Ever since Roberto De Zerbi signed on to become Brighton’s head coach in 2022 , Brighton have become one of the most exciting and entertaining teams in the Premier League, and in the footballing world as a whole.
Building on the excellent foundations laid by the previous head coach, Graham Potter, which made Brighton into one of the most tactically interesting and efficient teams in the Premier League, De Zerbi has brought a daring, thrilling, and effective style of play to the team.
This style of play is centered around attracting pressure from the opponent, then rapidly exploiting the spaces opened up behind the pressure via quick, vertical combination play, with the aim of moving the ball to the forwards in a goal-facing orientation and in areas where they can threaten the opponent’s last line of defence with carries, dribbles, passes and shots at goal.
Hence, phrases like “creating Artificial Transitions” and “Baiting the Press” have become almost synonymous with Brighton and other teams who utilize similar means of progression and penetration. But, is “baiting pressure” a Brighton thing, a De Zerbi special?
The answer is NO. Why? because ALL teams look to bait pressure when building attacks.
Many, if not most, teams now defend in compact and coordinated systems that rarely give up space unwittingly to the opponents. Therefore, there is a need to attract pressure from one or more opponent players to be able to then progress the ball into the space[s] opened up behind the pressure.
Not just a matter of space, it is also to attract and pull a marker towards a free player in a lower rung of attack[a Goalkeeper, Center-back or Defensive Midfielder] in order to create a new free player in a higher rung[a Center-back, Defensive Midfielder or an Attacking Midfielder] where it is more advantageous to have one.
I hope my attempt at clearing up that misconception is successful 🙂.
Now, where the distinctions start to set in are in terms of the heights and tempo at which different teams look to bait and exploit pressure.
💊 HEIGHTS.
The teams that have both the individual and tactical qualities to defend high up the pitch and to break down stubbornly compact blocks generally prefer to progress incrementally, gradually pushing their opponents into the middle or final thirds, where they then look to break them down.
In contrast, the teams that do not possess such quality prefer to instead attract pressure deeper and directly attack the spaces generated.
The Brighton team falls into the second category.
💊 TEMPO.
This is the area in which the Brighton team truly stand out.
Unlike most teams, Brighton build their attacks at an undulating tempo that involves sudden, significant jumps in tempo from numbingly slow to blindingly fast upon the successful attraction of pressure.
This constant undulation that sets the Brighton team apart and is the source of the excitement when watching them, is a consequence of the means with which they bait pressure.
They do so by taunting the opponent in a manner akin to how a Matador taunts a bull. Only that in lieu of a red cape, Brighton wave the ball.
Just like a Matador, Brighton utilize ‘pausa’. Not the usual kind of pausa that aims to exploit a changing picture, but the kind that instigates a change in the picture. It is a pause that says “if you dare to, come get the ball”.
Just like a Matador’s pose with the cape, Brighton’s center-backs put their studs on the ball in a nonchalant pose, choosing either to roll the ball forwards slowly, or to simply stand still.
Also, they look to purposely trigger common pressing cues like back-passes, pivots receiving with negative orientations, heavy touches etc.
However, the most important shared features of Brighton’s press-baiting and Bullfighting are the strong emphasis on timing and technique of evasion of pressure, and the jump in tempo required to do so to avoid being gored.
The timing of the reactions to the onrushing pressure has to be nigh perfect. Not too early, or the bull / presser might adjust his trajectory and punish the taunts. Not too late, or the player / matador will get gored.
The emphasis on timing also correlates with a need for high mastery of evasion technique. A loose control, a misstep, a heavy pass, a late swerve — blood red.
Therefore, this manner of press-baiting necessitates a slow tempo that lulls and taunts the opponent for the purpose of attracting pressure, and a sharp rise in tempo in order to exploit the pressure.
This is in contrast to teams like Manchester City and Arsenal who prefer to maintain a steady slow tempo throughout the process of baiting and exploiting pressure. To achieve this, they bait pressure and generate pass lanes via horizontal circulation of the ball, and the individual block manipulation skills of their deeper-lying players, then exploit the pressure with passes and carries into the generated spaces.
