Total Football - Current Use

Current Use

The term Total Football is often misused to describe any attacking football. In its purest form, Total Football is proactive, not counter-attacking, based on positional interchange and hard pressing. FC Barcelona, Athletic Club de Bilbao and the Spanish national team play a style of football known as "tiki-taka" that has its roots in Total Football, while Arsenal F.C are the best exponents of this style in the English game. What later would become known as tiki-taka developed and evolved from the football style propagated by Johan Cruyff during his tenure as manager of Barcelona from 1988 to 1995, This developed and upgraded system has more recently been employed by the Euro 2008, 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012-winning Spanish teams of Luis Aragonés and Vicente del Bosque, as well as by FC Barcelona under then manager Pep Guardiola. Tiki-taka differs from Total Football in that it puts greater emphasis on ball circulation and passing rather than on positional interchange of players