I'm Joe Devine and welcome to Whiteboard Football Extra.

Today, I'm joined by Alex Stewart to discuss the evolution of international tactics between 1982 and 1990,

and I also spoke to Stephen Tudor about Denmark's victorious European championships in 1992.

The first thing, Alex, that we notice about the World Cups from the 1960s onwards is the decline in goals per game.

In our videos, we're attributing that to evolving tactics with a number of reasons cited

for that. But if you had to summarize that, and you will have to, because I'm going to ask you

to, if I had to summarize that dip, what would you say were the primary reasons for this decline

over time? I think international football is always an awkward one

because teams are brought together for short periods of time

quite intensively.

The qualification process is very, very strong out.

So you've got, you know, weeks here and there.

That privileges systems of football that are

easy to implement and tend to focus on the defensive because it's a lot more straightforward

to get a team to defend solidly than it is to get a team to attack with precision.

So as football became more systematized and people started thinking about coaching tactics

rather than, I mean, you've got to remember that early football and by that I'm talking

even in really to the 1940s and 50s, a lot of coaching focused on physical conditioning.

Occasional ball skills like dribbling and heading,

but it wasn't really until the 50s and 60s that people started coaching actual systems,

coaching tactics, telling players where they needed to stand, who they needed to pass,

who they wanted to, run to, and all of that kind of stuff.

...