Positional play has become a defensive tactic

As every approach does, sooner or later.

Do football tactics run in cycles? Are we just destined to repeat the same loops over and over again with a few tweaks? Watching some of the football played by top sides recently, all I could think about was Rafa Benítez. Yes, the manager most recently sacked by Celta Vigo. Bear with me here.

Benítez is obsessed with Arrigo Sacchi, best remembered for his Milan side that won back-to-back European Cups in 1989 and 1990. Sacchi’s Milan absolutely wowed Europe with their aggressive pressing and compact vertical style. This was something that felt completely new and fresh, even as it borrowed and adapted ideas we’d seen before. Sacchi’s side was about pressing high but remaining compact, and then attacking with speed. It irritated defence-first Italian traditionalists, but everyone else was sold.

But not in England. Sacchi’s Milan won during the years after the Heysel stadium disaster, when English clubs were banned from European football. This was in an era when there was virtually no coverage of club football happening beyond our shores in the British media, so we essentially missed the Sacchi frenzy. Benítez, then, was perhaps more of a revolutionary in the Premier League than he would’ve been elsewhere.

It made him pretty well suited to facing José Mourinho’s Chelsea. Mourinho embarrassed most managers in England simply by playing a 4-3-3 shape against their classic 4-4-2 systems. “If I have a triangle in midfield”, Mourinho explained¹, “Claude Makélélé behind and two others in front – I will always have an advantage against a pure 4-4-2 where the central midfielders are side by side. That’s because I will always have an extra man”. The old British style 4-4-2 left plenty of space between the lines that Chelsea exploited through Makélélé as that spare man, Lampard making his late runs into the box from midfield, and the two wingers playing higher and narrower than a 4-4-2 would allow. It totally nullified the British managers’ main approach.

Benítez didn’t have that problem because he copied his idol. Sacchi played a 4-4-2 and wasn’t dissimilar to the British style, but he put a huge emphasis on compactness. You can’t exploit the gaps “between the lines” against a Sacchi-style 4-4-2 because there just isn’t any space. “If you asked me to say the one word I heard most during training and games”, Jamie Carragher said of his time under Benítez, “it would be him shouting ‘compact’”. That meant Mourinho didn’t have his usual advantages against a pure 4-4-2 here. Benítez’ Liverpool played Mourinho’s Chelsea 16 times in just over three years and there were some really close-fought contests.

There was just one slight problem: those games were absolutely awful to watch.

“Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion”, former Real Madrid and Argentina forward Jorge Valdano said after Liverpool and Chelsea’s Champions League tie in 2007, “and, in that, Anfield is unbeatable. Put a shit hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a shit hanging from a stick.

"Chelsea and Liverpool”, Valdano went on to say, “are the clearest, most exaggerated example of the way football is going: very intense, very collective, very tactical, very physical, and very direct. But, a short pass? Noooo. A feint? Noooo. A change of pace? Noooo. A one-two? A nutmeg? A backheel? Don't be ridiculous. None of that. The extreme control and seriousness with which both teams played the semi-final neutralised any creative licence, any moments of exquisite skill.

“If football is going the way Chelsea and Liverpool are taking it, we had better be ready to wave goodbye to any expression of the cleverness and talent we have enjoyed for a century."

Benítez was advocating Sacchi’s ideas, but they had mutated by this point. What was once about brilliantly attacking football now saw those same principles used to defend. Benítez was all about organisation and individuals sacrificing their own game for the team, just like Sacchi. But by the 2000s, this had become about defensive solidity. To coach attacking football in that era was to give players freedom of expression, to let them use their imaginations (see: Wenger, Arsène). Attacking flair was individualistic and improvised, while defensive football was about organising everything within an inch of your life. Benítez was definitely in the latter camp, and that was just how it was.

Until one man flipped it on its head.

“The trick of the post-Guardiola revolution”, a niche football writer by the name of Grace Robertson wrote a few years ago, “has been to flip Valdano’s view on its head. He was absolutely right, of course. Reactive, defensive coaching had drilled individual expression out of players, building teams of robots designed simply to protect a narrow lead. Automation had won out over individual expression, and dull efficiency was its result. But Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona took all that coordination and complex drills and applied them to the attack. Suddenly, the structure was about creating beautiful football instead of stopping it. This was much harder to shut down, because you’re dealing with collective brilliance instead of quality from individuals.” Damn, that writer really knows what she’s talking about. Whatever she’s paid, it’s not enough.

Guardiola didn’t pass for the sake of passing. “I hate tiki taka”, he told his players at Bayern². “I hate it. Tiki taka means passing the ball for the sake of it, with no clear intention. And it’s pointless”. Then he outlined his actual idea: “overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defence to cope. You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’e done all that, we attack and score from the other side. That’s why you have to pass the ball, but only if you’re doing it with a clear intention.”

