Charles Reep and What He Sowed

It is, frankly, horrifying that a philosophy founded on such a basic misinterpretation of figures could have been allowed to become a cornerstone of English coaching. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse.

- Jonathan Wilson on the influence of Charles Reep, Inverting the Pyramid

The vast majority of younger football fans have one of two opinions on Charles Reep - they either despise him, or they don’t know who he is.

He is one of the most influential tacticians and analysts in the history of the English game - and one of the founding fathers of its most hated strategy.

The story goes that, in March 1950, at half-time during a frustrating display by Swindon Town, a middle-aged RAF officer took out a pad and pen and began noting down everything that every Swindon player did in the second half, from passes to shots.

If you believe that exact account (did Reep really just happen to have pen and paper to hand at a football match?) it was the birth of the statistical analysis of football and, eventually, the birth of the long ball theory that defined the English game for the next 50 years.

Reep began to obsessively notate every match he could watch, recording teams’ attacking and defensive moves in the hope of discovering something remarkable - a definitive tactical theory for scoring goals.

Within a year, Reep was employed by relegation-threatened Bradford City as an adviser - perhaps the first of his kind in the world. Reep later recounted that Bradford, direly threatened by relegation, employed his methods and won 13 of their last 14 games, defeated only by Sir Tom Finney’s Preston after the Bradford manager, Jackie Gibbons, lost faith in the face of superior opposition and chose to play as defensively as possible¹.

Stan Cullis

Within a few years, Reep had been employed at both Stan Cullis’ legendary Wolves side (the “champions of the world”) and, less successfully, at Sheffield Wednesday. He would continue to refine his work over the coming decades and became a vastly influential figure in bootrooms around the country, right up to the era of the kick-and-rush experts of the '90s - Graham Taylor was an acolyte, as was Dave Bassett and, intriguingly, Egil Olsen. Olsen visited Reep in 1992 and his ideas ended up having a vast influence on the Norwegian national team.

His influence expanded gradually. Another disciple of the grim Reepian way was Charles Hughes - who became the FA's Head of Coaching after leading the Great British Olympic team through the '60s. Those who believed in the holy cant of the downfield pass reached the highest level of the English game and the very philosophy that spawned from Reep's ideas - blood and guts and brawn over brains and beauty and innovation - became imprinted on the English footballing psyche.

Reep’s theory was based on his discovery that 80% of goals were scored from moves which consisted of three passes or less. He also identified four areas where goals were most likely to be scored from. Reep decided that the best way to score more goals was to get the ball into these areas as quickly and often as possible, minimising the number of passes used and the amount of time taken to get the ball into these attacking areas. In his view, this was a system of pure attack, based on the principal that time spent defending or in possession was time wasted.

The main flaw with this concept and one that critics, including Wilson, have picked up on is that Reep’s own numbers suggested that 91.5% of moves consisted of more than three passes. Therefore it should follow that if 80% of goals were scored from moves of three passes or fewer, that surely represented a diminished return compared to playing possession football.

It’s a fairly fundamental problem with Reep’s maths and it is certainly extraordinary that a system which would find one of its believers in charge of England over forty years later had never been critically analysed sufficiently well to spot the gaping hole in Reep’s statistics.

"We can blame Reep or - at least as fairly - the many who bought in to his methods without ever running the numbers for themselves."

The other great problem with Reep’s methods is that his samples were hugely self-selecting and deeply limited in scope. In his fascinating article on Reep, Keith Lyons recalls meeting the man himself in 1996 (Reep passed away in 2002) and seeing that he had recently notated his 2194th match - a Champions’ League game between Manchester United and Juventus, watched on the TV. Not only does the number of 2194 recorded matches over 46 years reveal the sample size that Reep used to be statistically laughable (it must have been far smaller when he started work at Bradford in February 1951) but it reveals the issue that all of the matches Reep analysed were games he either attended himself or watched on television.

It is from these flawed numbers that we developed the basis of the long-ball football that began with Bradford City and Wolves and ended, through decades of minor tweaks and variations, with Watford, the Crazy Gang, right up to Sam Allardyce. For that mostly unedifying spectacle we can blame Reep or - at least as fairly - the many who bought in to his methods without ever running the numbers for themselves.

Reep, then, has become a figure of vilification - the false prophet upon whose hollow words were built decades of ugly, wrong-headed football, and a man at whose feet all blame can be laid for so many disappointments for the both the national team and English football as a whole - the tactical mire in which our national sport was bogged down for so many years was one that Reep's dubious analysis helped to create.

His theory - and his time of influence at Wolves - coincided neatly with England’s seismic 6-3 defeat to Hungary at Wembley in 1953, a result which shattered the long-standing illusion of English footballing superiority and shone a spotlight on the tactical and technical developments which had seen foreign powers overtake the English as the pre-eminent force in the sport.

