Antonio Conte has been praised for his bold use of Victor Moses and Marcos Alonso but history suggests it is part of a wider trend dating back to the 1960s

Barring an extraordinary collapse, this season’s Premier League title will have been decided at half-time at the Emirates Stadium on 24 September when Antonio Conte moved from a back four to a back three. The game was already lost but Chelsea, adapting remarkably swiftly to the new shape, then embarked on their record 13-match winning run.

It was a change that, rightly, has earned Conte great praise for his decisiveness and his capacity, albeit unhindered by the demands of European football, to instil a new formation. But its radicalness has passed largely unremarked.

Given Conte’s history with a back three with Italy and Juventus, perhaps it was half-expected – certainly it couldn’t be said to have been a shock – but it is nonetheless hugely significant in terms of English football history. If Chelsea take the title, they will be the first side to win the league while predominantly using a back three for more than 50 years.

The last team to do so using a back three was Harry Catterick’s Everton in 1962‑63, when Brian Labone, operating as a deep-lying centre-half, was flanked by the full-backs Mick Meagan and either Alex Parker or George Thomson, the final hurrah in England of the W-M formation.

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Thereafter, Bill Shankly and Don Revie, more cautious, defensively-minded coaches, dropped a midfielder back alongside their centre-back, playing the “method” football that created such a furore for its supposed negativity when they faced each other in the 1965 FA Cup final. If this was modern football, the columnist Peter Wilson declared in the Mirror, he wanted no part of it. “I am told if we are to survive the rigours of the World Cup,” he wrote glumly, “we must forget individualism, the brilliant flashes of inspiration which transform a treadmill into a flying machine, the genius which transmutes a muddied oaf into a booted genius.”

But this was modern football, and the shift to a back four was central to it. Catterick was edging towards the back four and by 1966-67, even the notably conservative Matt Busby had adopted a 4-2-4 at Manchester United, dropping Nobby Stiles in alongside Bill Foulkes. Pressing has set the tone of the modern game but it was those shifts that defined the shape, and that meant a radical change in role for the full-back.

When Jack Charlton noted after the 1994 World Cup that the full-back was the most important player on the field from a tactical point of view, it was widely regarded as an example of typical counter-intuitive Big Jackery, but it increasingly seems the history of tactics over the past half century is the history of the full-back, from Gerry Byrne to Danny Rose, from Paul Reaney to Victor Moses.

The liberation of the lateral



From the late 1870s to 1925, almost all teams played 2-3-5. Then the offside law was changed so only two defenders rather than three were required to play a forward onside. Bereft of the simple offside trap, teams needed a different defensive strategy and so pulled back the centre-half. That placed enormous pressure on the two midfielders and so enhanced the tendency for the two inside-forwards to play deeper than the rest of the forward line. Herbert Chapman was the most successful exponent of the new shape, the 3‑2‑2‑3 – or W-M – he pioneered at Arsenal, leading them to dominate the 30s. The W-M remained the dominant formation in English football for another 30 years.

Despite the reservations of those who preferred their centre-halves to be creators, the formation spread across the world, first to Europe and then to South America. The Hungarian Dori Kurschner, escaping antisemitism at home, took it to Brazil, where he was appointed the coach of Flamengo in 1937.

The man he replaced, Flavio Costa, remained as his assistant, took advantage of his lack of Portuguese to undermine him and then succeeded him the following year. He had been scornful of Kurschner’s efforts to implant the W-M but saw the potential and developed what he termed the “diagonal”, tipping the central square of the W-M so the inside-left became a more attacking presence and the right-half became much deeper-lying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ruud Krol of Holland, right, battles with France’s Didier Six during a World Cup qualifier in 1981. Krol was an attacking full-back who also played as a sweeper. Photograph: VI-Images/VI-Images via Getty Images

By the mid-50s, the skewing had gone so far that 3-2-2-3 had become 4-2-4. A similar process had occurred in Hungary, where the preference for a withdrawn centre-forward (Peter Palotas, Nandor Hidegkuti), led to the inside-forwards pushing up and one of the wing-halves having to drop back until he eventually became a central defender. The strands of evolution crossed during Bela Guttmann’s brief but successful tenure at São Paulo in 1955.

