Not to say I didn’t speak of the flowers: space, time, positionism and relationism
If you follow football from a more tactical point of view, you have certainly come across the debate between positional football and relationist football, which ended up in recent months breaking the niche of tactical debates on Twitter and invading new environments. Juanma Lillo saying that all World Cup teams play the same way; discussions about Tite’s Brazil losing its South American essence (and Scaloni’s Argentina ragaining it); the flaming debate over the coaching changes for Flamengo, the reigning Libertadores champions; Oliver Kahn’s criticism of Nagelsmann’s change of approach in the Bayern team in the post-World Cup period; the article in The New York Times about Fernando Diniz’s “new way” of playing football and so on. Slowly, the words “relationism” and “positionism” begin to guide some football debates around the world.
The term “role-driven attack” was coined by József Bozsik, aka “O Húngaro” (literally The Hungarian), (and later on translated to English by Gorka Melchor) in 2018 in the piece “Between the ball and the man there is space and time”, where he differentiates the types of attack between those that are organized to from space and those that are organized from time (more on that later), creating a clear divide in the offensive organizations. A few years later, coach Jamie Hamilton took the debate that Húngaro had raised in Brazil (and which had spread across much of South America) to Europe in his piece “Fernando Diniz vs. the Man Machine”, adapting the terms positional and role-driven to positionism and relationism respectively.
It turns out that, as in all other debates that expand a lot and move away from the core, the discussion between positionism and relationism was very distorted. In most of the debates where this topic is addressed, people usually talk about (and attack) scarecrows, adulterated and distorted concepts that barely remember the starting point from which they came, a classic consequence of the extreme polarization that the internet encourages. Emerged, then, an idea that relationist football boiled down to clustering players around the ball and that positional football was just spreading the players across the pitch; that one symbolized the maximum expression of freedom and the other, of mechanized and plastered football. Thus, I thought it was interesting to try to clear up some misconception, knock down some scarecrows and fix some deviations that the debate took by contextualizing what gave rise to the positionism versus relationism debate and, in addition, giving my opinion on the subject.
1. Space and time
“There is those who talk about counter-attack, quick attack, whatever you want. You use the vocabulary as you prefer. I understand football as space and time” — Xavi Hernández.
See, football is something a bit more complex than just a foot and a ball, that is, the players and the ball. Of course, they’re the material part of the game, what makes a match happen, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only thing that exists in football — we need to dive a little deeper and be a little less materialists to understand where the positionism versus relationism debates starts. We need to grasp the concepts of space and time.
Out of the two concepts, space is probably the less abstract and therefore the easier to grasp: it’s literally the physical space of the football pitch, the material stage of a match. From this, we can perceive space through a load of different ways, but we will focus here on a specific perception: each player occupies a certain space on the pitch.
Time, however, is a bit more abstract and therefore more difficult to grasp and explain. To set a starting point, we can define it as the time someone takes to do something. Applying this principle to what happens in a football match, it’s the time a player takes to perform a determined action on the pitch, be it a pass, a shoot, a run, a dribble, anything. Well, perfect, we have a neat concept perfect for a dictionary, but I’d rather split it in two: objectively, time is an action of a player, with or without the ball. It’s their movement, their touches, their interactions with the rest of the team — everything we see a player do is time taking shape. Subjectively, time is the individual perception that a player might have on what happens on the pitch — before interacting (or not), running (or standing still), passing (or carrying the ball), before materializing their action, a player must have conscience on what happens around them, must perceive the game, intuit, rationalize, and then, only then, act. In a nutshell, time is a player’s individual perception that guides their actions on the pitch.
Space is the stage and time is the play. Space is the instrument and time is the music. Space is the tongue and time is the speech. One doesn’t exist without the other, for one in meaningless without the other. And, inside a football match, they must walk together. If a player has control over their time but doesn’t have space to materialize it, or if a player has space but is unable to control the time of their actions, they can’t play. The players and the ball are the protagonists, but between the player and the ball there is space and there is time. And if a player wants to control the ball, they first need to control both space and time.
2. The positionist vision
“If there’s space, there’s time” — Xavi Hernández
There are those who believe that a player can only have time to act and interact if they have space for it, that is, the path to master time is to first master space. These people prioritize spatial control of the pitch and see space as the first thing you must master in order to have control over the ball. If a team has full control of all the spaces on a football pitch, the players will be able to interact. The term “positional” comes from this idea — players must control their positions in order to control their actions.
Football was born in England, and with it came the positional tradition. The almost umbilical relationship the sport had with virility, masculinity and war in Britain ended up naturally forging the idea of spatial control, and for sharing the same origin, football started as something very similar to rugby. It was an extremely physical sport, and its first tactical systems (1–1–8, 1–2–7, 2–2–6) sought to queue forwards in order to value a style of play heavily based on runs with the ball and long passes. See, football wasn’t place for romanticism, it was place for objectivity: you had to reach the opposite goal in the quickest, most practic way possible, and the British (better saying, the English — more on that later) thought that the best way for this was to make the football pitch as large as possible in order to attack the opponent from more places. With a line of 5, 6 or even 7 forwards, you could make a long pass to any of them so that they could run with the ball and, if or when they lost the ball, other player could pick it up and keep on carrying the ball towards the opposite goal — a lot like rugby. The idea of interactions and relations between the players wasn’t very popular here.
Here was born the idea of a spatial attack, that is, attacking through spaces. As football evolved, tactics evolved with it, and playing football well began to be strongly related to discipline — more specifically, spatial discipline. Tactics evolved within this military culture, and as they became more complex, they created an ever stronger relationship with the successful mastery of the spaces of the pitch. Just as it isn’t possible to have absolute control of a territory in a war, it isn’t possible to have absolute control of the entire extension of a football pitch, so a good strategist must have a series of strategic spaces that he considers most important in the fight for spatial control. Positions are born here— football is no longer just about running with the ball, it’s about controlling spaces that the coach deems strategic. There are those who continue to think that superiority must be gained on the offensive line and fill the team with forwards; there are those who prefer superiority in the center of the pitch and put more players there (thus the 2–3–5 was born and a little later the 3–2–5) and so on. The English school forged a positional tradition — a coach must know which positions on the pitch he wants to dominate and the players must respect them.
2.1. Total Football
Time went on and England maintained its positional tradition with not so many adjustments. Of course, the game was drastically more complex and studied, but the English style was still very much based on long passes and ball carrying, with the eventual development of lethal counter-attacks — without giving up control of spaces, of course. The 4–4–2 became the most common system in the country with two well defined lines of 4 players and a lot of focus on playing through the flanks with the wingers, a lot of verticality and a lot of crosses: the essence of the English game had evolved, but it was still there.
However, despite the general lack of interest of the English in taking football to other places and interacting with other cultures, one or two adventurer left England to explore other countries, bring the English tradition to them and, who knows, learn a thing or two. This was the case, for example, of Jack Reynolds, who left Great Britain to work in the Netherlands and thus coached Ajax on 3 occasions: from 1915 to 1925, from 1928 to 1940 and from 1945 to 1947. In his last spell at the Dutch club, Jack coached an 18-year-old forward called Rinus Michels. Another Englishman would have a strong connection with Dutch football and with Rinus Michels: Vic Buckingham. Vic coached Ajax twice (from 1959 to 1961 and from 1964 to 1965) and, when leaving the Dutch club for the second time, he was replaced by Rinus Michels, now retired and working as a coach. Years later, Vic also coached Barcelona (between 1969 and 1971) and was also replaced by Rinus Michels.
Before we talk about Michels, however, we need to highlight the English influence over Dutch football. The importance of Jack Reynolds here cannot be understated: he was a faithful follower of the traditional English school, closely linked to verticality and spatial control, but was beginning to explore the idea of more elaborate counterattacks, with shorter passes instead of just long balls. Jack arrived in the Netherlands and saw a semi-amateur football, a blank canvas for him to paint, and his almost 30-year-spell at Ajax have created a very well defined foundation. A few years later, Vic Buckingham would also leave his mark, adding to Jack’s traditional English game a vision more linked to the Hungarian football that thrashed England 6–3 at Wembley with style more structured in passes and well thought plays and relations not long before.
In parallel with this, a artistic-architectural style called “Total City” was developing: the architect Michel de Klerk stated that the modern industrialized city should grow like a work of art and that each building, street and public space of a city should follow a integrated concept, transforming a city into an expression of its residents. This inspired the designer Wim Crouwel to create the “Total Design”, which rejected the idea of linear spaces of modernism and defended that spaces should be manipulated, flexible, so that everyone could compose a concept, a larger structure. The ideas of Michel de Klerk and Wim Crouwel made their way into Dutch artistic culture and quickly spread throughout the country’s society. It was only a matter of time before this philosophy arrived in football: the architect Dan Roodenburgh, who was part of the Cidade Total school, was a member of Ajax’ board in the 1930s.
It was in this scenario that Rinus Michels grew up: within football, a strong English influence that said the domain of spaces was the path to the domain of time and that spatial discipline was a great quality of the modern footballer. Outside of football, an artistic-architectural movement that valued the manipulation of spaces and understood the individual, above all, as a part of the whole. As if this wasn’t enough, Michels himself was a big fan of military strategies and saw tactical discipline as a great value for a football player and spatial control as the main guideline for a good strategy, hence the nickname “The General”. The path was already paved: the mind who would later become greatest Dutch football history already thought that the path to good football was in the controlling space. From the same creators of Total City and Total Design, came Total Football.
