Football Explained

Total Football

Some theorise that ‘Total Football’ originally referred to an underground South African hairstyle, known in Afrikaans as Totaalvoetbal, meaning “keep it short and simple”. A chief proponent of the look was a young Kaizer Chiefs centre back by the name of Lucas Radebe.

Others have linked the expression to an avant garde post-war jazz funk movement from the Utrecht region of the Netherlands, in which band members would constantly swap instruments and freestyle at will during performances.

The passing of instruments over the area of the stage which would normally be housing a selection of singers became known as a Choirf Turn. By the mid-Seventies it was impossible to walk into a pancake house in Amsterdam without being offered an ‘eighth‘ of total football to enjoy with your crepe.

However, in his book Totally Football (described by Match as “unreadably good”) former bustling midfielder turned anthropologist Dale Gordon proposes an intriguingly different explanation for the term.

Gordon’s work charted the history of the French third-tier side Total (pronounced the other way – no, the other way) Football Club Inc., a collection of semi-professionals playing for the Parisian oil company, Total SA.

The French, whose long-ball game and clumsy grasp of English has long made them a laughing stock, are unlikely originators of such a dashing and eloquent phrase, but Gordon stumbled upon the explanation whilst leafing through the details of Total FC’s early Seventies pre-season tour of the west Midlands.

It seems a mix-up occurred when a BBC archivist mistakenly labelled footage of a Total FC friendly against Nuneaton Borough from 1972 as Holland v Czechoslovakia, and in turn filed the Oranje-Czech game under Total Football.

Because of the grainy quality to the original film it was several decades before historians noticed the balls-up, having already credited the one-touch interplay and flowing positional changes to the Dutch rather than the touring gas-petrol giants. However, the Total Football tag was by now too mythical to change, and there have subsequently been several attempts by FIFA bureaucrats to bury the truth.

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