There are also teams like Bayer Leverkusen that maintain a relatively rapid rhythm of quick, short and vertical or diagonal passes that they use to attract pressure, discombobulate the opponent’s lines of pressure, and attack the spaces behind.
Next, what are the advantages of Brighton’s sharply undulating tempo?
💊 BENEFITS.
The team in-possession always holds the advantage of superior timing because the opponent essentially reacts to their actions. Therefore, playing through pressure with rapid, one-touch, vertical passes helps to stretch that timing advantage, giving the team in-possession a little more time and space, because the opponent has a reduced reaction window of time before the next action is made.
However, the peculiar advantage that Brighton’s sharp upturn in tempo provides is that the opponent has an even slower reaction time to Brighton’s incisive actions. Why? because the slow tempo beforehand lulls the opponent…before Brighton explode past them.
So, the use of this sharply undulating tempo helps to stretch the gap between the timing of the actions of the Brighton players, and the timing of the reactions of the opponent players.
From this gap, the dynamic advantages of superior momentum and superior body orientation are birthed. This means that the timing advantage on the side of the Brighton players affords them more time to exercise more measured control over both the direction and velocity of their momentum and to adjust into optimal body orientations for the next action whilst the opponent is still reacting to the previous one.
📝Note how the Brighton players are getting set for the next action whilst the Fulham players are still chasing the shadows of the previous action.
Next, let us examine the flaws inherent in this manner of progression and penetration.
💊 DRAWBACKS.
I. Limited range of build-up mechanisms.
In the process of baiting pressure, the heavy reliance on taunting gestures presents a somewhat simple solution to the opponent — Don’t bite. Simply refusing to react to their taunts takes away a huge part of their ability to generate spaces and break blocks down. This is because they underuse major alternative means of breaking blocks down, like horizontal circulation of the ball and other individual block manipulation skills besides pausa.
The positioning [usually] of two players in the first rung of attack coupled with the short distance between them makes horizontal circulation of the ball barely effective at opening spaces within the block since the block only has to shift a short distance to adjust to the new position of the ball.
Also, the emphasis on slowly and patiently baiting pressure before playing through it means that the players on the first rung of attack, usually the Center-backs, relatively underutilize other means of manipulating blocks, like ball-carrying and deceptive passing into the block.
Basically, Brighton mostly rely on the use of socio-affective superiorities to create dynamic advantages. These superiorities are created via their quick, automated combination plays that use the successful baiting of pressure as the trigger. When the opponent refuses to apply pressure, there is no trigger, and penetration becomes difficult to achieve.
The solution [which to be fair, De Zerbi has increasingly used] is to seek to create other forms of superiorities — Numerical and Positional, in the build-up process. This means adjusting the number of players involved in build-up and the number of players on each rung of attack to create overloads that can help progress the ball easier. Also, the positioning of the players involved in build-up have to be adjusted with the aim of maintaining connections between players and at the same time, creating some confusion in the opponent’s marking assignments.
Increasing the range of possibilities with these changes, instead of using a rigid 4–2–4 structure within which the possible actions are choreographed and limited, will raise the ceiling of the approach.
II. High technical threshold.
After the process of baiting pressure, the sharp increase in tempo and the rapid exploitation of pressure require a relatively high threshold of technique on the ball.
For the passes and movements to be successfully executed at that tempo, the techno-tactical details — timing of actions, weight and trajectory of passes, angles of movements, speed of movements etc. — have to be nigh perfect in every sequence, and since the players are not robots, the fast tempo induces errors in execution.
Brighton’s use of deeply ingrained, due to repeated practice, patterns of play helps to reduce the incidence of these errors, but teams that employ aggressive and coordinated man-marking pressing schemes reincrease the difficulty of executing those patterns.
III. Risky nature of combination plays.
In exploiting pressure and penetrating the opponent’s block, Brighton utilize sequences of combination plays that are quick, long-ranged, and vertical in nature, each element increasing the risk inherent in the sequences.
