Arsenal Football Formation

Lineup (3-4-3)

Charlie Preedy · Eddie Hapgood · Tom Parker (c) · Bill Seddon · Bob John · Alfred Baker · David Jack · Alex James · Joe Hulme · Cliff Bastin · Jack Lambert

Arsenal's "Fantastic XI" (1930 - 1934) - Herbert Chapman's W-M

By the time Arsenal won the FA Cup in 1930 - their first silverware, as Herbert Chapman had promised, coming in the fifth season after his arrival as manager - the new formation had taken clear shape. The full-backs marked the wingers rather than inside-forwards, the wing-halves sat on the opposing inside-forwards rather than on the wingers, the centre-half, now a centre-back, dealt with the centre-forward, and both inside-forwards dropped deeper: the 2-3-5 had become a 3-2-2-3; the W-M.

Arsenal won the league in 1931 and 1933, and were beaten in the 1932 Cup final only by a highly controversial goal. Glanville wrote of them ‘approaching the precision of a machine’, and in their rapid transition from defence to attack, the unfussy functionalism of their style, there was a sensibility in keeping with the art deco surrounds of Highbury. The ‘machine’ analogy is telling, recalling as it does Le Corbusier’s reference to a house as ‘a machine for living in’; this was modernist football. William Carlos Williams, similarly, in a phrase that would become almost a slogan for his version of modernism, described a poem as ‘a machine made of words … there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.’ Chapman’s Arsenal were very much of their age. ‘It was,’ Joy said of their style, ‘twentieth-century, terse, exciting, spectacular, economic, devastating.’


Coach/Manager : Herbert Chapman