"Inverting the Pyramid" is not a football coaching book, even though it meticulously examines team systems and formations. It is not a history book either, despite presenting the protagonists of the sport and the timeline of its spread around the world. It is also not a book of social analysis, although it highlights the impact of social, political, and ethnic environments on the shaping of football's identity. Nor is it another book of personal narratives and memories, even though the personalities of the game are always in the foreground, remembering, commenting, and analyzing.

Jonathan Wilson has written a book about the world's most beautiful game that combines all of the above and much more. While he approaches his subject with the detailed eye of a historian, his intelligent, elegant, and humorous writing turns it into a captivating read. What is the connection between Pep Guardiola and modern possession football with the Scottish passing game, Tottenham of the 1930s, and Buckingham's Ajax? How does German gegenpressing and its foremost representative, Jürgen Klopp, relate to Arrigo Sacchi? The book offers the discerning football enthusiast the additional dimension of time, the awareness of origins and interconnections, the recognition of the thread that comes from the past to what they see today on the field. If the saying holds that "many watch football, but few understand exactly what they are watching," then this is precisely what the book contributes to: understanding the beauty of the global game through the knowledge of its dead ends and solutions, compromises, and revolutions, that is, its evolution.