Arsenal style of play shaped in part by the wind

Article From: The Arsenal Column
Exact Link: http://arsenalcolumn.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/arsenal-style-of-play-shaped-in-part-by-the-wind/ 

Although Arsenal’s style of football has suffered slightly this season, on their day they can be one of the most appealing on the eye. However the wind may have contributed to the Gunners style of play.
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Arsene Wenger has been credited with the football played by Arsenal and rightly so. His philosophy involves entertaining and maintaining an attacking emphasis. While the British football culture of passion, commitment and hard work shaped the fast paced and intriguing nature of the Premier League, Wenger vision differed amongst the masses.

I was going to write an article on why the English game is as cautious as it is this season but everyone knows why. Among writing it (and later discarding it) I found an interesting point on why one of the reason Englsih football is less technical than other countries. The answer; wind.

Long has it been thought the weather was to the detriment of the game but never had I heard a valid reason until now. It came from a book by Gianluca Vialli (and journalist Gabrielle Marcotti) entitled The Italian Job sought to find the differences of the Italian and English football cultures. I wondered if Arsenal played in La Liga, will we see the same fast flowing football or would it be slower? It may have been possession based but maybe not as it is right now. The wind making the football quicker as less could be focused on technically. This is what Vialli had to say in his book:

“It’s all about the climate. I had a long discussion about it when I went to Scotland to see Andy Roxburgh. I worked with a Scottish youth side and had them do the same drills I would do in Italy. I realised that, between the wind, the rain and the cold, there was no way they could do it. How can you possibly teach anybody anything in those conditions? To me, it’s pretty obvious and it explains why Brazilians are more technical than Europeans and, in Italy, the further south you go the more technical they are.”
- Fabio Capello, on the cultural differences behind footballing styles

I looked at three English cities (London, Birmingham and Manchester) and three Italian cities (Milan, Turin and Rome) and evaluated data on average temperature, wind speed, rainfall and hours of sunshine per month.

The research showed clearly that there was no substantial difference in temperature and that it rained more in Turin than in London. So why did it feel colder in London? The answer came when I looked at wind speeds. The average monthly wind speed in the three English cities was 15.3 kilometres per hour, compared with 10.3km per hour in the Italian cities. That meant that in England the wind blew some 50 per cent harder than it did in Italy. A substantial difference. And if we exclude the non-footballing summer months, the gap increases. The average in Manchester, Birmingham and London is 15.6km per hour while in Milan, Turin and Rome it’s just 10.1km per hour.

I felt vindicated. It supported what I had suspected for a long time — that wind, more than any other climatic factor, influences the development of a footballer. It seems basic, it seems simplistic, but it is an absolutely huge factor. And it’s not just something that affects young players: it has an impact on how a team trains and, therefore, how it plays, even at professional level.

“One of the first things I had to get accustomed to as soon as I arrived in England was the weather. And I don’t mean the temperature or the rain but, most of all, the wind. The wind ruins everything. It forces you to do only one type of exercise. It forces you to work on either speed or continuous movement. It’s very rare that you get the chance to sit calmly and work on technique or on tactics. You have to keep the players moving, otherwise they get cold. And this is something which begins way back when they are children.”
- Arsene Wenger

The wind affects everything. You can be the most technical footballer in the world — you can be Zidane and Maradona rolled into one — but if a fierce wind is blowing, you won’t be able to do any meaningful work with the ball in the air, whether it’s volleying practice, heading or keepy-uppy. Even any kind of passing over ten or 20 feet becomes pointless when it’s windy. And it’s not just down to the way the wind affects the flight of the ball. No. As Wenger points out, the wind makes everything feel colder. You don’t want to do a shooting drill or individual ballwork when players spend lots of time standing around. You want to keep them moving so that their muscles stay loose.

I have clear memories of standing on a training pitch in Italy as the coaches explained what they wanted us to do tactically in excruciating detail. We would play for about 30 seconds, then everything would stop and they would explain it again if somebody made a mistake or didn’t make a crisp enough run. All of this, of course, was in addition to the time we spent in front of the blackboard. This type of tactical work gave us a base in terms of movement and reading the game. In England the wind makes it impossible to replicate that kind of work.

Does it explain why, generally, Italian players have better individual technique than their English counterparts and why in Italy we spend much more time on tactics? Not on its own, but it’s certainly a factor. More than any other climatic factor, the wind determines what kind of players are produced and their characteristics, both technical and tactical.

Click here to buy The Italian Job by Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti