The Circle of Tactics
Football is entering a new tactical epoch – but how did we get here? And have we seen it all before?
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton’s famous Third Law of Motion is a cornerstone of physics but can just as easily applied to football tactics. When one team acts, the opposition reacts. But it also applies to tactics in a more generic sense. When a tactical philosophy enters football’s main stage as the lead, other tactical philosophies react.
Some of the supporting cast fight for the main role. Others are pushed to the back as extras. Other tactics still are killed off entirely and become a memory of the way football used to be. The latest trends in football to take the mainstage are quick attacks, long balls, tall strikers and set pieces. This style of football has many names. Dycheball, Brexit football, route one. Whatever you call it, the direct style of football that was once viewed as unsophisticated and anachronistic is back.
But how did we get here? To get to the root would require going through every action and reaction in the history of football’s tactics. The nexus of modern football, however, can be found with Rinus Michels’ Total Football. From it, various axons delivered principles and ideas throughout the game.
Bernardo Silva’s Latest Milestone is a Manifestation of Pep Guardiola’s Tactical Evolution
One of these axons can be traced to Arrigo Sacchi. One of the most influential managers in the past fifty years of football, Sacchi transformed the footballing landscape. When he took over AC Milan in 1987, Italian football was dominated by the defensive style that Italy is renowned for. Catenaccio, the Libero, and man-marking dominated the tactical bubble. Sacchi came along and burst it.
He implemented a very high defensive line and intense pressing to compress space and set offside traps. Emphasising collective movement as a singular unit, players moved in relation to their teammates and the space around them, not just their individual opponents.
Perhaps the most influential introduction was zonal defending. Whilst Sacchi did not invent zonal defending, he popularised it in Europe and showcased how successful it could be. In zonal defending, players are assigned a space. When an opposition player enters that space, the defender becomes responsible for them. If the defender moves out of the space, that responsibility is passed on. In zonal defending, structure and coordination is key. The team must move together as a cohesive unit to cover ground in a compact shape.
The revolutionary style of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan side won him a Serie A and back-to-back European Cups. And his propensity for entertainment as well as results, made him revered and feared. But every action has a reaction and that came in the form of Pep Guardiola. When Guardiola took charge of Barcelona in 2008, football was entering a transitional stage.
Football’s Ideological War: Pep Guardiola vs. The Traditionalists
The 4-4-2 old guard with its solid structure and direct attacking routes was being challenged by new kids on the block like the 4-3-3 or 4-3-2-1 which emphasised possession and central control. Thus the foundations were in place for Guardiola to revolutionise the game.
The zonal defending that had permeated Europe was almost ubiquitous throughout Europe’s leagues, but it wasn’t without its weaknesses. As it requires the team to move as a unit to occupy as much space as possible, space can open up between the lines and gaps appear in the half-spaces. Guardiola exploited this by introducing a positional attack, or juego de posición as it is now known as.
This positional play worked in a similar way to the zonal defending in that players are assigned a zone. In the buildup phase, there are strictly no more than two players allowed in a zone except to create passing triangles or an overload. Once that has been achieved however, players must return to their zones. When the ball reaches the final third, the strict, obstinate positioning is eased, and players can be more proactive. By assigning players positions all over the park, they can stretch opposition defences high and wide, regardless of how they are set up.
The key tenet of positional play is the ‘free man’. The entire system revolves around trying to find a free teammate between the lines and this can be done a number of ways. One such method is using dribblers. Elite dribblers attract more defenders who will double up on the player. The consequence of this though, is a player is now unmarked by the defender who has gone over to double up and is now free to receive the ball.
Henrik Rydström and Malmö FF: The Art of Relationism in Scandinavian Football
Another method is using the third man. Player A will pass the ball up to player B whilst player C makes a forward run into space. Player B then bounces the ball to player C who receives the ball facing forward. Creating these options, or triangles, across the pitch is key to maintaining possession through positional and numerical superiority. The final method used to find the third man is positional interchange. The rotation of players in the midfield causes chaos for the opposition and allows players to find pockets of space to receive the ball.
What Guardiola is most known for is his possession-orientated, death by a thousand passes style. This is not intrinsically linked to position play, one can exist without the other, but a marriage between the pair is a match made in football tactics heaven. For the best part of fifteen years, Guardiola’s style dominated the tactics sphere. He quite literally redefined how to play football. And then the 2024/25 season happened. The wheels came off. Followed by the bumper, then the doors, then the roof and then the engine. Guardiola’s once impervious and imperious Ferrari had turned into a clown car.