The English could have taken any number of roads forward from that humbling point, but looked to the lessons of their most successful team at the time - Wolves under Stan Cullis, who a year later would defeat Honved and Spartak Moscow, the best teams from Hungary and Russia respectively. Their methods became a major part of the tactical dogma in England for years to come.

Cullis himself, in his 1960 autobiography All for the Wolves, suggests that the ultimate driving force behind his new, direct, tactics were the dictats he learned as a player under his predecessor as Wolves manager, Maj Frank Buckley. However, despite Cullis attributing much to Buckley (both tactically and in terms of personal and professional conduct), the language he used to describe his system was pure Reep.

“Before Wolves can score a goal, we must have the ball somewhere in the region of the other team's goal and the more often we have it in that part of the field, the more goals we are likely to create.

“Consequently, our plan of play is designed to send the ball into the other side's penalty-area with a minimum of delay and to keep it there for as long as possible.

“The best method of achieving this end is to ensure that every pass is, if possible, decisive and long rather than pretty and short… it is necessary to put the ball into the opponents' penalty-area from any quarter of the field in a maximum of three passes-and preferably in two, or, better still, one.”

The use of the exact numbers that Reep propounded is telling of the influence that Reep had in Cullis' thinking. This is where the long-ball lineage in English football began - the ground zero for half a century of dour football.

"Reep saw time spent defending as time spent at risk with no chance of reward, and as such wanted to find ways of attacking even when the ball was at an opponent's feet."

Cullis' account, however, also hints strongly another brand new tactical development - pressing.

"As we were working largely to the law of averages, determined to ensure that the ball spent a far larger proportion of each match in front of the opposition goal than in front of ours, it is a logical sequel that, once we had put the ball into the other team's danger area, we could not afford to allow them to obtain possession of it without a fight. So I needed forwards who could challenge and tackle and struggle for every loose ball."

Whenever Reep's contribution to the English game is analysed, the focus invariably falls upon his spurious statistic about 80% of goals being born of moves involving three passes or fewer. Far less discussed is another figure that Reep had calculated - that 50% of all the goals he observed came from moves involving one or even zero passes. In other words - dead balls and mistakes.

Lyon recounts that Reep specifically viewed attempting to regain possession inside the "shooting areas"² he identified as a critical part of his attacking method. Previously, the tactical norm was that if the opposition won possession in their own third, your team would dash back into position, ready to defend their attack. Reep believed in reversing this - he saw time spent defending as time spent at risk with no chance of reward, and as such wanted to find ways of attacking even when the ball was at an opponent's feet. Pressing was the logical method of achieving this.

Tradition dictates that pressing as a strategy has its birth in the '70s, with Rinus Michels' legendary Dutch team³. Certainly they were more coordinated and sophisticated (rather than pressing as a unit, it seems that Cullis placed the burden of winning the ball back on the individual, and especially the forward Roy Swinbourne) but there is little doubt that Cullis had the germ of the idea - and probably had it from Reep.

Despite Cullis' application of the press being somewhat limited, that didn't stop it from being one of the specific elements of his plan which he pinpointed as being crucial to the famous victories over Honved and Spartak. Those wins, coming so soon after England's crushing defeat to the Magical Magyars, served to partially restore English pride and provide a new blueprint for the English game. Had Reep not brought his analysis to Cullis' door, the development of the pressing game over the next 20 years may not have happened - or at least may have arrived far more slowly than it did.

For all that Reep has become a much-maligned figure, his tactics and ideas may not only have been the inspiration for the tedious tenets of the Anglo-Saxon 4-4-2 - but he may have left behind the seeds of the pressure game which has been a critical part of Michels' Total Football, Guardiola's tiki taka and Klopp's gegenpressing: some of the most beautiful and beloved systems and theories that the game has developed.

Maybe Reep's ideas, deeply flawed as they were, gave more to the game and to its aesthetics and tactical development than we have appreciated for so long - and perhaps we should look a little more kindly on a man whose life's work was, if nothing else, a work of absolute and consuming passion.

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¹Personal accounts of Reep - such as those of Keith Lyons - strongly suggest that Reep had two defining character flaws: dogmatism; and a tendency towards rose-tinted recollection. Bradford actually lost three games, even if the core of the story surrounding their survival is true enough - but it's typical that the one defeat Reep recalled should be blamed on the manager deviating from the principles laid before him.

²Reep divided the attacking third into four "scoring areas", seeking to understand which areas the ball should ideally be moved to in order to create more chances. He also felt, somewhat eccentrically, that a top-level striker might be described not as Homo sapiens but as Homo pomo - man in the Position of Maximum Opportunity.

³Outside of football, the development of pressing as a strategy can most likely be traced back to a Canadian ice hockey coach in the Thirties.