Vittorio Pozzo

As a player, Pozzo played professionally in Switzerland for Grasshoppers the 1905–06 season, before returning to Italy where he helped found Torino (then "Foot-Ball Club Torino"), a team with which he played for five seasons until retiring from football in 1911. He would serve as the technical director of Torino from 1912 to 1922. After completing his studies, he joined Pirelli, where he became manager, a position he would leave for the Italian national team.

Early career

Until the 1912 Summer Olympics, the Italy national team was guided by "technical commissions", when Pozzo was appointed as the first head coach of the national team during the debut of an Italian selection in an official competition. Italy was eliminated in the first round after a 3–2 loss to Finland in extra time, on 29 June. Pozzo resigned after his third match, being defeated 5–1 by Austria in the consolation tournament, on 3 July. He returned to work at Pirelli; only to return to the national team in 1921 as part of a "technical commission", a committee composed of federal managers, referees, players, former players, coaches and journalists. Throughout his first term, the national team was guided by this diverse group of people. With the brief exception of Augusto Rangone (in 1925–1928) and Carlo Carcano (1928–1929), Pozzo was the only person to play the role of sole commissioner until the sixties. Pozzo would also serve with the Alpini as lieutenant during the First World War. In 1921, Pozzo was commissioned by the Football Association to study a draft reform of the league to address the tensions between the bigger and the smaller teams, because it was thought that the number of participants in the championship had to be reduced. The mediation failed resulting in the split between the FIGC and CCI, before merging again the following year. In 1924, for the occasion of the 1924 Summer Olympics, Pozzo was again appointed sole head coach. This time…

The Metodo system

Until the 1930s, a common tactic in football was the so-called pyramid of Cambridge, which is a 2–3–5 in the shape of an inverted pyramid that had its apex in the Keeper. The design of this scheme is given to the team of the famous British university, and its launch is due to Blackburn Rovers, who applied it for the first time in the 1890s, and won five league cups. For over 30 years this form experienced uninterrupted luck in the British Isles and, by extension, the world. In the years after World War I, by evolution, from the pyramid, two tactical systems originated simultaneously: the WM, or 'sistema', practiced by the Arsenal side of Herbert Chapman, and the 'metodo', whose fathers are commonly identified as Vittorio Pozzo and his friend and rival Hugo Meisl, who served as the manager of the Austria national football team for 25 years. Pozzo and Meisl developed the idea of an array with two defenders as full-backs and a player in a central position in front of the defence, between the two half-backs, who effectively functioned as a central or defensive midfielder, who was a key component of the system; this position was known as that of the centre-half-back, or centromediano metodista in Italian, and was seen as a precursor to the regista or deep-lying playmaker role, as the metodista's responsibilities in Pozzo's system were not entirely defensive but also creative. As such, the metodista was not solely tasked with breaking down possession,…

Vittorio Pozzo was born in Turin, Italy on 2 March 1886, into a family originally from Ponderano. He attended the Liceo Cavour in Turin, his hometown; he later studied languages and played football in France, Switzerland and England. He studied in Manchester at the turn of the 20th century and met Manchester United half-back Charlie Roberts and Derby County's inside-left Steve Bloomer.