PEP INTERREGNUM
Everybody’s talkin’. Manchester City’s dramatic fall from grace this season has sent the narrative machines into overdrive. Who can construct the most compelling rationale to explain the sudden collapse of Pep Guardiola? And who can shout their story loudest?
On one hand, Pep-bashing is an easy sell. Kicking the turtle-necked Catalan while he’s down guarantees clicks. Fraudiola propaganda is like crystal meth for real Barclaysmen types who crave something, anything, to replace the blood, sweat and tears they once feasted on when Saturdays came.
On the other hand, Pepites from all over cyberspace have rallied to defend their delicate god-king from the rampaging troll army gathering along their empire’s borders. Mitigating circumstances are cited. There are pleas for context. Rodri’s injury, squad burnout, a lack of hunger. Apologists preach from the book of Guardiola’s phenomenal success. Countless trophies, inhuman consistency, the treble.
Make no mistake, we’re in the midst of perhaps football tactics’ most intense culture war. We’ve had conflict many times before, often vicious. Clough vs Revie, Menotti vs Bilardo, Fergie vs Wenger, but this feels like something new. Social media and hyper accelerated online content cycles have whipped the commentariat into a frenzy. We’ve now reached the stage where mainstream outlets like SKY, BBC and The Athletic are debating an until recently fringe footballing concept. All of a sudden Juego de Posicion is up for public debate.
There has always been a significant aversion to Pep’s tantric keep-ball. From Zlatan to Schweinsteiger to Alan-down-the-pub, many have voiced concerns about their beloved game being transformed into some kind of intellectual ballet dance. City’s hapless form has, for perhaps the first time in over a decade of Guardiolan supremacy, given enough oxygen to these contrarian views for fire to break out.
Guaridola’s football has always been synonymous with Juego de Posicion or ‘Positional Play’. So a debate about Pep automatically leads to a debate about Positional Play. The two seem inexorably entwined.
This is at once the best and worst thing that could have happened. Pep’s downfall has created a space for a discussion of the broader philosophical assumptions propping up the tactical school of ‘Positional Play’.
A topic once reserved for the most tactical of tacticos is now being chewed over by Scholes and Carragher. This is the great awakening the Pep Interregnum affords us. A space has been cleared for the demystification of ‘tiki-taka’. The people will finally see the truth behind the 78% possession stats, redemption for Brummie Jack Grealish is only a return-to-real-football away. What could possibly go wrong?
The problem is that no one really seems to know what Positional Play actually is, not even the self-styled experts who purport to be authorities on such matters. Even British tactical aristocracy like Jonathan Wilson seem ill at ease when forced to define what this playing style consists of; possession focussed play, grids on the training pitch, something something rondos.
This ambiguity provides the perfect cover for a particular narrative to be spun. The gist of the story goes like this: How can Pep’s football be outdated when no one actually ever caught up to him? What? I thought everyone played like Pep, that’s how he ruined football, right? Y’know, the whole Positional Play thing. Wrong! Just look at data viz like the one in Sam Lee’s piece in The Athletic. I think you’ll find that nobody actually plays like Pep. His teams have always been radical outliers according to our in-house style-o-meters.
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The conclusion that Guardiola’s style isn’t outdated because no one ever actually got close to it might well be true in one sense. Guardiola, in his own somewhat peculiar way, is a genius-level coach. He works exclusively with the world’s best players and is employed by one of the world’s richest clubs. Add a guy like Florian Wirtz to the equation and City aren’t exactly going to be a pushover next season.
But to argue whether or not Guardiola is finished is to, quite spectacularly, miss the point. The real question is whether Positional Play writ large has become outdated. To address this issue we need to look away from the glitz of European Super Clubs and zoom in on the vast majority of global football that takes place away from the Captain’s table. We also need to return to that pesky question of what the hell Positional Play is.
Guardiola is a Positional Play coach. This is not up for debate. Guardiola says it himself. Positional Play as a concept was almost completely unknown before Guardiola’s emergence at Barcelona. In the wake of that generational team the football coaching world became obsessed with this new way of organising a team’s attacking play. Powered by the burgeoning online tactics-sphere, knowledge of the concepts spread and bit by bit coaches all over the world learned how to implement a Positional Play system.
Positional Play was so alluring because it gave those who applied it to a certain standard huge advantages. In the wake of Sacchi almost all teams defended zonally, using relatively rigid structures to ensure compactness and pitch coverage. But these zonal systems had a weakness — there were always gaps in the structures. Positional Play is tailor made to exploit these gaps. The now famous 5 across the frontline is specifically designed to pull apart back 4 formations like the classic 4–4–2. Sacchi’s zonal defence had changed the game, but now Pep’s zonal attack had found the solution.
Teams of all levels all around the world now possessed the kryptonite to the zonal defences that had made life so difficult for so long. If you played Positionally well enough, your attack would almost always have the upper hand. It’s no wonder these ideas spread like wildfire.
Think of Swansea City’s rise in the late 2000s and early 2010s. By appointing a series of more Positionally minded coaches, Swansea were able to pass their way all the way to the Premier League. Under Michael Laudrup (who played for Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona ‘dream team’) Swansea regularly dismantled their more glamorous top division opponents. How did they do it? They did it because their Positional attack exploited the largely zonal defensive structures deployed by the majority of Premier League coaches.
Positional Play allowed clubs with modest resources to suddenly dominate games in ways they could have never previously dreamed of. Positional principles became commonplace in academy curriculums across the globe and professional clubs increasingly sought out Positional coaches to inject some of that La Masia magic into their teams.
None of this means that all of these coaches played like Pep. Pep’s version is notoriously slow, patient and weaponises particular aspects to gain advantages. But it does mean that all these coaches were attacking the opponent on a structural level. Players were trained to identify the spaces in the opponent structure and exploit them. This was achieved using various formations, tempos, rhythms, connections, progressions and intensities, but the underlying principles were unmistakably Positional.
Over time this has led to a homogenisation of playing styles. It’s not that everyone played like Pep, it’s that almost everyone plays Positionally. But football is a game and its theory is always developing. We have now reached a point where defences are no longer willing to simply allow Positional attacks to meticulously pick them apart. Defences have learned that they can no longer fight structure with structure — the more fluid nature of the attack will always have the advantage in this type of match up.
Guardiola describes playing against Gasperini’s Atalanta as ‘like going to the dentist’. The reason for this acute discomfort is that Gasperini does not play a zonal defence; he plays a man-to-man defence. By locking onto individual opponents, defences can nullify the structural advantages that Positional Play seeks to exploit. This dynamic was so clearly demonstrated when Atalanta comfortably beat Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen in last season’s Europa League Final. We are now seeing a widespread increase in man-to-man defences for precisely this reason.
This is why it is not unreasonable to suggest that, while Pep Guardiola’s elite-level Positional super teams might not be outdated, Positional Play as a hegemonic attacking style very well could be. A modest Premier League club like Swansea can no longer leverage extreme advantages by simply deploying a Positional attack. Top coaches know this game now, most of them play it, and for sure, all of them know how to counter it.
So what next? The football coaching world’s fixation on Positional Play has led to a stagnation in attacking development. This has allowed defences to get the upper hand. Hopefully this disastrous state of affairs won’t last for long. Coaches must find ways of attacking that fall outside the Positional paradigm. If defences are going man-to-man, attacks will have to find ways of organising while their players make unpredictable movements to evade their limpet-like markers. How can such organisations be achieved? We’ll find out soon enough.