Michels’ Total Football had some keys. The first one, of course, was the control of spaces, but he felt that the traditional English style was too rudimentary. For Michels, basing a game on long passes, crossings and running with the ball made the game way too vulgar, valued the physique, devalued the technique and didn’t the team clear chances to score. He turned his eyes to the Hungarian school (which had already inspired Vic Buckingham) of short passes, possession and technical imposition above physical imposition and saw in it the key to a more efficient control of spaces. Michels’ idea was to determine strategic spaces on the pitch that should be dominated by the players: the player should adapt his own individuality to respect a unique concept and compose the larger structure of the team. However, these spaces were collaborative, interactive, and established relations between themselves through the short passes. Michels would also create the idea of switching positions, keyword “switching”. He’d determine the spaces on the pitch that he wanted his players to occupy, but the important thing here was that those spaces were occupied, not necessarily who occupied them. In fact, Michels saw polyvalence as important as discipline for a player: if a player managed to play in several positions, even better, as the spaces would become even more collaborative. Michels greatly encouraged switching position, but with one condition: that all the spaces determined by him were occupied. This would become the most striking feature of their teams: players constantly switched positions, but whenever someone left their position, another immediately occupied it. No space was left empty.
The philosophy was laid out, and the next step was taken by Rinus Michels’ best player: Johan Cruyff. In addition to being talented like few others, Cruyff had unmatched tactical intelligence and had assimilated Michels’ concepts better than anyone else. He was the Michels’ voice on the pitch, and anyone who watched him play knew that his career as a coach — and a successful one— was certain. When Cruyff finally embraced his destiny and started coaching Ajax in the 1980s, he was ready to take Michels’ philosophy and turn it into a method.
2.2. Juego de Posición
“It’s a game of position, not possession” — Domènec Torrent
Cruyff’s spells coaching Ajax (from 1985 to 1988) and Barcelona (from 1988 to 1996) went far beyond simply adjusting Rinus Michels’ game philosophy to the new demands and challenges that a two decades older football presented — he was the greatest exponent of a wide line of coaches influenced by Michels’ Total Football (which had some Dutch figures, such as Louis Van Gaal, and others from outside the country but who were equally inspired by Michels, such as Juanma Lillo or Marcelo Bielsa) who sought not to just replicate or adjust this philosophy, but expand it, modernize it, systematize it, materialize it and transform it into a method.
Cruyff’s spell as Ajax’s coach weren’t as memorable as the following spell (mainly due to lack of time; the coach of this new school who influenced Ajax the most was Louis van Gaal, whose spell coaching the club was two times longer than Cruyff’s), but his first 3 years as a coach in Amsterdam were more than enough for him to leave his blueprint: in a scenario where everyone played in a 4–4–2, Cruyff didn’t understand the need to defend 2 opposite strikers with 4 defenders, and decided to give up one of the defensive line players to have an extra forward. His Ajax, therefore, played with three defenders, a defensive midfielder, two midfielders, an attacking midfielder, two wingers and a center forward: it was a 3–4–3, but with a diamond midfield. In the following decade, the Champions League winner and three times national champions Ajax team played exactly in that 3–4–3 under the tutelage of Louis van Gaal. In 1988, Cruyff would leave Ajax for Barcelona and, taking his 3–4–3 with him, he had plenty of time (8 years) to be truly consecrated not only as a great coach, but as a great football mind. Barcelona was a stage as fertil for his ideas as Ajax was: in addition to being coached in the past by both Vic Buckingham and Rinus Michels, Barcelona still had the figure of Laureano Ruiz, who coached the club’s academy in the 70s and was very responsible for taking this philosophy to sectors other than the first team.
Cruyff had a very clear guideline: inspired by the almost military mind of Rinus Michels, Cruyff also believed that the way to master the ball was to first master the spaces on the pitch, and only then master the time of interactions between players. Like Michels, he also believed that this mastery of spaces shouldn’t come from long passes and counterattacks, but from a game of possession and short passes. Thus, the basis of his triumphs was formed, triumphs that go far beyond his four consecutive LaLiga titles or the first Champions League title in the history of Barcelona — Cruyff created an identity, a method that gave face to Fútbol Club Barcelona and that would inspire countless trainers in the following decades. The Juego de Posición was born.
It’s necessary to understand the Juego de Posición (“Game of Position” in a literal translation) as something that goes beyond a style: it’s an identity, a culture, a method. To practice it, it isn’t enough to try to master the spaces and pass the ball all around, it’s necessary to understand and replicate a series of deeply complex and cultural concepts that the generation guided by Cruyff created and the generation guided by Guardiola perfected.
Positional attack or zonal attack: it’s a common misconception to believe that the positional attack (or positional play) and the Juego de Posición are synonyms, but in reality the positional attack is nothing but one of the concepts inside the Juego de Posición. It’s important, yes, probably one of the most important, but it isn’t the only one and it isn’t exclusive to the Juego de Posición. According to Pep Guardiola himself, “most people think that there’s only the defensive zone, but that’s not true: there’s also the attacking zone. When your attackers are far from the ball, waiting for it to arrive after a series of plays and actions, that is a zonal attacking. We call it a positional attack, but in reality it is a zonal attack. The point is not to look for the ball to attack, but to wait for it to reach a certain zone”.
The positional attack (or zonal attack, as Guardiola prefers to call it) is the material application of the concept of dominating spaces to dominate time. As explained before, it is impossible to dominate all the spaces of a football pitch, so the coach must know where on the pitch he wants to seek superiority and, from that, distribute his players in the spaces he deems strategic. Therefore, a coach divides the attack into zones and distributes his players there; thus, each player has a specific position that he must master before interacting with the other players. This is where spatial discipline becomes extremely important: the coach has only 11 players (or 10 if we exclude the goalkeeper) to dominate the entire length of a football pitch. Therefore, each zone assigned to the players is extremely important, as the coach believes that dominating that particular space is something extremely strategic in the struggle for spaces on the pitch. If the player in that particular space decides to leave it to get closer to the ball, that space will be empty and the spatial control of the pitch will be radically compromised. Therefore, it’s extremely important that players respect the zones determined by the coach: players must not move towards the ball, because when leaving their position, moving towards the ball and interacting, a player puts the time of their actions as something more important than the space they occupy, and that isn’t the logic of a positional attack. Within a positional attack, the players move towards the ball, the ball moves towards players. In this logic, a player can participate in the game even when he’s far from the ball: when a left winger, for example, is stuck on the left flank when the play happening out on the right, he may not be in direct contact with the ball, but standing on the opposite side, he pins an opposite defender, who now can’t leave his defensive zone to help defending the zone where the ball is as to not leave that winger alone. Now, there’s one less defender where the play is, and therefore there’s more room for players to attack. It’s the idea that one player creates spaces for another, even without both of them interacting directly.
“To make players understand the positional attack, which in my point of view is the most important”, says Guardiola. “Make players understand that by not intervening, you are helping. And this is very hard to understand even in very top-level players. Because players want to be protagonists. To tell a player: ‘you now stay open and in 3 minutes you are not going to touch the ball, but it will eventually come, or maybe not and you will have to wait more, but you have to wait there because that means you are opening spaces on other parts of the pitch’. The positional attack is very complicated, it is to be still and wait for the ball to reach you”.
For a player to interact with others, they must first be the lord of the space they occupy. First generate space so that the player has time to act. Therefore, a player won’t take the ball unless they have space — waiting in a position is important for a) creating spaces elsewhere on the pitch and b) waiting for the right moment to receive the ball, which is when the player has space to act. The idea is to move the ball through the offensive zones, because in doing so you move the opponent: if the ball goes to the right, the opponent needs to move towards it and therefore the left side of the pitch will be empty. There is a great objectivity here within the concept of the pass: the pass exists to find superiority. According to Xavi, passing only makes sense if I leave my teammate in a better position than I am. Otherwise, it’s pointless. To pass the ball to another player is to pass time to him, and since here space comes before time, that player must be the lord of his space. This can mean that he’s alone in his position or that, for example, his superiority is positional, that is, he is better positioned than his opponent and, therefore, he is the lord of that space. Or that there’s a technical superiority, where a player can easily beat the other in a 1v1 and dominate that space.
“Stay there, don’t come to the ball, stay there and we will take the ball to you” — Xavi Hernández.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the team that plays in a positional attack is constantly static, and there are two very important types of movement to be highlighted. The first is when a coach assigns the zones to be dominated, he assigns them according to the position of the ball. If the ball is in the defensive third, there are a series of spaces to be dominated; when it arrives in the attacking third, other spaces become more important. Positions within a positional attack are marked according to the position of the ball; as the ball moves across the pitch, the zones to be dominated change, and the players’ positions change accordingly. The second has already been explained here: the important thing is that the zones are occupied, not necessarily who occupies them. According to Domènec Torrent, Guardiola’s former assistant, the coach’s role is to determine which spaces the players should occupy, but who occupies each space should be determined by the players themselves on the pitch. As long as none of the spaces the coach determined are empty, it doesn’t matter who occupies each one: players can switch positions freely, as long as this switch occurs within the positional logic. One implication of this is that different zones of the pitch present different dynamics of domination: receiving the ball at the wing is different from receiving it in the midfield, as the spaces are different, the opponents you will find in each space are also different and, therefore, the movements and interactions for each zone are different. Let’s take Guardiola’s Manchester City as an example: Grealish, the left winger, and De Bruyne, the midfielder, can switch positions whenever they want as long as both spaces positions remain occupied. However, when De Bruyne leaves his position in the midfield and drifts to the wing, he starts to occupy a space with a radically different dynamic. He will likely have fewer defenders around him and more space for 1v1, but fewer teammates around him. It means he will have to change his game to that of a winger: despite De Bruyne being a midfielder, dominating a space on the wing requires a player to behave like a winger. Thus, despite being a midfielder, when De Bruyne is on the wing he must adapt his role to being a winger, and the same logic happens when Grealish leaves the wing to stay in midfield. This means that, here, the roles of the players are secondary to the positions: it doesn’t matter what the player does naturally, his movements, his interactions and his time must always respond to the position he occupies.
