The Club World Cup and the End of Tactical Colonization

The sky turned red. The heavens bled crimson. And the earth darkened beneath its weight. On the day PSG dismantled Inter Milan 5-0 in the final of the UEFA Champions League, something ancient broke. What remained of Inter wasn’t a team—it was debris. Tactical dust scattered across the pitch, their legacy crumbling before our eyes.

As the ashes cooled, Brazilian football philosopher Joszef Bozsik wrote what would become the most searing postscript in modern tactical writing. He titled it, simply: Post-Human Football

He wrote: “Football has always been an odyssey,  a sport that invites chaos, surprise, the unforeseen, the demonstration of human incompleteness… But PSG? PSG is not football as we once knew it.”

Bozsik drew a line. On one side: football as life—fluid, unpredictable, communal. On the other: football as automation, a mechanical ballet where spontaneity is replaced by simulation. Where Hakimi doesn’t move with instinct but by instruction. Where Dembele’s position at the base of play is not a jazz note, but a barcode. To the untrained eye, it looked like expression. But for the attentive? It was memory. Drilled, coded, recalled. A choreography mistaken for conversation.

This is not just a tactical evolution. It is a philosophical mutation.

For decades, European football didn’t just win—it convinced the world that its way of winning was the only way worth playing. Its influence stretched across continents, through coaching diplomas, UEFA Pro-Licensed gospel, and the seductive vocabulary of progress: structure, space occupation, rest defence, pressing triggers, and zones. Tactical dominance wasn’t merely imposed—it was exported, institutionalized, and mythologized. This wasn’t just football—it was football imperialism dressed in the colours of science.

The failure of European clubs in this tournament is not about match fitness or roster rotations. It is philosophical. It is the revelation of a system reaching its epistemological limits. The positional play (juego de posición) that once dazzled with geometric harmony has become rigid, predictable, and disturbingly inhuman. Built for control, it now seems unable to cope with chaos. And relationism? It thrives precisely there.

Relationism is not just a tactical choice—it is a cultural expression. It speaks in the language of improvisation, of players trusting not just the pass, but the context. Where positional play asks players to trust the system, relationism asks them to trust each other. It values the in-between: the moment after the dribble, the second man run, the unscripted cutback. It treats the game as an unfolding conversation, not a PowerPoint presentation.

The Club World Cup has become an accidental theatre of this contrast. European clubs arrive with patterns; their opponents respond with patterns of life. One side arrives with control; the other, with community. One side plays to occupy space; the other plays to share it. The result is not always aesthetic—it’s often raw, unstable—but it is always alive. And aliveness is something Europe has forgotten in its obsession with optimization.

This isn’t just about South America either. It’s about Africa, Asia, and the other footballing peripheries. It’s about players who grew up with street football,It’s about players who grew up with street football, where the ball is more than just an object—it is the first friend, the unspoken language, the invisible teacher. Where the pitch is a patch of gravel, sand, or clay. Where goals are made of schoolbags, slippers, and dreams. Where the rules bend, but the rhythm never breaks. Where nobody waits for the whistle to play—they play because life itself whistles.

In these places, football is not drilled. It is discovered.

In the favelas of Rio, in the alleyways of Kinshasa, in the heat-soaked corners of  Lagos, Accra and Abidjan, the game is born not from diagrams, but from desire. It doesn’t begin with cones or rondos or positional grids—it begins with chaos. With older brothers nutmegging younger ones. With laughter, insults, tackles, and tricks. With a crowd of children chasing a ball like a school of fish—fluid, reactive, alive. Every touch is improvised. Every pass is personal.

There are no zones here. Only stories.

The midfielder who plays barefoot for six years before lacing up boots for the first time. The winger who learned how to feint by mirroring dancers at a local festival. The goalkeeper whose reflexes were shaped by dodging stones on the street. They didn’t learn timing from match analysis—they learned it from dodging cars, potholes, and authority. And this, more than anything, is what tactical colonization could never capture: football as folklore.

In these cultures, the game is not controlled—it is absorbed. It seeps into the bones, not through curriculum, but through community. Coaches don’t isolate patterns—they inherit them. Techniques aren’t broken into drills—they are passed down like stories, shaped by rhythm, song, ritual, and resistance.