In Brazil, the shift of shape went hand-in-hand with the development of zonal marking. This was hugely significant. Whereas previously players had simply marked their opposite number – the left-back picked up the right-winger, the right-half picked up the inside-left – they began to mark space, to pick up whoever came into their zone. The new idea, usually credited to Zeze Moreira, gave players freedom to leave their designated areas of the pitch, safe in the knowledge a team-mate would cover for them by dropping into their zone.

By 1958, Brazil were playing a zonal-marking 4-2-4. As they won the World Cup, most of the headlines were taken by the performances of the 17-year-old Pelé, but just as significant was the new way of playing. With two central defenders as cover, the full-backs could push forward, adding a new angle and depth to attacks. The left-back, Nilton Santos, was described as the first attacking full-back. Perhaps significantly, the oxymoronic nature of that term does not exist in Portuguese or Spanish, in which the word for full-back is “lateral” – side player.

Consequences of the back four



The 1958 World Cup had a far greater impact on English football than any that had gone before. In part that was simply a matter of geography and timing: far more coaches and journalists travelled to Sweden than any previous tournament. But it was also a consequence of England’s heavy defeats to Hungary in 1953 and 1954: there could be no belief any more that English football had nothing to learn from the wider world.

The widespread adoption of the back four had a major effect on English notions of attacking. English football – with a handful of exceptions, notably Chapman at Arsenal – had always revered the winger, perhaps because English pitches tended to become bogs between November and March, meaning the firmest ground, the area where skill was most possible, was near the touchlines.

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Teams playing a W-M against a W-M would operate on a pivot: attack down the left, say, drawing out the opposing right-back. The centre-back would mark the centre-forward, with the left-back tucking in as cover. That left the attacking team’s right-winger in space. If the ball could be switched from left flank to right and the defence turned, the winger would have acceleration room, moving at speed when he encountered the left-back. Beating a player at pace is much easier than doing so from a standing start, but the addition of a second central defender meant the full-back did not have to cover. He could stay wide and the acceleration room that had been granted the winger if the play was switched was lost.

The winger began to evolve away from the Stanley Matthews archetype. Alf Ramsey had great success at Ipswich by withdrawing Jimmy Leadbetter on the left into a midfield role. With England, he would have even greater success by withdrawing the wingers on both sides.

That in turn accelerated the change in the role of the full-back. With no winger up tight against him, he could advance. The result, in the 1960s, was the great age of the attacking left-back: not just Nilton Santos but also the Argentinian Silvio Marzolini and the Italian Giacinto Facchetti. For England, Ray Wilson advanced as no other full-back ever had before.

The taste for attack



Once the winger had retreated into midfield and the full-back begun his advance, there was an obvious question to be asked: Why bother playing a defender in the full-back position if there was little defending to be done? Why not instead play a midfielder there and let him go toe-to-toe with his opposite number, ideally driving him back on to his own full-back?

That was precisely what happened in the early 1980s with the birth of the wing-back. Ciro Blazevic, Sepp Piontek and Carlos Bilardo all have claims to have come up with the idea. Turning the full-back into a midfielder had advantages beyond enhanced attacking threat on the flanks: if one player was doing the job of both full-back and wide midfielder in a 4-4-2, then it effectively gave managers two spare players. The overwhelming tendency was to deploy one at the back and one in midfield, a 3-5-2 that allowed a side to overman in the centre of its defensive and midfield thirds. That was the shape that provided the platform for Diego Maradona to win Argentina the 1986 World Cup.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brazil’s Nilton Santos, right, tackles Sweden’s Kurt Hamrin during the 1958 World Cup final in Sweden. Santos was described at the World Cup as the first attacking full-back. Photograph: DPA/PA Images

When England, belatedly, adopted the notion of a formation with three central defenders at the 1990 World Cup, they still clung to the idea that a full-back, as the name suggested, should be a defender. Their interpretation of a 5-3-2 featured not midfielders in the wide positions but Paul Parker and Stuart Pearce as full-backs who could get forward.

By the late 1990s, the back three was retreating in the face of single-striker systems. Once the full-back had tasted freedom, though, there was no going back. The advent of 4‑2‑3‑1 and the return to popularity of 4‑3‑3 pushed wide creators higher up the pitch, but full-backs remained an attacking presence.

