H is for Hogan, Jimmy

James Hogan, the main character in Foul and Fair, bears a name steeped in footballing history, albeit one that many modern fans are unaware of. Jimmy Hogan was a professional footballer prior to the First World War, playing for Fulham, Bolton Wanderers and others, but his reputation in the game comes from his vast contribution to the development of coaching.

An early pioneer of possession-based football, with an emphasis on good individual technical skill and constant passing and movement, Hogan’s philosophy was out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy in England for most of his life, meaning that the bulk of his coaching career was spent on the continent, with influential spells in several different countries.

One story of Hogan tells of how, when employed as an advisor to the German FA in the 1920s, he lost credibility with translation errors early in a presentation – he accidentally claimed to be ‘a professor of languages, not a master of football’ and that football was a game ‘not merely of the body, but also the committee’. Recognising that something wasn’t right, he called for a ten-minute recess, then returned to the stage in football kit. Removing his boots and socks, he informed the audience that three-quarters of German players couldn’t kick a ball properly. He drilled the ball right-footed into a wooden panel some fifteen yards distant. As the ball returned to him, he observed the importance of being able to play with both feet and hit the ball first-time with his left. This time, the panel split in two and his audience was won back.

Two of the great teams in the history of football – the Austrian ‘Wonderteam’ of the 1930s and the Hungarian team who humbled England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 – were managed by men who learned their footballing principles from Hogan. Helmut Schon, assistant manager when West Germany won the 1954 World Cup, and manager for their 1974 triumph, was another of his students. Hogan’s impact on the game was so profound that on his death in 1974, the head of the German FA described him as ‘the founder of modern football in Germany’. After the famous Hungarian Wembley victory, Sandor Barcs (the President of the Hungarian FA) said, ‘We played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us. When our football history is told, his name should be written in gold letters.’  There’s a direct chain of influence stretching down through the history of football, reaching back from Pep Guardiola, to the Total Football of the 1970s Dutch, to the Magnificent Magyars of Hungary in the 50s, and beyond. If that chain can be said to start anywhere, it starts with Jimmy Hogan.