It’s important to remember that the positional attack isn’t something exclusive to the Juego de Posición, it is a tool used by the Juego the Posición to dominate the spaces on the pitch, obtain numerical, technical and/or positional superiority and to scale players in lines to help the team advandce on the pitch. All teams that practice Juego de Posición play in a positional attack, but not all teams that play in a positional attack necessarily practice Juego de Posición (like the traditional English style, for example) which, as said before, involves a number of other methods and concepts.
Juego de Posición’s positional attack presents some peculiarities that aren’t necessarily seen in all styles of positional attack: the most obvious ones are the rational and symmetrical occupation of the spaces, that is, spreading the players in the pitch following a logic of symmetry so that one side of the pitch doesn’t have more players than the other and the spaces, therefore, are occupied rationally, and the maximum width, where the wingers are very close to the touchlines to stretch the opposite defensive line as much as possible and open spaces inside.
Short movements: even though it’s more of a consequence of the positional attack than a concept by itself, short movements are essential for the Juego de Posición to work. When Manchester City signed the Argentine midfielder Máximo Perrone in January 2023, Guardiola was emphatic in what caught his attention in the young player: “he moves very well. We are looking for players who know how to move in short spaces, and he does this very well”.
One of the main pillars not only of the Juego de Posición, but of positional attack as a whole, is that the ball must go to the positions. “Hold on inside the square”, says Abel Ferreira, the coach of Palmeiras, to his players. “Wait there and we’ll bring you the ball, don’t come over here,” says Xavi. Players don’t go to the ball, the ball goes to the players. Or rather, the ball goes to the positions, to the zones that the coach wants to dominate, and the players must be in those positions, occupying those zones. The key here is this: moving towards the ball, breaking up those positions to always be close to the ball, requires a player to move through long spaces. Henry said in an interview with Sky Sports that when he was playing for Barcelona, Guardiola played him as a left winger and told him to keep his position. In a specific game, Henry got mad with going long periods without touching the ball, as it didn’t reach him constantly, and decided to leave his position, cross the pitch and interact with Messi, the winger on the opposite side. From that, Henry scored a goal, but Guardiola subbed him off at half-time, as Henry didn’t respect the positions, didn’t wait for the ball to reach his zone and therefore compromised the control of the spaces of the pitch. Henry performed a long movement: when crossing the pitch to get closer to the ball, he ran at least 40 meters. However, the Juego de Posición is pretty straightforward about this:
“In my team, forwards only need to run 15 meters, unless they’re either stupid or asleep” — Johan Cruyff.
When a winger behaves like Henry in this situation and crosses the pitch to get closer to the ball, when a midfielder passes the ball and immediately makes an overlap to receive it again further up the pitch or when a striker drops back to receive the ball behind the defensive midfielders or drifts all around the attacking third and thus covers a lot of space instead of holding their position between the centre-backs, these players move throughout long spaces. The famous “pass and move”, which we will talk about later, is based on this: a player passes the ball and automatically moves to receive the ball back elsewhere. Long movements, which break the idea of determined positions, of specific zones assigned to each player. The logic of movement in the Juego de Posición is more like a “pass and stay”: a player will never remain static, of course, but his movements must happen within the zone that the coach has assigned for him. All types of movement that comes from the players within the Juego de Posición must take place in short spaces, always within the zones that a coach determines.
“What we get from playing this 3–4–3 against this 4–4–2 is that we play without running. There’s that famous phrase ‘pass and move, pass and move’, pass and move where? Where? Football is about rationally ocuppying the space, and the ball moves to the space. Of course this player has to move when he receives the ball, of course he moves. When he makes a supporting run or a run into space, in that moment he moves. But he’s moving in his designated space” — Pep Guardiola.
Manipulating spaces using possession has clear foundations: if the ball goes to the positions, what moves is the ball, and not the positions, because, when moving the ball, the opponent will need to move accordingly to cover the spaces and defend themselves while the team that has the ball moves much less and, consequently, gets much less tired. Of course, the positions change according to the position of the ball on the pitch, but even within that, the movements are short: a fullback who started wide on the early build-up can drift inwards when the ball moves forward, or a midfielder who starts further back can take a step ahead and get closer to the striker, but movements such as a winger crossing the pitch, a fullback changing sides or a striker roaming through the attacking third don’t happenm, can’t happen. Each phase of the game has a range of positions specific to it: positions can change if the ball is in the first, second or last third of the pitch, but while a certain phase unfolds, positions are very well demarcated and players must respect them. When a player drops back to receive the ball at his foot or moves forward to attack a space, these movements are always short, respecting the area that the coach has marked out for them. Spatial discipline proves to be a very important foundation for a player to adapt to the Juego de Posición: their movements must always take place within their zone and must never break with the logic of positions and create different grooves on the pitch. The movements, the time of the players is always secondary to the space they occupy. That’s why Guardiola always got along very well with defensive midfielders like Busquets or Rodri, as they are players very used to the idea of “pass and stay” — they interpret spaces very well and know how to move in short spaces. Then, they read the game, pass the ball immediately after receiving it and don’t look for an overlap, a one-two: they remain in their positions and always move within their zones. For the same reason, Yaya Touré didn’t get along with Guardiola: his style of play is very much based on sprints, overlaps and one-twos. Touré likes to move through larger spaces, always be close to the ball and create countless grooves across the pitch.
“What moves is the ball. Looks like we are moving the players, but what moves is the ball. The people believe, ‘oh, look how they move’. No. What moves is the ball. Everybody have to be in their positions. When you move much, that’s not good. The ball comes to where we are, we don’t go where it is to pick up the ball” — Pep Guardiola.
Because of that, there’s a lot of confusion about the role of a false 9 within the Juego de Posición. What we call a false 9, inside the logic of the Juego de Posición, is when the player who should occupy the position of the striker doesn’t occupy it and, in fact, his position is a little deeper, like Messi in 2010/2011 Barcelona. When Guardiola decided to bring Messi to the center of the attack, Messi didn’t start as a striker and then dropped back to receive deeper and/or circulated throughout the attack, as these things would require larger movements— his initial position, in fact, was already right behind the opponent’s defensive midfielders and not between the centre-backs like a typical 9. The zone assigned to him, the position he had to respect, was behind the defensive midfielders, and all his movement had to happen there. The striker position, therefore, was empty and was never filled — Messi’s role was to receive the ball at the back of the defensive midfielders, attract the attention of a centre-back and, thus, create a gap in the opposing defense and open a space for someone to infiltrate. The position of the “9” was empty until someone infiltrated it, because Messi didn’t stay there, he was started deeper — hence the name “false 9”, because despite starting in the center of the attack, Messi left the number 9 area empty and played a little deeper.
This would change in the 2011/2012 season: to accommodate Cesc Fábregas, Barcelona’s new signing, Guardiola changed the team to a 3–4–3 with a well-defined diamond-shaped midfield with Piqué, Puyol and Abidal as centre-backs, Busquets as the defensive midfielder, Xavi and Iniesta on the “sides” of the diamond, Fábregas as an attacking midfielder, Dani Alves on the right wing, Pedro or Thiago on the left wing and Messi in the middle. In that formation, however, the “false 9” zone, the one on the back of the defensive midfielders, was occupied by Fábregas, the attacking midfielder. Therefore, Messi had to play more higher up the pitch, in the number 9 zone.
As within the Juego de Posición the roles of each player are secondary in relation to the positions they occupy, Messi played as a number 9 in the 2011/12 season. Not a false 9, a number 9. Of course, a more associative 9, which switched positions with Fábregas many times during a match, but he was a 9 because the zone he played in was the zone of a 9. The idea of short movements of the Juego de Posición didn’t allow Messi to drop back at will to be closer to Xavi and Iniesta and roam around the midfield, therefore, Messi’s movements happend in the number 9 zone and, thus, he behaved like a number 9. Because of that, Messi reached the umbelievable mark of 73 goals scored in one season, but had much less direct impact on the build-up compared to previous years.
This false 9 controversy was revived in 2022, when Luis Enrique’s Spain took to the World Cup 3 options for the center of the attack — Álvaro Morata, a classic striker, Marco Asensio and Dani Olmo, two attacking midfielders. When Luis Enrique used Asensio or Olmo, the press and fans said that Spain had a false 9, but Luis Enrique corrected them in a livestream: “Spain has never played with a false 9! They (Morata, Asensio or Olmo) always occupy the same space, what changes are the characteristics of each player. While Morata, a pure 9, generates that first superiority, Olmo turns more. But, in the end, they occupy the same space”. Playing different players in the same position may give that position new characteristics, but the position remains the same. When a midfielder like Messi, Asensio or Olmo is used in the number 9 position, their movements must always take place within that position. Short movements performed within the determined zones, always.