The pattern of playing long passes into the feet of the forwards dropping from the last rung of attack for them to bounce the ball to the pivots is one that puts possession at risk in two ways; One, the ball spends a longer time in transit, creating a larger window — compared to when shorter passes are used — for the opponents to intercept the ball. Two, the forwards receive vertical passes that make it harder to shield the ball from the defender behind, compared to when they receive diagonal or horizontal passes.
In lieu of the use of long, vertical passes to access the free player[s] on the 2nd rung, short-range, horizontal combination plays and rotations should be used more as means to move the ball into the free man arriving dynamically into the spaces between the lines. This will improve security in-possession whilst achieving the same goal of penetration into the opponent’s block.
IV. Compromised Compactness.
This is another consequence of the tempo at which Brighton penetrate the opponent’s block.
The speed at which the ball travels up the pitch makes it difficult for the team to maintain vertical compactness when transiting upwards, as the ball is faster than any player, and the players move at different speeds. Thus, both the ability of the team to counter-press, and the integrity of the rest-defence are negatively impacted.
Brighton’s partial disregard for maintaining compactness in-possession when they break into the opponent’s block is a deliberate trade-off in a high-risk-high-reward strategy that prioritizes attacking the spaces that open up when the opponent applies pressure. This trade-off is taken because of the relative lack of variety in their build-up process that makes it difficult to break down stubbornly compact teams, and makes those spaces valuable and difficult to ignore when they are available.
Ideally, one would suggest deceleration in the final third to pin the opponent back, sustain pressure, and maintain compactness, but that would be counterintuitive, unless De Zerbi expands Brighton’s block-breaking toolbox via the aforementioned solutions.
💊 THE CODA.
¶ Roberto De Zerbi’s game-model, despite its flaws, is one that significantly raises the floor of his teams because it simplifies the decision-making process for the players. This simplification is achieved via three key features of the game-model; the structure, the automatisms, and the tempo of play.
- Structure.
De Zerbi’s strong preference for the 4–2–4 in-possession base structure is because the structure affords a great deal of connections in terms of both numbers and distances between players.
The presence of multiple pass options in close proximity to the player in-possession means that he can quickly find the next pass and be easily relieved of pressure.
It also facilitates quick combination play.
- Automatisms.
With the strong emphasis on having as much possession as possible, the rigidity of the in-possession structure, the insistence on baiting pressure, and the manner with which Brighton bait pressure, De Zerbi essentially sets the conditions of the playing field and the possibilities within it.
The players are then prepared to recognize and adapt to these possibilities via repetitive practice of the possible scenarios, which makes the process almost instinctive, requiring little thought during actual games.
See Lewis Dunk’s comments below on the repeated practice of patterns / automatisms.
“We rehearse it every day. Now I know every position on the pitch and where someone would be. We practice it so much that we know every scenario. If someone presses from this or that angle, we know where the ball should go to reach past the pressure. We do lots and lots of hours on it.”
- Tempo.
We have examined the influence of the tempo of play on the timing gap and the dynamic advantages born from it.
The extra time afforded to the players is more time to gather information, process it, and act accordingly.
¶ Since Brighton’s success with this style of play, some other teams have either incorporated some of its elements into their gameplay[e.g. Manchester City], or essentially mirrored the style with minor modifications[e.g. Lille, Nice]. The teams with very similar styles to Brighton’s also exhibit the same strengths and flaws, albeit to different degrees.
¶ I have a slight inconvenience with the use of the term “Artificial Transition”, as it makes no sense by definition.
The term suggests a transition — which is the momentous switch between the in-possession and out-of-possession states — that is intentionally generated. This makes sense for the team out-of-possession, as that is the point of pressing and counter-pressing, but for the team in-possession, the intentional generation of transitions is completely illogical.
A better description for what Brighton seek to generate is ‘Fast / Quick Transits’ i.e. rapid movements up the pitch.
¶ Lastly, this article mainly zooms in on what I believe is the core element of Brighton’s game model, Tempo, and its impact on their in-possession play. There are other principles and sub-principles involved, and their out-of-possession gameplay also deserves the same, if not more, amount of scrutiny in analysis. But one article would be insufficient for all of that; hence, the narrow scope of this one.
If you enjoyed reading this article and learned something from it, kindly share. Thanks!
Love,
Silva♥️.
