Viani, Valese and the Vianema

Gipo Viani has always been heralded as the father of catenaccio, but a magazine article from 1960 suggests what may be the true inspiration for his system

The story is a famous one. Gipo Viani, the coach of Salernitana shortly after the Second World War, was a worried man. His defence was leaking too many goals and he couldn’t work out how to tighten up. Unable to sleep, he got up early one morning and went for a walk by the harbour. As he walked along the dockside, he saw the fleet coming in from the Tyrrhenian Sea. He watched one boat as the fishermen hauled in the net, swollen with fish, and then pulled in the reserve net that was deployed behind it. This, he claimed, was his Eureka moment: he could withdraw an attacking player to catch those forwards who slipped through the defensive line, and so was born the Vianema, an early form of catenaccio. Viani was set on a career that would take him to Roma, Bologna and Milan.

Except, of course, that none of it was true. Viana did successful deploy a libero, but he was far from the first to come up with the plan, and his tale of the dockside walk is exactly what it sounds like: a lovely story with vaguely Biblical undertones that offers a romantic explanation that has about as much basis in fact as the Just So Stories.

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My history of the World Cup, The Power and the Glory, is out now. Order here. Or, for those who dislike Amazon, here.

Episode 18 follows next Wednesday. For the full archive of Postcards from the Past, go here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at Eduard Streltsov, the supremely young forward, the Russian Pelé, who was jailed for rape in 1958. Listen here.

On Libero, we discuss why it’s so hard to defend the title. Listen here.

A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. Episode Eight, about the survival of football during the War is here.

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In football, there is always a regress. There’s always somebody who did it first. It’s entirely probable that at some point in the first six decades of football’s existence, long before Viani, there were teams who, to protect a lead, pulled back a player to operate as extra cover behind the defence, possible even that an injured player or an ageing player who had lost his pace functioned as a deep-lying full-back, particularly before 1925 when the offside law was changed to require only two rather than three defensive players to play a forward onside. But the first manager who seems to have used a sweeper as part of a fully thought-through plan was the Austrian Karl Rappan.