A perceptive, comprehensive, and thoroughly in-depth appreciation of how European football has developed over the last three decades. European football has always found new ways to stimulate the imagination.

From the attacking style of Real Madrid in the 1950s to the defensive tactics of the Italians in the 1960s, and onto the total football of the Dutch in the 1970s, the European leagues were the ones driving the evolution of the game.

In the last three decades, beginning with the renaming of the European Cup to the Champions League in 1992, this pattern continued, with each major European football nation laying its own foundations in how game tactics evolved.

The clever use of space by the astonishing Ajax team in the early 1990s gave way to the dominance of Italian league strategy at the end of the 1990s and then to the technical magic of Barcelona's tiki-taka.

European football continues to reinvent the tactical dimension of the game. In Zonal Marking, Michael Cox excellently investigates and analyzes the major leagues of Europe during specific periods and shows the impact each has had on the way the game is played now.

Extremely entertaining and filled with wonderful stories, this is the first book of its kind that reveals how much the international development of football can be influenced by the unique identity of a nation.