Possession and third man: at every opportunity he gets, Guardiola says how he hates “tiki taka”. When his Barcelona rocked Europe and became the best team in the world in an extremely orthodox and well-executed Juego de Posición, the team’s style was quickly called “tiki taka” for its foundation in possession and short passing. The midfield formed by Busquets, Xavi and Iniesta made recovering the ball from Barcelona a near impossible task, and the team had almost infinite possession and endless sequences of passes. The term tiki taka, however, suggested that Barcelona passed the ball just for the sake of it, when the reality was exactly the opposite — within the Juego de Posición, possession and the passing are such objective concepts that they are almost bureaucratic.
In the book Pep Guardiola: the Evolution, author Martí Perarnau lists, in fact, ball possession within the concepts that define the Juego de Posicíon, but also lists numerical and/or positional superiority, defensive protection from ball possession, excellence in the technical gesture and body position while both receiving and passing, the search for passes that improve the partner’s position and the search for the third man as equally important concepts. Focusing on the part of obtaining defensive protection from possession of the ball, when Cruyff says that “when you have the ball, the opponent doesn’t have it”, the premise here is that having the ball is the best way to defend yourself, because if the ball is with you, the rival can’t attack you. Guardiola has repeatedly said that having the ball is more than a matter of attacking, it’s also about staying safe. The Catalan is obsessed with control, and the further the ball is from his team’s goal, the better for him. It is obvious how, over the last few seasons, Pep has been simplifying the players’ decisions to possibilities reduced by the relationships within the structure he sets up, where the priority is always to reduce the risk as much as possible so that the possession of the ball is maintained. There were numerous clashes between Guardiola and Klopp where Guardiola’s team had very high numbers of possession and passes exchanged while, in fact, the team was defending, as Guardiola knows that losing the ball to a Klopp team is synonymous with facing one of most powerful and intense counterattacks in the world that offers an incalculable risk.
Beyond possession of the ball as a method of defense, we have the other objectives that Perarnau lists. Although possession is the element that catches the eye the most within a team that practices the Juego de Posición, it’s important to emphasize that having the ball is not the main objective of the coaches of this school — the main objective is to dominate the spaces. What differentiates these coaches from coaches like, for example, José Mourinho (who also comes from a positional school and even spent part of his coaching training as an assistant to Louis van Gaal at Barcelona) is that while some coaches prefer to control spaces without the ball (like Mourinho and his unrivaled zone marking), the Juego de Posición coaches find that the safest, most efficient way to control space is to control it from possession. Having the ball, according to this school of coaches, allows you to have more control over the actions of the game (since, by giving up possession, even if you defend exceptionally well and make the opponent have the ball in harmless zones, you limit your actions because you’d always depends on the other team losing the ball to be able to act), it leaves you in a safer position (because you take the ball away from your goal and, as said before, if you have the ball, the rival doesn’t) and makes it easier to accelerate or slow down the rhythm of the game according to the needs of your team. Therefore, more than a philosophical or aesthetic issue, the Juego de Posición coaches want the ball for a practical reason.
As said before, Xavi says that the pass only makes sense if it leaves the teammate in a better situation than the one who passed, and that’s what we’ll work on here. Within the Juego de Posición, there is an almost bureaucratic ultra-objectivity to the pass — it only serves to progress, to gain superiority, to leave another player in a better situation. Otherwise, passing is meaningless and counterproductive. Juanma Lillo, a Spaniard who was the last coach Guardiola had in his career as a player and one of the main names in the process of transforming the Juego de Posición into a method, says that Juego de Posición should be called Juego de Ubicación (Game of Location, in a literal translation), as its objective goes beyond positioning players well on the pitch; it must also seek to position the players in the best possible way within the positions, that is, optimize the posture and positioning of the players within their zones so that the technical gesture he performs when receiving is the best possible — excellence in the technical gesture and the body position while both receiving and passing and the search for passes that improve the position of the partner, as Martí Perarnau describes. Within the Juego de Posición, everything — the position of the players, their positioning within their zones, the pass, the control of the player who received the pass — must be shaped in order as objective as humanly possible. There is no such thing as passing just for the sake of it within the Juego de Posición (it has been reported numerous times that Guardiola hates when a fullback passes to a winger, as this type of pass doesn’t make the team move forward on the pitch), everything must have a meaning, a purpose, an objective. This is where the concept of the “third man” comes in.
If a team uses their goalkeeper in the build-up, they’ll have 11 players who participate in the offensive phase; however, the opponent will have only 10 players to defend against it, as they can’t use their own goalkeeper as an extra defender. Therefore, there will always be a free player on the pitch— since the players are spread out in their respective positions, the idea is to move the ball between these positions (always moving the ball and never the positions) in order to find the free man on each move and move the team forward from this. The ball must move between positions and the opponent will need to move along with it to defend, so spaces will open up across the pitch and a player will always be free. When they worked together at Barcelona, Cruyff would tell Guardiola (who played as a defensive midfielder) that, when he got the ball, the first thing he should do was look as far as possible to Romário, the team’s striker. If Romário was free, the ball should go to him, as he’d offer a lot of danger. If he wasn’t free, the pass should be short. There’s the concept of the ultra-objectivity of the pass — if there’s space, use it. If Romário has space, he’s extremely dangerous, so use it. If he doesn’t have space, trying to trigger him is practically synonymous with giving up possession, so it’s better to play short, but whenever there is space, the best thing to do is to use it. To systematize and automate this mechanism of finding the free man, the Juego de Posición developed the concept of the third man — since the attacking team will always have a free player and the objective is to make the ball move and the opponent move along with it to open up spaces, the Juego de Posición has developed a method to find a free man on every move (since passing only makes sense if whoever receives the pass has space to act).
It’s very common to see images like the one above in teams that practice the Juego de Posición, be it Barcelona, Manchester City, Spain or any other — the players spread out rationally and symmetrically across the pitch and forming passing triangles, where each player has two or more short passing lanes. This is the basis for the third man. Giving an example from Guardiola’s Barcelona itself: Busquets receives the ball from the defenders, and all the players in front of him are marked. Busquets then runs with the ball and attracts the attention of the defender that’s marking Iniesta. Now, Iniesta has space and can receive the ball from Busquets. Upon receiving, Iniesta attracted the attention of another defender, who was marking Messi — Iniesta, now, can pass to Messi who in now at the back of the defenders and, consequently, with space and time to act. In this example, Busquets is the first man, he’s the one who starts the move, attracts the attention of the first marker and starts the domino effect of opening spaces on the pitch. Iniesta is the second man, he’s the bridge between the first and the third man, he’s the one who makes the connection. Messi is the third man, he’s the one who receives the ball from at the back of the defenders and has time and space to make the best possible decision. Van Gaal stated that when the first man starts the play, the second must be alert to receive the ball and the third must already start the movement to get unmarked and receive at the back of the defenders. In this example, when Messi receives the ball, he becomes the first man of the next play, which must have two other players as second and third man.
3. The relationist vision
“In football, spaces are created by moving” — Carlo Ancelotti
On the other hand, there are those who believe a player will only have control of the spaces if they first master their time. If a player is able to make things on the right time, he will control spaces, therefore, the path to conquer space is to first conquer time. Here, the most important thing is that all players on the pitch have full control of their actions and the time of their actions and, from the interactions between the players, a team will control the spaces and therefore the ball. If a team has full control of the relations between its players, it will control the spaces of a football pitch — hence the name “relationism”.
3.1. The European tradition
“We play football like Jimmy Hogan taught us. When our football history is written, Jimmy Hogan’s name should be written in gold letters” — Gusztáv Sebes.
While the English believed that spreading players in certain positions and triggering them through long passes so that they carried the ball towards the opposite goal, their neighbors in Scotland had a different idea. They believed that the best way to gain superiority on the pitch was not to base their game on long passes and carrying the ball, but to work on possession from short passes. According to the first theorists of this style, the game shouldn’t be based on looking for long passes and carrying the ball all the time, and that attention should be focused on the time of the players’ actions. The thesis was as follows: the play started when a player dominated the ball; then, they should stop, analyze the game, decide what to do and then make the best possible decision (control their time); then they’d pass the ball to the teammate in the better situation, then move to receive the ball further up the pitch to continue the play, even if the ball went through 2 or 3 players before returning to them. The team would move higher up the pitch like this: always starting with shorter passes, which valued the players’ technique more and allowed for more elaborate and well-crafted plays. The most important thing here was that the players developed relations of mobility between them, without giving so much importance to the positions.
Interestingly, an Englishman was the responsible for spreading this style all throughout Europe. Jimmy Hogan was a son of Irish parents, but he was born and raised in England and built his entire playing career there. Hogan was a restless player: not exactly the best of his time (Jonathan Wilson describes him in his book “Inverting the Pyramid” as “a useful and dedicated right midfielder”), but he was deeply troubled by the conformism that reigned in English football, which insisted on the rudimentary and excessively physical game of long passes and ball carrying, diminished the importance of training with the ball and of the individual evolution of the players and firmly believed that the natural technical superiority between players was something insurmountable and, therefore, individual training that weren’t 100% aimed at working on the physical were useless. It turned out that Hogan didn’t go to Scotland, Scotland went to Hogan. The young player was bothered by the rudimentary and excessively physical style of play of Burnley, the team he played for, and an argument over money was the final straw for him to move to Fulham. Fulham were managed by Harry Bradshaw, a businessman who had a profound dislike for England’s long passing style and, therefore, set up a coaching staff and a squad full of Scots so that they could replicate the passing game that had already conquered the pitches — and hearts — of Scotland. Still as a player, Hogan would meet James Howcroft, an engineer who also worked as a referee in football matches, on a pre-season trip to the Netherlands, and a few years later Howcroft would be decisve in Hogan’s appointment as the coach of FC Dordrecht — Hogan, frustrated with his recent knee injuries, left his career as a player aside, accepted the proposal, spent 2 years coaching FC Dordrecht and did so well that he coached the Dutch national team in a match against Germany. He had semi-amateur players on hand, but he decided he would train them “as a British man would train” — he improved everyone’s physical condition, but he really focused training on the technical part in order to develop a very clear game method based on the old Scottish passing game. Shortly after, Hogan would still try to restart his career as a player, but he soon gave up and accepted his fate as a coach.
