There are some things that every football fan just knows. Sir Alf Ramsey, faced with a lack of effective wing-backs, converted his side into a new formation and invented, for the first time, the 442. Arsene Wenger, as a young manager at Monaco, revolutionised the fitness and recovery of football players in a way that has been adopted by pretty much every professional club in the world. And counter-pressing, “heavy metal football”, was invented in Germany by Ralf Rangnick, and passed through to Jurgen Klopp. Unquestioned truths of the game. But, as Mark Twain said, “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Viktor Maslov was born in 1910 in what was then the heart of the old Russian Empire, in Moscow, and grew up in the turmoil of the First World War and then the Bolshevik Revolution. By the time he was beginning to find his way in football, it had become a propaganda tool for the Communist regime, but in 1930 he embarked on a solid but unspectacular playing career, playing for four Moscow teams in the next 12 years. The last was Torpedo Moscow.
Upon hanging up his boots, he was given the managerial reins at Torpedo. It would be difficult to call those early years a success, and he lost and regained his job a number of times, filling in the gaps with short stints at other clubs. But inspiration struck in the late 1950s, when Brazil shocked the world in winning the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. They implemented their own tactical revolution, what we would now see as a 424 formation that could become a 433. The world followed suit – after all, who wouldn’t copy the world champions? – except for Maslov, who had lived through the instability that caused one revolution to lead to another in quick succession, and set about repeating history, but in football.
“Football is like an aeroplane. As velocities increase, so does air resistance, so you have to make the head more streamlined.” Maslov said, as he took the 1958 Brazilian system, and pulled back two of the forwards so that they became wide midfielders. Some years before Alf Ramsey turned to the 442 out of necessity, the Russian had created it by choice.
As part of his revolution, he gave the fullbacks more responsibility for getting forward, and one of his central midfielders was expected to protect the defence. In a footballing landscape that was built upon the principle of scoring as many goals as possible, he focussed on the defensive aspects of the game. Maslov believed in reducing the individuality of the sport for the good of the team; something so commonplace now that it seems unnecessary to say, but at the time it was a rare quality to find in football.
As part of the team ethic, he introduced zonal marking for the first time. No longer would his players win or lose by their individual battles with a single opponent. The whole team was expected to take responsibility for defending the goal. On top of this, whereas before 1960 teams were given space to play and run and try to create, Maslov began instructing his players to close down the opposition in a systematic fashion, restricting the space they had to play in and their time on the ball. This, as we now know, was the birth of the pressing game. He instructed the team to win the ball back further up the pitch than the traditional defensive zones, and apply pressure as soon as his side lost the ball.
His new system had an impact. For the first time, he found success at Torpedo Moscow (in his fourth spell at the club), winning the league in 1960. He moved on to unfancied SKA Rostov-on-Don where he began a root-and-branch rebuild of the club. They would finish second in the Soviet League in 1966, but by that time Maslov had already moved to Ukrainian giants Dynamo Kyiv.
In Ukraine, Maslov developed his revolution further. While his system was impressive, the players struggled to cope with the demands now being placed upon them. So Maslov set about revolutionising the players off the field to complement what he was asking of them on the field. For the first time, nutrition became a principle concern, and approaches to recovery became more scientific and effective. On top of that, fitness was improved to a huge degree; Dynamo’s players were expected to run harder and further than any other players in the league.
As if that wasn’t enough, Maslov would seek input from his players on how to improve. His involvement in their lives led to them calling him Dedushka – Grandpa – and like all great leaders he was loved by those who followed him.
Dynamo were already the most serious force in Ukrainian football – the Soviet system allowing them to hoover up all of the best prospects around the country – but now Maslov determined that they would dominate the Soviet Union. In the controlling dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain, football was one of the few outlets where nations could compete with the central powers back in Moscow, and there was huge national pride when a club went to face their Russian counterparts. Whoever Ukrainians supported in Ukraine, all supported whichever team could bloody the noses of Russia’s elite. Dynamo, under Maslov, did just that.
Between 1966 and 1968, the Kyiv side won the Soviet Top League, the highest level of club football in the Communist bloc, three consecutive times. In their debut European season, they reached the quarter-finals of the Cup Winner’s Cup where they lost to Jock Stein’s Celtic. But sadly, the good times weren’t to last.
Soviet sport was cut-throat. When the national side lost to Yugoslavia in 1952, Stalin as so outraged that he stripped the manager, Boris Arkadiev, of his title as Merited Master of Sports of the USSR. As most of the players had come from CSKA Moscow (who, at the time, were known as CDSA), he disbanded the side and expelled the club from the Soviet League for two years. Similarly, when standards began to slip at Dynamo, the club was unforgiving. Maslov could only lead Dynamo to a seventh placed finish in 1970, and was summarily dismissed. He returned to Torpedo, where he won the cup again, before finishing his career at Ararat Yerevan.
In terms of honours, Maslov’s career is not the most impressive. But in terms of influence, he has been unfairly overshadowed by the likes of RInus Michels and Arrigo Sacchi. Maslov’s system inspired the great Valeriy Lobanvskyi – whose own success at Dynamo is one of the reasons that Maslov has been forgotten – and the Ukrainian is rightly recognised for his influence on the game. When he took his Dynamo side to a small German village for a preseason tour, his system – a development of Maslov’s – made such an impression on Viktoria Backnang that they changed everything they did. Their manager at the time, a fresh-faced 25-year-old Ralf Rangnick, would introduce Maslov’s ideas to Germany, and then to the world.
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