We saw this emphasis throughout Guardiola’s spells at Barcelona and Bayern, which he brought with him to Man City. During those first two title wins, City preferred to play the two “free eights” Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva high up the pitch, with the wingers Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane stretched very wide, and the striker (either Sergio Agüero or Gabriel Jesus) central in the box. I don’t know how many times I saw them score exactly the same goal: one of the free eights threads it to a winger, who drills in a low cross into the box for someone to score a tap in. I can’t ever remember watching a great side so frequently score one specific type of goal. Every single time they’d execute that overload on one side before scoring a tap in towards the opposite side.

But then, after that, he changed things a little bit. I think there were two main reasons he did this, and both were about how opponents had adapted to him in the decade and change since he first won titles at Barcelona. First of all, his team was getting exposed on the counter. This was the main reason City lost the title in 2019/20. Injuries as well as key players getting older and declining meant that they just didn’t have the individuals to cover ground at the back to defend wide spaces, and the pressing had dropped off just enough to increase the volume that opponents could get it into City’s half. Guardiola fixed this the following year by slowing everything down. He rebuilt the midfield around Rodri, the closest thing to himself on the football pitch, and patient passing. City weren’t getting done in transition partly because they were so much more careful in keeping the ball in midfield rather than passing forward every time.

The other shift hit on some of the same notes: it’s harder than ever to be a passing midfielder in 2024. Guardiola’s Barcelona had such control over games with Sergio Busquets, Xavi and Andres Iniésta in the middle of the park. At the time, the only way most sides really tried to nullify this was by sitting deep, which just let them pass it wherever they wanted. Over time, though, teams realised you had to press these midfielders and restrict the time they had on the ball.

That meant “press-resistance” was suddenly a prerequisite for a central midfielder in a possession-dominant side. You had to be able to control the ball in tight spaces and dribble your way through trouble. Iniesta would have no issue adapting to this, but I suspect Xavi would lose something in the modern game. If press-resistance is a prerequisite, then teams will inevitably compromise at least a little bit on “pure” passing quality. İlkay Gündoğan is a genuine unicorn who can do it all, but when Guardiola needed to replace him, City signed Mateo Kovačić, who is amazingly press-resistant but otherwise pretty limited on the ball. The emphasis has shifted toward dribblers in tight spaces and away from progressive passers, just a little bit. If Kevin De Bruyne left for the Saudi Pro League this summer, as some (unlikely) rumours suggest, I think his replacement would be a more press-resistant player without his killer passing range.

Guardiola’s core principles haven’t changed. He still wants players to stay in their positions and favour the structure of the side to slowly manipulate the space. But in face of changing opposition tactics, the scales have been tilted towards “control”. Sometimes that means going a little more direct to avoid zones where they might give the ball away dangerously. Sometimes it means players moving the ball more slowly. But overall, it means the same ideas he’s always had are now being used for defensive purposes.

Guardiola’s influence, of course, is everywhere. Mikel Arteta is not a pure disciple of Pep. He has his own ideas, developed at the various clubs he played for. He knows when to embrace a high pressing style without the ball, and when to drop into a deeper block like he did as a player under David Moyes. Arsenal do play thrilling football at times, as do Man City. But it’s their sublime defensive record that stands out so much right now, with just four goals conceded in their last ten matches. Even without Man City’s players, Arteta is showing it’s possible to use positional play principles to coach an amazing defence.

Yes, both teams score lots of goals. Yes, you can pull up all the xG to show that actually these are very effective attacks. But effective is not the same thing as entertaining. As Valdano put it, “football is made up of subjective feeling”. It’s the surprise that entertains as much as anything else, the disbelief at the brilliant bit of play you just saw. As positional play becomes more controlled, it becomes more predictable. We’re seeing the same patterns over and over again and it’s just getting boring.

But don’t take my word for it. “Football’s finished and now whatever this is has emerged”, said Juanma Lillo. Yes, current Man City assistant manager Juanma Lillo. “Everything is ‘dos toques’. Two touches. Because they all train with two touches, they all play with two touches. We’ve enforced ‘El Dostoquismo’, as I call it.” Managers, Lillo claims, “have too much influence. It’s unbearable. We have our own ideas and we say that we espouse them to help people to understand the game. Bullshit! It should be for the players to understand the game as they understand it.” And he admits that he’s part of the problem.

Do we need a counter-revolution? Is there something else coming? I’m honestly not sure there is, at least for the time being. Positional play and control are the most effective strategies to dominate right now. If you’re a superclub, your primary challenge in most games is to break down an opponent happy to let you have the ball. For that, I haven’t seen a more effective strategy. But maybe it just hasn’t been done yet.

Football needs tactical innovation. It thrives on change and surprise. We’re all waiting for the next thing.

1. Cox, Michael (2017). The Mixer. London: HarperCollins.

2. Perarnau, Martí (2014). Pep Confidential. Translated by Louise Hunter. Great Britain: Arena Sport.