That has become increasingly the case with the growing trend for inverted wingers over the past decade or so. If a left-footed forward plays on the right, his effectiveness is significantly enhanced if he has a full-back overlapping outside him, presenting the full-back with the dilemma of defending on the inside, anticipating the forward coming on to his stronger, left foot, or remaining in a neutral position in case the ball is pushed right to a full-back coming on the outside. The relationship between Lionel Messi and Dani Alves at Barcelona is perhaps the best example of that, but it is also apparent in, say, the way Sadio Mané and Nathaniel Clyne link up for Liverpool.

The picture today



Tony Pulis at West Bromwich Albion is so concerned to ensure his full-backs defend he often picks four centre-backs across his defensive line. Danny Simpson and Christian Fuchs rarely ventured forward for Leicester last season. When Manchester United went to Anfield this season, Antonio Valencia and Daley Blind tucked in and rarely left their own half. But in the modern game the vast majority of full-backs are attacking.

There were times during Euro 2016, notably against Spain in the last 16, when Conte had his Italy wing-backs, Mattia De Sciglio and Alessandro Florenzi, pushed so high the shape was almost 3-3-4 rather than 3-5-2. When Pep Guardiola has used a back three with Manchester City this season he has often used Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sané or Nolito as his wide men in what is effectively a 3-2-4-1.

Modern full-backs are so attacking we are living through another variant of the paradox that existed in 1990, when, to English eyes at least, a back five tended to be more attacking than a back four. These days, a back four is often more attacking than a back three.

Clyne and James Milner at Liverpool, Danny Rose and Kyle Walker at Tottenham Hotspur, whichever of his many options Guardiola throws at the problem, all essentially play as midfielders. That may be one of the reasons why this is on course to be the highest-scoring season in Premier League history.

The most effective full-backs have been Chelsea’s Victor Moses and Marcos Alonso. With the additional central defender, they have been emboldened to push forward to such effect Alonso has four goals and two assists this season, as does Moses. Moreover, their forward surges have freed up Eden Hazard and Pedro to drift into those awkward three-quarter spaces in what are in effect inside-forward roles; there is no expectation for them to provide attacking width. While it is true Moses has, occasionally, looked defensively suspect – particularly when his lack of aerial ability was isolated against Tottenham – that is a gamble Conte seems happy to take.

Even if they are wing-backs rather than full-backs, the terminology, the use of the suffix “back”, seems unhelpfully old-fashioned. The position has changed to the extent that today’s Kyle Walker and Marcos Alonso are almost unrecognisably different players to Everton’s 1960s stalwarts Meagan or Parker. Those who protested after the 1965 FA Cup final would hardly have believed it but that was the necessary first step in the evolution of the full-back. At the highest level they’re all laterals now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tottenham Hotspur’s Kyle Walker, left, and Danny Rose are part of the new breed of attacking full-backs. Photograph: Tony Marshall/Getty Images

Five pioneering attacking full-backs

Nilton Santos (Brazil; Botafogo): A World Cup winner in 1958 and 1962, he was the first attacking full-back to gain worldwide renown. Nicknamed “the Encyclopaedia” for his knowledge of the game.

Silvio Marzolini (Argentina; Ferro Carril Oeste, Boca Juniors): Five times a champion with Boca, he was a vital outlet in an often defensive side. A pin-up, he was the first Argentinian to sign an advertising contract, promoting espadrilles.

Giacinto Facchetti (Italy; Internazionale): Won two European Cups, four scudetti and a European Championship and scored 75 goals in 629 games from left-back, an instant riposte to those who dismissed catenaccio as a purely defensive system.

Tommy Gemmell (Scotland; Celtic, Nottingham Forest, Dundee): A right-footed left-back, Gemmell scored in two European Cup finals, grabbing the equaliser as Celtic beat Internazionale in 1967 and converting a penalty in a losing cause against Feyenoord in 1970.

Ruud Krol (Holland; Ajax, Vancouver Whitecaps, Napoli, Cannes): The great left-back in the Total Football sides of Ajax and Holland, he won six Dutch titles, two European Cups (missing the 1971 final with a broken leg) and lost in two World Cup finals.