Hogan’s path would soon cross that of Hugo Meisl, an Austrian football fan who had made it his life’s mission to transform football in his country and, little by little, accumulated positions and powers in the Austrian Football Association until he became, in fact, the strong man of the organization. Meisl would meet Hogan through Howcroft who, after refereeing a 1–1 draw between Austria and Hungary, heard Meisl’s complaints about Austria’s football in the game and suggested a talk with his friend Jimmy Hogan. The two hit it off quickly and Meisl didn’t take long to offer Hogan a 6-week contract which, in theory, was to work with Austria’s top football clubs, but in practice was to set the Austrian National Team up for the 1912 Olympic Games. Austria would end up knocked out in the quarter-finals of the tournament by the Netherlands, but Meisl was already convinced — the Austrian had a reasonably romantic view of football (unlike Hogan, who preferred the Scottish passing game purely because he found it more efficient) and was delighted with the football that his national team had shown under the tutelage of the Englishman. Meisl was already beginning to plan a whole cycle with Hogan to prepare Austria for the 1916 Olympic Games, but the First World War ended their plans — Hogan would be arrested as a foreign citizen just one day after the War was officially declared. He’d went on to spend almost 2 years in a concentration camp in Germany until the vice-president of MTK Budapest, from Hungary, sympathized with his situation and politically articulated for him to be released and coach his team. MTK Budapest, under Hogan’s spell, would later be crowned champions of the 1916/1917 Hungarian League, but Hogan would leave Hungary shortly after the end of the War to return to his homeland — his replacement as coach of MTK Budapest would be one of his players, the defender Izidor “Dori” Kürschner. It wouldn’t take long for Hogan to become disenchanted (again) with England and go on to have relevant spells in Switzerland (coaching both Young Boys and, later, the Swiss National Team at the 1924 Olympic Games alongside Dori Kürschner) and Germany (at Dresdner SC) before returning to work with Hugo Meisl, now coach of the Austrian National Team, in the early 1930s.
Jimmy Hogan was not a particularly winning coach in the sense of collecting many titles, but he was extremely successful in managing not only to shape a style of play, but to systematize it, transform it into a method and spread it throughout Central Europe. His works in Switzerland, Germany and mainly in Hungary and Austria would create an extremely well-defined game identity, and the proximity of these countries to the Danube River ended up popularizing this identity as the Danubian School.
The Danubian School, Danubian Game or any other variation of that type of name had very strong roots in the old Scottish game of passing, but it went far beyond that. The Scots created the seed, yes, by building the idea that football could value technique more than physicality and that the best way to move higher up the pitch was not necessarily by respecting positions in an almost religious way and always looking for long passes, physical disputes and ball carrying, but perhaps by giving up rigid ideas of positions in favor of a greater approximation of the players so that they could exchange short passes, move around and reach the goal from this. Hogan then seeded it — he wasn’t a sworn enemy of long passes and believed they were useful if used sparingly and not all the time English style, but for him the most efficient method of moving higher up the pitch was from short passes that favored the technique of its players and that gave them the ability to interpret the move and seek to dominate the time of their actions, even at the expense of a greater spatial advantage. The Danubian countries — especially Austria and Hungary first, then Germany later on — germinated this seed, gave it a body, a name, an identity and even some personal touches.
The cornerstone of this game was clear: players should get closer to each other to facilitate short, progressive touches by creating shorter and more numerous passing lanes— if, in the English style, when a player received the ball there was no one around them and the only option available was to carry it, now, when a player received the ball, he would have 4, 5, 6 teammates next to him offering numerous short passing lanes that allowed the team to work the ball through short touches. The priority was for the players to establish interactions and relations of mobility between them, for them to have more freedom to interpret the play and decide, for themselves, what was the best decision to be taken: the players, now, were masters of their own time. The Danubian Game allowed them to move throughout longer spaces, for everyone to get closer to the ball to create shorter, more numerous passing lanes, more possibilities for interactions and more relations of mobility between them. The players’ roles began to be the protagonists of the game, and the positions had to respond to them — now, dominating time was more important than dominating spaces.
The first great team of the Danubian School would be the Austrian Wunderteam commanded by Hugo Meisl (and by Jimmy Hogan in some periods) between the late 20s and the early 30s, presenting beautiful dynamics of movement and approximation with Sindelar as a surprise weapon, acting as a center forward who left the center of the attack and roamed throughout the pitch. Shortly afterwards, Vittorio Pozzo’s (a great friend and rival of Hugo Meisl) two-time World Champion Italy already assimilated some concepts of the Danubian Game and began to give more importance to the relations established between the players than the spaces they occupied. Decades passed, Danubian football developed, and Yugoslavia wasn’t the greatest sensation of the 1954 World Cup with its inverted wings and its mobile center because of a simple detail: the Magic Magyars, the golden generation of Hungary guided by Ferenc Puskás and coached by Gusztáv Sebes, would write the most beautiful yet the most tragic page of their history by making a tournament that wasn’t impeccable only due to the controversial defeat to West Germany in the final (this Germany was also influenced by the Danubian School, more on that later). Breaking the logic of positions, bringing its players closer together, privileging their technique by giving them the power to interpret, intuit and act and dominating time itself before anything else, relationism took its first form on the banks of the Danube River.
3.2. The South american tradition
“Like tango, football flourished in the favelas. On the canchas of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, a style was born. A unique way of playing football was finding its way, while a specific way of dancing asserted itself in the milongueros courtyards. The dancers drew filigrees, making flourishes on a single brick, and football players invented their language in the tiny space where the ball was not kicked, but held and possessed, as if the feet were hands weaving leather. And el toque was born on the feet of the first native virtuosos: the ball played as if it were a guitar, source of music” — Eduardo Galeano
On the other side of the Atlantic, there was another group of countries that effusively embraced the new sport created by the English, but who rejected even more effusively the way the English practiced it. When football arrived in South America, it carried the status of an elitist game, played only by those who had contact with English culture, whether members of wealthy families who studied in British schools in South America, descendants of British or even even British people who lived there. Because of this, the English style of long passes and ball carrying would quickly find its place among this elite, who cared more about getting things done efficiently and correctly than anything else. There was an obsession with objectivity, game plans and the methodical and disciplined approach of the English, focused more on valuing virility, masculinity and physicality than on valuing technique. Within that elite, there was no room for romanticism in football.
This would not last long: the seed of football came from England and reached the elites, but, as Galeano said, it would only flourish in the favelas. The process took its time, of course, but football would start to break free from the strong English influence to be embraced by the South American people (more specifically, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil). The signs of this process were as timid as they were clear: the football associations of Argentina and Uruguay replaced English with Spanish as the official language of their business in 1903 and 1905 respectively, and in 1912 the Argentinian Football Association (AFA) would replace its English name with a more national one (Asociación de Football Argentina — Football would only be replaced by Fútbol in 1934). Brazil took a little longer to develop a more natural approach to football, but when the Brazilian population started to watch a sport much easier to replicate than cricket, they quickly embraced it and began to play it.
“Our football mulato […] is an expression of our social formation, […] rebellious to excesses of internal and external order; to excesses of uniformity, geometrization, standardization; to totalitarianisms that make individual variation or personal spontaneity disappear”— Gilberto Freyre
There is no way to overstate the importance of street football in the cultural formation of the sport in South America. As the lower classes came into contact with the elites’ newest sport, they became as fond of it as they grew a strong rejection to the way the elites’ played it. The ease of replicating football was certainly one of the main factors that made it so popular in South America: you didn’t need a specific instrument like baseball and cricket, you didn’t need to assemble an ingenious structure like volleyball or basketball, you only needed a ball (or simply something that rolled when kicked) and something to mark where the goal was; nothing more. Football would quickly become a sport for the streets, for the people, which grew alongside tango in Argentina and Uruguay and samba in Brazil. These countries began to mix their own culture in the way they played football: miscegenation, resistance to rigid European norms, flexibility, the artistic plasticity so valued in music and dance, all this embodied the sport that was practiced in South American. In his text on Brazilian football, József Bozsik states that “our game, our characteristics, our choices are part of our culture. Football is an integral part of the material, affective and symbolic life of the people. Our game was created by the characteristics of the Brazilian people. […] Miscegenation “de-europeanized” Brazilian football. Our style of play was a reflection of the Brazilian social formation. Our football would be Dionysian […], not Apollonian”.
