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For Sacchi, though, the system was the most important thing. “Football has a script,” he said. “The actors, if they’re great actors, can interpret the script and their lines according to their creativity, but they still have to follow the script”

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It (pressing) arrived in Germany only in nineties. When Arrigo Sacchi imposed it on AC Milan in the late eighties, it was hailed as groundbreaking, yet Rinus Michels’s Ajax and Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv – even Graham Taylor’s Watford – had been using it for years. It was central, too, to the success of the Argentinean side Estudiantes de la Plata under Osvaldo Zubeldia in the late sixties. It was invented, though, by a Russian working in Ukraine, by a coach virtually unknown today outside the former Soviet bloc. The game’s evolution, of course, is not linear, and there are others who have had significant roles to play, but if there is a single man who can claim to be the father of modern football, it is Victor Maslov.