One short article cannot describe his contribution to football sufficiently, but let's have a look at least at a few things that he did to improve the sport that the whole world loves.
The architect of Arsenal's success
Chapman is primarily associated with Arsenal. He was the first manager to lead the Gunners to win big trophies (league titles in 1931 and 1933, FA Cup in 1930). But how did he actually get to the North London team?
In the 1920s, Arsenal were on the rise. The club's ambitions were to be fulfilled by a new manager. The Gunners even tried to find him by publishing an advertisement in the newspaper in 1925. The offer printed in the sports magazine Athletic News appealed to a rising managerial star - Chapman from Huddersfield Town (with whom he won the league twice and the FA Cup once before).
At Arsenal, they agreed to cooperate with Chapman. The goal was given - to build Arsenal into a team that would start winning trophies.
One of the first interesting innovations he brought to football at that time was the creation of the position of coach. As a manager, he wanted to focus as much as possible on building the team and the club as such and left the training of the team to the coach.
Chapman as a game changer
During the very first football matches, holding the positions of defenders, midfielders and forwards was not very important. Everyone was chasing the ball. It was only at the end of the 19th century that the formation called the pyramid became established.
It consisted of a five-man attack, three midfielders, two defenders and a goalkeeper. The formation was relatively static, the players had to hold their defined positions. And Chapman was one of the initiators of how to make football more attractive, bring more dynamics to it and ensure that more goals were scored.
The solution was a fundamental change to the offside law, the so-called "two-player rule", introduced in 1925. The effect of the new rule was that short passes were replaced by faster passing with long passes. It was more difficult to catch opponents offside and if this was not possible, the number of remaining defenders was reduced. Thus were to be created, they were to be more dangerous, so also more goals were to be scored.
Naturally, the formation had to change as well. The response that Herbert Chapman came up with was to create a system called 'WM'. It can be said that it was a more secure version of the pyramid. Both midfielders withdrew to the depth of the field so that the attackers' formation on the pitch formed the letter W.
One of the midfielders moved into the defence and the remaining central midfielders sealed the space in front of the defensive three and filled the gaps between the defenders. The back rows thus took the form of the letter M. That is why this style of play came to be called the WM formation.
From the point of view of how the formation is described currently, i.e. from back to front, it would be the MW system. Today, the most commonly used numerical terminology is the 3-2-2-3 formation.
International cooperation, inspiration and new signings
Unlike many of his contemporaries in Great Britain, Herbert Chapman was also a fan of the continental game – that is, football played on the mainland of Europe. He did not despise other Europeans who "meddled in English sport" (as the discourse in the British Isles often went).
On the contrary, Chapman broadened his horizons on the continent. With his teams, he organised trips to Europe to play international matches against European teams, and then he invited the opponents to rematches in London. Chapman also proposed the creation of an international, pan-European football club competition. He came up with this idea more than 20 years before such a cup actually came into being (the European Cup and the Fairs Cup were both introduced in the 1955/1956 season).
Herbert Chapman was one of the first managers to consider recruiting foreign footballers. In 1930, Chapman tried to sign the great Austrian goalkeeper Rudolf 'Rudi' Hiden to Arsenal, but the UK Ministry of Labour was against the transfer.
However, Herbert Chapman achieved his goal of signing a goalkeeper in the same year anyway. And this despite the fact that another foreign player caught his eye.
In a match between the amateur team Margate FC, a team that was a kind of Arsenal reserve team at that time, he took a liking to the Dutch goalkeeper Gerrit Keizer. After just a few matches at Margate, Keizer was suddenly a member of the Gunners squad.
As an amateur (i.e. unemployed, therefore not falling under British employment law regulations), Chapman was able to put him into Arsenal’s first team. Keizer was renamed Gerard Keyser in England, and he became one of the key figures in Arsenal’s first league title in 1931.
Sacrificing his life for football
In addition to football as a game, i.e. building the squad, selecting lineups together with a coach or tactics development, Chapman also paid attention to the physical fitness of the players.
He was one of the first to set a strict training regime, which was guided by clearly defined tasks and deadlines. His staff was expanded by physiotherapists and masseurs, and he introduced also convalescence and compensatory exercises to the training process.
Chapman also broke the established order in the football culture of that time by discussing tactics and principles of the game directly with his players. His charges became part of the decision-making process, better understood what their boss wanted from them, so they pursued the set goal more purposefully and responsibly.
He also worked on team building outside the football grounds and training unit - he encouraged his players to go golfing together or have dinner together.
Chapman sacrificed his whole life to football, unfortunately literally. At the beginning of January 1934, during another great season of his Arsenal side, he had gone to the north of England after the New Year's Eve celebrations to watch the matches of Bury and Notts County.
The following day he travelled to his native Yorkshire to analyse Sheffield Wednesday, the Gunners' next opponents. He returned to London with a cold but decided he was well enough to go and watch Arsenal's reserve team play. However, his condition soon deteriorated, he contracted pneumonia and died on January 6th, aged just 55.
Despite his early passing, Chapman gave a lot to football. It is thanks to him that today's football is what it is.