If the process of breaking the English influence in football was gradual, the popularization of the new South American football was overwhelming. The ease with which the sport could be replicated, not on specific courts or fields, but on the street, at the front of a house, on the lawn next to a church, in any minimally straight area, quickly conquered the entire continent. Within this new football, the methodical rigidity of the English game, which was only concerned with the objectivity of the game, didn’t find a place and was replaced, as said before, by the same flexibility and plasticity that originated samba and tango. Peoples with violent histories of slavery and colonization quickly learned to resist the external order imposed by colonizers who were concerned only with imposing their own culture on others; they learned to trust themselves, to give more value to the individual and to make order more flexible. Thus, football in these countries was born from the disorder that reigned in the street football: there were no determined positions, rigid rules or an appreciation of objectivity, but rather individual skills, disruptive creativity, freedom of movement and appreciation of technique, of subjective beauty. The truth is that the English style had no chance in South America, and it wouldn’t be long before the “Europeanised” elite would be outnumbered and the street South American style would make its way into club football.
Some took longer than others; Uruguay embraced the country’s style once and for all in the late 1910s and Argentina in the early 1920s. Brazil would take a bit longer, but Brazilian football in the 1930s already had a very strong, singular personality. The appreciation of technique had become a very important foundation in these countries that, after mastering individual technique, began to work on it better through tactics. Francisco Varallo, Argentina’s right midfielder in the first World Cup final, said: “South American teams handled the ball better and had a more tactical perspective.” Here, emerged an idea that planning the game tactically was not just about molding the team to be ultra-objective like the English did, but that making a set of 11 individuals into a team could also be about connecting talents, synchronizing players and perfecting technique. While England thought of tactics as a way of dominating the spaces on the pitch, South America worked on it with the aim of dominating the players’ time. South American teams organized themselves around the individuals who formed them: the idea was no longer to find a structure and fit the players into it, but to create a structure based on what each individual on the team could offer. The tactic was a method of enriching the individual, for by enriching the individual, the team would also be enriched.
It’s very common to find speeches out there that state loud and clear that the Hungarian Danubian Game provided the tactical basis for South American football, mainly because of a tour of the Hungarian team Ferencváros in Argentina in 1922 and the spells in Brazil of the Hungarians Dori Kürschner (yes, the same who played for Jimmy Hogan) at Flamengo, from 1937 to 1938, and at Botafogo, from 1939 to 1941, and Béla Guttmann, who left Puskás’ Honvéd to coach São Paulo between 1957 and 1958 However, when the Hungarians decided to explore the South American lands, they discovered that football was actually going very well there. The unique style of these countries of valuing individual technique was already very well rooted, and they were already beginning to explore tactics as a means to improve technique.
What happened was a case of convergent evolution. In biology, convergent evolution is a phenomenon in which unrelated individuals end up, independently, developing similar solutions to solve the same problem (for example, how whales and dolphins, mammals, developed fins very similar to the ones fishes have, even with no close relation between them). The Danubian and South American countries were independently exposed to similar problems and solved them in similar ways. Despite the reasons being quite different, both rejected England’s excessively physical and rigid style, embraced individual technique and developed methods that broke with the idea of fixed positions so that players had more freedom to approach and create interactions and relations between them. The Danubian Game gave more importance the pass and the South American, to the individual plays, but with all due respect to the cultural differences, the ideological base of both was reasonably similar. The passage of the Hungarians through South America certainly did a lot of good for football on the continent, but it didn’t replace one thing with the other: the South Americans just assimilated what they thought was most interesting and adapted these concepts to the existing culture, in a process of anthropophagy. For example: the WM (a scheme that resembles the current 3–4–3 or 3–2–5) already existed in South America, but only from the English perspective and, therefore, wasn’t popular. Dori Kürschner arrived in Brazil as a great admirer of the WM, but his teams practiced it the Hungarian way, with greater flexibility of positions, short passes, approaches and asymmetries. Kürschner did not bring WM to Brazil, but he did offer the country a new vision of the system which, from then on, began to be more accepted.
Flávio Costa, a Brazilian who played for Flamengo under Dori Kürschner and later became the Hungarian’s assistant, ended up being his successor in charge of Flamengo and started working on the tactical base of Kürschner’s Danubian WM. Flávio kept the 3 defenders and the 3 forwards, but profoundly changed the midfield structure. He’d pull the rightmost defensive midfielder deeper closer to the defenders and make them the first defensive midfielder; the other would move slightly forward, as a second defensive midfielder. The rightmost attacking midfielder also moved deeper, while the leftmost attacking midfielder moved forward to become the classic number 10. Therefore, the square in the midfield of the WM would become something more like a parallelogram, creating a kind of diagonal from left to right (which could be inverted if, instead of moving the players on the right side deeper, you’d move the players on the left side deeper). From that, Flávio created a scheme that was impossible to be numbered, as his teams were organized based on the individual role of each player. Each of the players stood at a specific height on the pitch, without forming lines, and the team organized itself around the natural movements of the players — tactics as a way of organizing the team around individual talent. Flávio’s scheme was asymmetrical and didn’t follow the logic of lines, as he tried to stagger the players at different heights, creating “staircases” for the team to move higher up and a diagonal for the ball to go from one side of the pitch to another.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the first midfielder moved deeper by Flávio Costa would move even deeper until he became a fourth defender, and the attacking midfielder would effectively become more of a forward; thus, slowly, the renewed Brazilian WM based on asymmetries and diagonals became a 4–2–4.
When Béla Guttmann arrived in Brazil, another process of convergent evolution had already united the two cultures and Hungary had also developed its own 4–2–4, but did so using different mechanisms. Gusztáv Sebes’ Hungary side had also turned one of WM’s defenstive midfielders into an extra defender, but the two attacking midfielders would actually become forwards and the striker would drop back so hard that he was no longer a false 9, like Sindelar in the Austrian Wunderteam, but rather a midfielder. In any case, both Hungary and Brazil would again find similar solutions independently, and the 4–2–4 was already well structured in Brazil when Béla Guttmann arrived with the Hungarian 4–2–4 in mind. Once again, Brazilians would assimilate specific movements and methods and adapt them to what already existed in the country.
Since they were born, the Danubian School and South American football were destined for a perfect marriage. Little by little, both were merging, one assimilating characteristics of the other and, based on the relational ideas that formed them, broke with the English positional logic and placed greater emphasis on the players’ time. This process had numerous consequences — Hungary’s short passing game in 1954 enchanted Rinus Michels, who transferred this idea to the positional logic and, based on that, created Dutch Total Football. However, the most relevant development was much more one of their own: both on the Danube and in South America, the styles walked together and embodied the concept of relationism. The role-driven attack was born.
3.3. The role-driven attack
“Football is a game, and you must play it with freedom” — Jürgen Klopp
The role-driven attack is nothing more than the concept of relationism applied in a concrete way in a football game. If relationism says that a team will only control the spaces of the pitch if it first has total control over the players’ time, this means that each player must have control both over his individual perception of the game and over the actions that originate from this perception. Each player is a unique individual, who has unique perceptions, interprets things in unique ways and, consequently, acts in a unique way. Executing this on the pitch is what we call a role — if the space occupied by a player is his position, when it’s time to act and put their perceptions, interpretations and intuitions into practice, transforming them into concrete actions, they exercises their role. In the positional attack, roles are secondary and must respond to positions — as explained before, in the Juego de Posición, roles change according to positions, and when a player leaves a position to act in another, they must change their role to the one corresponding to the new position they occupy. In the role-driven attack, the logic is reversed: what reigns here are the roles. Each player has their own role, that is, they have a particular relationship with their own time, they think and act in an unique way — the team, then, organizes itself around these roles. It’s a game of roles, not of positions — hence the name role-driven attack.
I like to compare positional and role-driven attack to building a team from the outside in or the inside out. In a positional attack, the coach delimits which spaces he wants to be dominated and which role will be linked to which position, that is, how a player must behave to dominate a certain space. Here, the team is built from the outside in; Of course, a coach can adjust his perceptions according to the players he has, but the basis of the positional attack is to determine the positions, the roles corresponding to them and then, only then, fit the players into this system, creating concessions when necessary. In a role-driven attack, a coach observes the role of each of the players he has and builds a team from that. Each player plays his individual role, and the team moves higher up the pitch from that. Here, the team is built from the inside out, as the players’ natural movements and relation dictate how the team will play.
Organize the team around the ball and move along with it: it seems redundant to say that a team moves accordingly to the ball. After all, all the movements of a team, be they offensive or defensive, are guided by the position of the ball. As said before, in the Juego de Posición, a coach determines which zones of the pitch his players must occupy according to the position of the ball; as the ball moves higher up the pitch, the zones to be dominated change, and players move to leave the old zones and occupy the new ones. Why, then, would this be a differentiator in a role-driven attack?
Because a team that plays in a role-driven attack goes beyond moving according to the ball’s movements — it doesn’t organize itself based on the ball and its movements, it organizes itself around the ball and its movements. Since the goal of a role-driven attack is to set the team up based on the relations that the players, while each one plays their particular role, establish among themselves, it’s very common (although not mandatory, more about this later) that the teams that play in a role-driven attack get rid of most (not to say all) of the notions of positions and of control of spaces and gather players around the ball, as it’s not interesting for a role-driven attack that a player stays away from where the others are just to ensure that a determined space is occupied — it’s much more useful for this player to get closer to the others so that he offers the team more possibilities for movement, interaction and relations of mobility. Having players closer to each other, as seen before, creates shorter, more numerous passing lines and, therefore, offers players more possibilities of progressive interactions, facilitates the development of a technical game of short touches and favors individual talent as well as, of course, creates a powerful numerical advantage around the ball. To boost this, when the ball goes to some part of the pitch— be it the left, right or center — a team that plays in a role-driven attack groups its players in that part so that everyone is close to each other. For example: when the ball goes to one side of the pitch, it’s very common to see the opposite side fullback making a diagonal movement to approach the ball area and serve both as a short pass option and as a rest defense mechanism for when the team loses the ball — we call this a defensive diagonal.
