east of Stuttgart. It’s February 1983, and local sixth-tier side Viktoria Backnang are playing a friendly against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv, who are wintering at Sportschule Ruit. For Viktoria’s young player-manager, Ralf Rangnick, it is a revelatory experience. When the ball goes out of play for a throw-in early on, Rangnick counts the Dynamo players, half-believing they had sneaked an extra man on to the pitch. They hadn’t, but such was the ferocity of their pressing that it felt as if they had. And so a seed was planted that has had a profound impact on football’s tactical development.
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Dynamo kept coming to Ruit and Rangnick, who is now the head of sport and development at Red Bull, kept studying them. As his career developed he became part of a group of coaches fascinated by the possibilities of zonal marking and pressing, radical ideas in a
Germany dominated by the belief that football was about individual battles, courage and vocal leadership.