The answer to why that happened, put in a word, is transitions. Admittedly, the absence of Rodri through injury, who is exceptional at preventing transitions, played a large role but to pin it all on that would be facile. The root cause was a far more serious one. It was terminal.
The positional play system relies heavily on pinning the opposition back. If the ball is deep inside the opposition’s half, it maximises your attacking threat whilst minimising the opposition’s. But what happens if the opposition refuse to be pinned back? What happens if the opposition maintains an intense press? What happens when the opposition goes man-for-man? It is these three question that have dismantled the Guardiola hegemony and ushered in a new tactical epoch.
This new age is still in its nascent stage but perhaps the biggest characteristic of the new tactical landscape is the proliferation of man-to-man marking. When every player has a counterpart to mark, it negates the advantages and exploitations gained through positional play. The ‘free man’ that is so essential to the system, no longer exists. Hence the return of direct, transitional football.
This season, per Opta, passing sequences have lasted a full second less than last season, while the number of long balls per game is up at 99.6 – an increase of just over 6 from last season. When teams press up against your players and restrict passing lanes, bypassing the press and playing quick, vertical long balls, or to use its tactical term, hoofing the ball up, is oftentimes the best way to go.
Few have been better at this than Bournemouth under Andoni Iraola. According to Opta, they are joint second for goals from direct attacks and second for total direct attacks. Bournemouth’s centre-back Marco Senesi has made the most long balls of any non-goalkeeper this season, with 266 of his 1,204 going long.
Conversely, Bournemouth’s intense pressing out of possession results in many teams going long against them. And this is exactly what they want. They invite teams to go long against them, or go long in possession themselves, not because they are good at aerial duels and winning the first ball (they are actually rock bottom for percentage of aerial duels won) but because they are so good at winning the second ball. When the ball goes long and is contested between two players, Iraola sets his side up so that they can press and pounce on the second ball. In short, controlled chaos.
This tactic has been so successful, and now widespread, that it wouldn’t be a surprise to see second ball regains become as important a metric in football statistics as xG or progressive passes/carries. For further proof of Iraola’s merit as a forerunner of football’s next generation, look no further than Guardiola himself, who labelled Bournemouth, alongside Brighton and Newcastle, as the “future of football” after a defeat to them in November 2024. If it wasn’t clear already that football’s landscape is shifting, then Pep Guardiola calling Bournemouth the “future” is as clear an indication as you will find.
Another young manager who is shaping the tactical zeitgeist is Vincent Kompany. A member of the Guardiola diaspora, he shares many of his former manager’s principles including high possession and building up through the phases, but he has updated and renovated the system to move with the modern times. Where many teams have gone long to bypass intense, man-to-man presses, Kompany’s Bayern Munich lean into it.
When watching Kompany’s Bayern Munich, formations are often merely superficial. Players swap, stray, and scatter from their original positions. Harry Kane has been the epitome of it this season. Regularly, he will come as deep, or even deeper, than the centre backs to pick up the ball, where he can then act as an extra man to supplement the build-up or play a trademark long pass to start the attack himself. He then runs up the pitch and into the box to either finish off the move himself or create space for one of his teammates.
Kane did this on many occasions against PSG in their Champions League face off in November, but he was not the only one rotating. Both Konrad Laimer and Dayot Upamecano, a right-back and centre-back respectively, found themselves spearheading an attack as the highest positioned Bayern player. When watching them, one often has to second guess themselves (‘hang on, is that the right-back bursting through the middle to latch on to a ball over the top??’).
The reason Kompany’s team does this is manipulation. Manipulation of the opponent’s setup, and manipulation of space. By dragging a player out of his starting position, you leave his marker with a dilemma. Either they let their marker go, in which case he can receive the ball unmarked and create an overload, or they follow their marker, which creates space in the area they have just vacated thus allowing a teammate to invade that space.
This is nothing new, however. Whilst Kompany has taken it to extremes rarely seen before, positional flexibility and rotations were a cornerstone of Rinus Michels Total Football in the 70s. The circle of football makes another loop.
And with that, football, like this article, has come full circle again. Another orbit around the sun. From Michels to Saachi to Guardiola to Iraola and Kompany, and back again. A lineage of managers who have shaped the modern game and a direct line connecting them. Zoom out though, and that line becomes a loop. Within it, more loops. Like a circle in a spiral. Like a wheel within a wheel. All interconnected and never ending. Tactics don’t die, they reinvent themselves.
By: Brent Forrest
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Jonathan Moscrop / Getty Images