The genesis of this season's success

I’ve just finished reading Graham Hunter’s insightful and interesting book “Barca; The Making of the Greatest Team in the World” where he takes a magnifying glass to everything at the Catalan club from the La Masia academy and the background politics to the lives and histories of key personnel like Pep Guardiola, Xavi Hernandez and Lionel Messi.

One of the key themes in the book is the huge impact that Johan Cruyff had on the club, particularly in his stint as manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The theory goes that the current success of the club under Guardiola’s management has its genesis in the almost complete overhaul of the Catalan club that Cruyff instigated.

The two key facets of Cruyff’s policy were the implementation of an offensive 4-3-3/3-4-3 formation on the first team with Guardiola in the pivote role and then ensuring that this formation was used at every level of the club youth development system (obligatory use of the phrase La Masia) to ensure that the best young players would be schooled to know how to play in their respective position and so slot seamlessly when they made the jump to the first team. Cruyff would go on to win a record 11 trophies at the club, including their first European Cup in 1992.

The influence on the current ‘Pep team’ is blindingly obvious as the formation and attacking intent is very similar (with Sergio Busquets performing the Guardiola role) and the number of cantera graduates coming through the system who, upon graduation to the first team, slot into their respective positions with no fuss. From Xavi and Iniesta through Messi and Busquets to the current crop of Cuenca and Tello, the fruits of Cruyff’s labours are plain to see. Guardiola has since surpassed Cruyff’s trophy record.

In between these two epochs was the success of Frank Rijkaard’s teams which took the influences of the Cruyff formation in addition to the young generation coming through (particularly Iniesta, Valdes and Messi) from La Masia. However, the Rijkaard team failed as it’s generally seen that the team lost its hunger for success; a lesson Guardiola is keen to avoid and has to a certain extent, though time will tell.

In the same way that Rijkaard and Guardiola’s success can be traced back to the seeds sown twenty years beforehand(thus creating the ‘Barcelona way’), the successful season that Reading have had can very conceivably be seen in seeds sown by Brian McDermott’s predecessors starting over a decade ago. And this isn’t just promotion giddiness talking, going and comparing Reading to Barcelona.

Whilst there has been no large scale restructuring of the club ala Cruyff, key themes and elements of this successful Reading side can be seen in the last two times we were successful in this division, with refinements and evolution over the years.

The play-off defeat of 2002/03 team of Alan Pardew, the 2005/06 Championship-winning squad of Steve Coppell and this season’s incarnation under McDermott all share distinctive similarities in their respective on-field and off-field demeanours and styles.

The playing style of each team is very similar; reliant for creativity on wingers (from John Salako and Luke Chadwick through Glen Little and Bobby Convey to Jobi McAnuff and Jimmy Kebe), hard-working almost to the point of self-sufficient strikers (Nicky Forster, Kevin Doyle, Noel Hunt, Jason Roberts) and a solid, uncompromising, ever-present base of central defence and centre midfield to launch attacks from. If there is a ‘Reading style’ of football, this is it and it has been it for the last ten years since Pardew was manager.

The teams of Coppell that failed to get promoted in 2003/04, 2004/05 and 2008/09 as well as being relegated n 2007/08 all played in this manner and, despite McDermott being absolutely right in saying that he has created three different teams in his time as Reading manager, each of them broadly played in the same manner. Each time the system was found out, it has been refined but the same basic premise remains.

The other key reason for the successes of Pardew, Coppell and McDermott, and for the interspersed failures indeed, has been the utilisation of team spirit to create a ‘greater than the sum of our parts’ playing staff. Pardew’s style was to create something of a siege mentality, Coppell’s may well have been something of an accident created by some players that really got on well mixed with success (as in evidence by the capitulation of 2007/08 and the subsequent clear loss of team spirit) whilst this season’s team looks genuinely like they get on well and are a supremely united unit as in evidence by their celebrations together but, more importantly, their socialising together all through the season. We did say that about the 2005/06 vintage mind, when finding factors to attribute their initial Premier League success to.

Lessons from the 2005/06 team to the current generation, both in terms of positives built upon and negatives learned from, can also be seen in a similar fashion to how Guardiola has learnt from Rijkaard.

The way McDermott handled the media this season by playing things down and the fallback line of “we’re just concentrating on the next game” is a carbon copy of how Coppell spoke to the press and TV throughout the 106 points season. Meanwhile, the decline of that team and the way the team spirit fell apart is something McDermott will seek to avoid when recruiting players this summer.

The fact that McDermott has been around the club for so long and picked up the best bits of each of his predecessors can be seen as instrumental to this year’s success, in addition to Nicky Hammond’s years of service to maintain stability and preserve an identity on the playing side of the club.

Sir John Madejski in his role as Chairman has a very powerful say in the direction that the club will follow and his role in this evolution should not be underplayed either. His choices of manager and his desire to run the club on a budget have had a large impact on how the three teams analysed were made and developed. But additionally, his desire to not be an overbearing Chairman has allowed the distinctive Reading manner outlined earlier to flower by giving managers the time and space to refine the system that had become stale under their predecessors. *It should be hoped that Anton Zingarevich will continue this and quotes like these give a good indication that he will.

Overall, this post isn’t about comparing Reading to Barcelona as every club enjoying success for an extended period of time (which Reading have relatively over the last ten years) can trace that success back through its ‘family tree’ to see where its roots lay and the evolution that the club has been on in that time by building on past successes and learning from failures in a stable environment.

The success of this season can be traced back through Coppell and Pardew’s team building, their style of play and their own personalities’, combined with the understated role of Hammond as a pillar of the club, all under the influence of Madejski’s stable ownership regime.

To say that this season has been the culmination of a decade-long project is wrong but the DNA this team possess has traces of Coppell, Pardew, Hammond and Madejski in it and whilst the success is hugely attributable to McDermott, his coaching staff and the playing staff, how they all got there and the way in which their success has been achieved has its roots a lot further back than the start of the season.

*Incidentally, the one manager who wasn’t given the time, Brendan Rodgers, was the one manager who seemed to attempt to branch out from the successful model of the last decade in his style of football and Madejski appeared to notice the mistake swiftly and rectify it.