Players close to each other and organized around the ball is the fertile ground that the role-driven attack needs to flourish. From there, the “disrespect” to the positions only gets bigger: when the role-driven attack is put into practice, the team starts to work possession not between the positions, as in the Juego de Posicón, but from the roles of each player. Players don’t wait for the ball to reach them, but rather move along with the ball, and each one plays their own role by developing their own perception, intuiting from it and acting according to what they intuit. Because of this, possession inside a role-driven attack gives an air of restlessness: while the Juego de Posición imprints a greater sense of calm, as the players’ movements are much more limited and the ball goes to positions, even the slowest role-driven attacks have frenetic possession sequences. Players constantly move, go to the ball, receive a pass and, when passing the ball forward, immediately move to receive it back elsewhere. If the Juego de Posición seeks to occupy the spaces and work the ball from them, the role-driven attack seeks to empty the spaces — a player receives the ball in the space, passes it to a teammate and immediately moves, emptying the space he previously occupied to infiltrate in a new, empty space and continue the play. This is how a team organizes itself around the movements of the players: possession is worked on based on the roles of the players, who always move around the ball and seek to empty spaces to maintain this dynamic. This creates an air of unpredictability within the role-driven attack: there is no way to mechanize the plays as in the Juego de Posición, where a coach determines the zones to be dominated, how those zones will be dominated and how the ball will reach the players. If the team is organized by the players’ movements and the collective is formed from individualities, creating pre-defined mechanisms, determining how the ball will be handled, how it will reach the players and how players will move becomes an exponentially more difficult task and, therefore, role-driven attacks tend to be more unpredictable, less influenced by external control, and better suited to chaotic scenarios. Within each new play, something never seen before may emerge, as each play unfolds from the individual perceptions, intuitions and actions of each player.
The job of the coach, then, becomes organizing the players’ movements so that the game doesn’t turn into a complete mess, and working on those movements so that the fit between them becomes more natural. About this, Klopp says that “when a new player arrives, I don’t give him any information. It’s like, let him play, let’s learn about him, what he does naturally, what we want to adjust, what we want to leave with him and what we want him to stop doing” — the idea of, first of all, understanding how the player plays naturally and only then polishing their moves so that they fit better in the team. Ancelotti describes his training methodology as “individual tasks” — he, like Klopp, first seeks to identify how a player moves naturally, then assigns him an individual task that corresponds to those movements. Ancelotti prefers to lapidate the movements of his players to build a team from them than choose a predefined system and train his players to fit it. “The individual tasks are closely linked to the physical characteristics of the players. When assigning individual tasks, not only the characteristics and role of the specific player are taken into account, but also the technical and physical particularities of the closest partner. The coach sees the whole, combines individual qualities and builds the team”, explains the Italian. Developing a role-driven tactical identity takes time and requires a very specific training method that allows the coach to understand the individual qualities of their players first moment and synchronize these qualities to form the team from that. That approach doesn’t always work: by the time Ancelotti arrived at Bayern, the players were used to Guardiola’s more rigid and methodical approach, and complained about the “long and unspecified” training sessions Ancelotti used to explore players’ natural movements and assign them small individual tasks, without imposing a system first. However, even if everything works out and the coach is fully aware of the characteristics of each player and managed to combine them perfectly, the team is still organized based on individual perceptions and movements and, therefore, the coach that plays in a role-driven attack must always get used to the idea that chaos will be a part of matches at one point or another.
Long movements, one-twos, pass and move: while organizing around the ball and gathering players around it is a unique principle of role-driven attack, it’s not what defines whether or not a team is role-driven— in fact, I don’t I don’t even think it’s a determining factor. Gathering players around the ball is, without a doubt, a very efficient way to enhance interactions between players, but we must look beyond these approaches and understand the principle behind them: organize the team based on roles and make the team move higher up the pitch from the players’ individual movements implies that they make long moves that break with the idea of determined positions.
I’ve explained before that player movement within the Juego de Posición must follow the logic of the zones that the coach assigns to each player and, therefore, when a player moves, they must do it in short spaces, that respect the zone that the coach assigned them. In a role-driven attack, the logic is the opposite: the player moves towards the ball, leaving his original position. Then, when a player gets close to the ball, it’s time to interact — once again, the player doesn’t wait for the ball to reach them, but rather moves closer to it. The way the play unfolds is also different: in the Juego de Posición, the player needs to remain in their zone after passing the ball so that determined space remains occupied; in a role-driven attack, after passing the ball, the player is both allowed and encouraged to move forward to attack an empty space and become available to receive the ball back — this the logic of pass and move. The players’ movements are what make the ball move higher up the pitch, it’s what dictates the team’s possession dynamics, and these movements — leaving your position to approach the ball, moving towards it to receive a pass, pass and move immediatly after to receive the ball back further forward etc. — require players to break with the logic of positions so that they can exercise their own particular roles and always interact with the play, that is, require that they move for long spaces. If Cruyff wants his forwards to run 15 meters, the role-driven attack wants that its attackers crossing the pitch, making runs of 40, sometimes 50 meters; instead of waiting for the ball, players look for it, move towards it to interact with others and put into practice their perception of the game, their time. Players can move from left to right and vice versa, make an overlap to receive the ball further ahead or drop back to receive it through a shorter pass — what matters is that they are always moving, always interacting with the play, for the team to move higher up the pitch from that. They have the freedom to make long movements, extensive, endless movements, always one after the other. Players don’t just move the ball, they move with it.
Let’s take Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli as an example. Napoli wasn’t a team that sought to gather players around the ball and, in fact, started the plays in a well-defined 4–3–3, with all players in their positions. However, when the team had the ball, their movement logic was much more interested in creating relations of mobility between players rather than controlling the spaces of the pitch. Even with more spread out players, their starting positions don’t dictate how they behave, and the whole team moves through long spaces. It’s very common to see, at Napoli, a winger crossing the pitch to interact, a player passing and immediately moving to receive the ball back, things that break with the logic of a positional game so that players can interact and move constantly — this this is relationism, this is the role-driven attack, even if not in its most orthodox form. Hansi Flick’s Germany follows a similar logic. “There are no more systems in football. It’s all about the spaces left by the opponent. You need to be quick to notice them and know the right moment to attack them”, says Luciano Spalletti — emptying the old spaces to always invade new empty spaces and keep the logic of intense movement, always along with the ball.
4. Homogeny, fordism, culture and 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. […] I’m like a regretful father” — Juanma Lillo
The impact that Guardiola’s Barcelona has had on football was one of proportions rarely seen in the history of the sport. The amount of control that team had during matches, the categorical way they overcame opponent after opponent; that Barcelona seemed to be playing oblivious to everything that was happening on the pitch, as if the presence of an opposite team was something as relevant as the intensity of the wind — something that was noticed, of course, but that would hardly change anything in the final result. Cruyff’s Juego de Posición renewed by Guardiola was as dominant as it was beautiful: the endless possessions, the short touches, the way the team took the ball all the way to the players, it was all astonishing. But, more important than that, it was a modern, scientific game, which created clear mechanisms capable of being replicated if they were exhaustively and obsessively practiced in training. Barcelona were beautiful, yes, but they were efficient like a well-lubricated machine. They always knew where to put the ball, how to put the ball, how to work on possession and how to manipulate spaces, because everything had been previously trained. The coach had control of everything, and could change player positions and interactions at will. The key word is this: control. Control over spaces, yes, but over game situations, over the players themselves. An almost chess-like football.
The Juego de Posición school was as eager to spread its idea around the world as the world was to learn it. That looked like the face of modern football, of an era of numbers, methods, control. No more chaos, the rudimentary unpredictability of old football. In the same way that sociologists like Karl Marx believed in an evolutionary theory of human history, where society would have a starting point and would evolve to a final point, many football theorists also had evolutionary views: the game evolved linearly, starting in the 2–3–5, going through the 3–2–5, 4–2–4, Catennacio, Total Football, 4–4–2, 3–5–2 until reaching the 5–4–1, where the pyramid supposedly was inverted. Within this vision, the idea that the Juego de Posición was the final evolution of football, the apex of tactics, the perfect game mode, the culmination of decades of tactical evolution in the sport, became popular. The efficiency, beauty and dominance of Guardiola’s Barcelona made this speech seem very feasible: it brought together tactical discipline, mastery of spaces, the game of short touches and a modern scientific method. The Juego de Posición, then, began to be replicated in an almost Fordist way. Its method was transplanted to several other cultures with no worries about adaptation; after all, that was the most modern style of play, it wouldn’t need any changes. 12 years after Barcelona won their second (and last) Champions League under Pep Guardiola, it’s hard to find teams that don’t practice incomplete variations of the Juego de Posición. All teams organize themselves from space to time; they attack by zones, in a positional attack; they take the ball to the positions and never bring the positions to the ball; players move through short spaces… Even in Brazil, where the disruptive, role-driven football of South America flourished, basically all first tier teams, even the Brazilian National Team, present styles of play that seek to replicate the principles of the Juego de Posición.