To these players, structure is secondary. What matters is feel. The feel of a teammate drifting into space, of an opponent leaning the wrong way, of the ball wanting to be touched just once more. It’s a sense that isn’t taught in coaching manuals—it is cultivated in the wild. And it creates players who move not by map, but by music.

This is why relationism makes sense to them. Because relationism, at its heart, is not a rejection of discipline—it is the re-humanization of the game.

It doesn’t deny systems. It simply asks: who are they built for?

It believes the player is not a cog, but a communicator. It views the pitch not as a battlefield to conquer, but a  space to co-create. Where Europe sees zones to occupy, relationism sees relationships to activate. Where positional play seeks control, relationism seeks communion.

And this is what we are seeing now. Not just a tactical shift but a reclamation of voice.

The Time of the Pass

There is a phrase often used by Relationist coaches: a bola pede—“the ball asks.” It suggests that in each scenario, the ball has a voice. A call. A question. But to hear it, the player must be alive to the moment.

Consider a pressing trap. In Positional Play, the trap is structured—coordinated through triggers, automated pressing lanes, and a shared reference. But in Relationism, the trap is felt. It emerges not from choreography but from collective intuition. The players recognize cues not because they were instructed, but because they share an understanding of when the opponent is unstable—when the rhythm has broken. The ball asks—and the team answers.

This responsiveness is the essence of Relationism: a football played in time, not on timelines.

Football as Conversation

Imagine agame scenario where the winger receives wide with three players approaching. In Positional Play, he recycles possession. The risk is too high, the structure too important. But in Relationism, the winger feints, drives between two, and draws the third. Now the shape has warped—and from the wreckage of the opponent’s structure, the relationist team improvises a new stanza of play. The fullback overlaps, the central midfielder ghosts behind the line, and the striker drops—not because they were told, but because they felt.

This is not improvisation in the sense of chaos. It is improvisation in the sense of jazz. Structured freedom. A deep grammar of cues, references, and relationships. It is not that the system does not exist—it is that it emerges from within, rather than being imposed from above.

The Center-Back Who Dares

Modern positional play created the “libero-by-structure”—a center-back who steps into midfield in pre-defined moments to create overloads. Relationism creates something more volatile: the daring defender—one who senses the rhythm of play and breaks shape not to execute a plan, but to awaken possibility.

It is the centre-back who drives diagonally and invites pressure, not to beat it, but to create dialogue. His movement is not a solution—it is a question. A provocation. One that demands an answer not from a coach’s voice, but from his teammates’ senses. Will the pivot drop? Will the fullback invert? Will the winger come short? Nobody knows until it happens. The game is not solved in advance. It is discovered in the doing.

Fanon in Football Boots

Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, wrote of the “colonized intellectual”—the one who mimics the master’s language, apes his culture, and internalizes his superiority. In football, that figure has long been the coach who imitates Europe’s drills, installs Europe’s metrics, and suppresses his own cultural inheritance.

But the new generation is different. Diniz. Gallardo. Abel Ferreira. Even African tacticians like Pitso Mosimane, Rhulani Mokwena and Walid Regragui. They are not mimics. They are insurgents. They do not speak in tactical jargon borrowed from UEFA pro-licenses. They speak in gestures, emotions, and relational flows.

They understand, as Foucault did, that power is not always loud—it is coded into what is normalized. To disrupt that code, one must not only critique it, but embody an alternative.

What we see in the Club World Cup is not just football. It is a decolonial performance. A resistance that plays, not preaches.

The Reckoning Will Be Rhythmic

Football’s next revolution will not come from a laptop. It will come from the dirt pitches of Recife, the winding alleys of Casablanca, the raucous parks of Nairobi. It will not be coded—it will be felt.

The Club World Cup, at first glance a commercial sideshow, may yet become football’s reckoning. Not because Europe loses, but because the world wins back its voice. A voice not shaped by drills and data, but by drums and dance, chaos and communion.

The colonizer’s tactics were never universal. They were simply unopposed. Now, finally, football plays back.

By Tobi Peter / @keepIT_tactical 

Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Soccrates Images / Getty Images