It turns out that, as I explained here, football is cultural. The English positional game only managed to find its way in Dutch lands because the Netherlands was simultaneously developing an artistic-architectural culture based on the manipulation of spaces to compose the whole. And even so, while formulating Total Football that would be the north of Dutch football culture for the next few decades, Rinus Michels assimilated and adapted concepts from the Danubian school, in order to manipulate the spaces of the pitch from short touches. Hungarian football was only able to exert influence on Brazilian football because the philosophy of breaking with position logic and bringing players closer together to extract the maximum from each individual’s technique was perfectly in line with the rebellious, disruptive football, built on the basis of individuality and freedom of movement that developed in Brazil. And even so, Brazilian football didn’t become the same as Hungarian football, it only adapted the concepts that best served it for its own scenario. Anthropophagy, not homogenization. When it came time to take the Juego de Posición to other countries, they forgot the cultural aspect of football. Imposing the Juego de Posición in Brazil would be as harmful as imposing the role-driven attack in the Netherlands: they are different peoples, with different cultures that gave rise to different styles. “Guardiola did a lot of harm to football. It looked so easy that everyone wanted to copy it”, said Messi in an interview with the Spanish channel Movistar.
Juanma Lillo, one of the main responsibles for structuring the Juego de Posición method and taking it to the world, recently complained about this process in an article in the English newspaper The Athletic. “And everything is globalised now”, he said. “At club level, if you go to a training session in Norway and one in South Africa, they’ll be the same. ‘Look inside to find spaces outside’, ‘pass here, pass there’. […] We have globalised a methodology to an extent that it’s crept into the World Cups: if you got the Cameroon and Brazil players to change shirts at half-time you wouldn’t even realise. Maybe with the tattoos or the yellow hair, but not the performance. 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. […] I’m like a regretful father”.
Within this new scenario, where the method matters more than the culture, some specific types of players are dying. Not that crap about the classic 10, full-backs or anything like that: I’m talking about playing styles. If all teams play based on the Juego de Posición principles, it means that all players must know how to move in short spaces because, as Guardiola himself said, the most suitable profile for the Juego de Posición is that of a player who performs short movements.
It’s not necessary to go into too much depth to see that the Juego de Posición isn’t universal and doesn’t suits all types of players. The example of the conflict between Henry and Guardiola that I mentioned earlier is probably the most famous: Henry wanted to move all over the pitch, always be close to the ball, move constantly, but Guardiola wanted him to move within the designated zone. As I explained before, Guardiola’s compatibility with Busquets and Rodri and his incompatibility with Yayá Touré is also due to this: Busquets and Rodri are used to waiting for the ball in their positions and staying in them after passing the ball; Yaya Toré liked to move after passing, to carry the ball, to overlap, to move through long spaces.
There is another equally famous (or infamous) case: in the 1998/1999 season, when Louis Van Gaal was coaching Barcelona, Rivaldo, the left winger of the team, scored the third goal for the Blaugranas in the 3–0 victory over Real Madrid by leaving the left flank and moving to the center of the pitch to receive a pass from Kluivert. This made Van Gaal furious, as Rivaldo didn’t respect the zone assigned to him and didn’t move within it, but rather broke through it to get closer to the ball. Rivaldo, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with spending long periods of time without touching the ball, always waiting for it in his position and moving in short spaces — he was born inside the South American game, that is, his cultural background had led him to develop a game of long movements, where he was always close to the ball.
“We have that habit of as soon as the ball arrives, we start running with it. He (Guardiola) comes to me and says: first control the ball, then you go. […] The only issue I had with Guardiola was that of waiting, of standing still for longer, of not caring about not touching the ball, playing, participating in the game. He always asked for this and it bothered me. […] I go crazy, I want to enjoy it, I want to play, I want to be involved. I used to go crazy with him” — Gabriel Jesus.
The problem is not the Juego de Posición nor the positional attack, but imposing these concepts and methods in an universal, globalized and systematized way that has little to no regard for the cultural differences of each country. When Vitor Pereira or Sampaoli, positional coaches who build the movement of their teams from short spaces and who like to seek spatial superiority on top of the opposite defensive line and, therefore, put more players in the attacking line than in the midfield line train Flamengo, a team with extremely talented midfielders (Éverton Ribeiro, Arrascaeta, Gerson) who always want to be in contact with the ball, work it through the midfield and move through long spaces, the shock is clear. The same happens when Tite, coaching the Brazilian national team, radically changes his style to try to dominate spaces without worrying about the players he’d have at his disposal and, because of that, limits Vinícius Júnior’s zone of action to the left flank, without allowing him to move through long spaces, interact with central players and move around the attacking third in the style that made him Real Madrid’s best player. Within this logic, there are some tragedies that are clear even before they happen: the favorites to replace Ancelotti as coach of Real madrid are Raúl and Xabi Alonso, coaches with irreducible and orthodox positional styles, even though the Real Madrid team is full of players who need positional freedom to constantly move through longer spaces and always interact with the play, like Camavinga, Rodrygo, Tchouaméni, Valverde and Vinícius Júnior himself. There is little concern with the characteristics of the players and with the particular culture of each scenario. It doesn’t matter how Flamengo, Brazil or Real Madrid players play; in fact, it doesn’t matter that these teams built their respective glorious pasts exclusively by role-driven teams — they have to adapt to the Juego de Posición or to the positional attack. The priorities of modern football end up becoming first what the coach wants and then what the team needs.
The opposite can also happen: players used to positional systems, performing shorter movements and waiting for the ball to come to them may have difficulty adapting to role-driven systems. Xavi describes that, when he played under Aragonés in the Spanish national team (a coach who liked the style of short touches, but who preferred to work them from roles and not between positions), there was an initial clash between the two: “Luis Aragonés told me, ‘you go where the ball goes and you are the master of the game’”. Xavi, who was used to Barcelona’s Juego de Posición where he waited fot the ball to come to him to act in a few touches and remain in his position after passing the ball, had an initial difficulty assimilating what Aragonés was asking of him.
Some coaches, however, seek to give up some previous concepts to fit different players into their systems. Xavi himself quotes the episode with Aragonés to explain his relationship with Frenkie de Jong at Barcelona: “I had many conversations with Frenkie. At Ajax he used to go where the ball was; a bit like how Aragonés was with me, so I’ve been trying to understand Frenkie. We’ve asked Frenkie to play more positionally, to be patient, to receive at the back of the pivots. We found a system where the midfielder can drop back to the base, the winger comes inside and the full-back is the one who gives width. So, Frenkie is in his natural place”.
However, the best example of this is what happened between Messi and Guardiola. Messi, like Rivaldo, was formed within the South American football culture. He always wanted to be in contact with the ball, to move intensely around it, to make long movements, to run with the ball, to infiltrate, to dribble, to show his individual talent. When Messi didn’t touch the ball for a long time, he disconnected from the game. “When I arrived at Barcelona, a coach told me: ‘here, you have to release the ball, let’s play with two touches. Don’t dribble so much’. I didn’t mind him and in the first few years I never played”, he said. When Guardiola arrived at Barcelona, Messi was still a winger with a powerful sprint, unstoppable dribbling and the same South American drive he always had in his game. “I think we younger coaches have a lot to learn from the older ones,” said Guardiola. “And the older ones always said, ‘put the good ones on. And the good ones should always touch the ball. There’s a lot of that here. At the wing, a player participates less in the game than in the middle, because even if the ball doesn’t pass through the middle, he participates more. And if a team puts a lot of good midfielders in the middle, they end up touching the ball more. And we wanted Messi to touch the ball as much as possible, and if we had another player like him we would always worry about him participating as much as possible. That was the main idea: to bring him into the middle so that he could participate more, so that it wouldn’t be something sporadic like it was at the wing, which would require the ball to arrive there”.
Once again, the opposite is also true. As Toni Kroos evolved as a player, he became less and less the inventive wide midfielder he was when he first emerged at Bayern and more and more of a defensive midfielder perfect for the Juego de Posicón — the year he spent under Guardiola has certainly played a part in that. So, when Kroos arrived at Real Madrid, he was already a player who didn’t always seek to move, but who preferred to interpret the spaces, wait for the ball to reach him, choose the best pass and stay in his position. Ancelotti, the coach of Real Madrid at the time, chose him as the first defensive midfielder, leaving him in charge of the early build-up and transferring all the intense movement that his role-driven attack requires to Modric and James Rodríguez. When Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid 7 years later, Kroos was even more positional and even less mobile, largely because of his age. The result was the same: Kroos always played as a defensive midfielder, whether in a partnership with Casemiro or Tchouaméni or as the first defensive midfielder. His movements were more restricted to the base of the play, always behind the ball, since he didn’t try to get close to it at all times. His more positional style has him passing the ball and keeping his position, not passing and moving. Ancelotti embraced this, placed him at the early build-up and made up for his lack of movement with Camavinga, Modric, Tchouaméni, Valverde and even Rodrygo circulating tirelessly through midfield.
There’s no universal style. Each footballing school was born in a different contex and shaped by the hands of a different culture. Some may even have some affinities, such as the Danubian and the South American, but they should only be seen as similar, not as equals. Football is science, yes, without a doubt, but it is also culture, identity, personality. Spain and Italy, countries so close to each other, can have radically different styles of play, both on and off the ball. Clubs from the same country, such as Real Madrid and Barcelona, have antagonistic cultures, and cultures that have lasted for several decades. Different styles not only can, but should dialogue with each other — but dialogue. Assimilate. Trade. Not impose, homogenize, erase. The most beautiful thing about football, as Diego Simeone would say, is that everyone has an answer and no one is wrong.
