The art of planning freedom
The idea that playing offensive football means giving all the power in the world to the players so they can express themselves free of the evil “tactical ties” (those are exclusive to the pragmatic and defensive football) exists basically since the beginning of the game. Attacking well always meant having a large number of creative players capable of pulling a rabbit out of their hats in every move and overcome every obstacle with an outstanding dribble or a genial pass. The manager should simply not interfere: the less he crumbled to his ego and started to limit his players with tactics, the better. His job was basically organizing the team defensively, because tactics and organization belonged exclusively to defenders. To a manager, less is always more. Right?
Brazil proudly embraced this idea. Our footballing literature, for example, developed much more in the chronicles field rather than in the dry desert of tactics, valuing the game’s ludic side instead of the scientific one. After three World Cup titles in just 12 years, it was very confortable for us to just relax in our throne and praise the creativity and the genius of our players and credit to them, and to them only, the beauty of our football. Tactis was something that belonged to the europeans, that sad people that wasn’t blessed with our swing and had to search a systematic and pragmatic way to compete against us. We relegated our managers to the role of just man-managing and building defensive systems. In the attack, it was better to just leave it to the “experts”. Of course, when facing a crisis, the criticism always fell harder on the managers, the great responsibles for disorganized and solution-less teams. But that hardly matters, right? Vicente Feola was the kind leader who sometimes slept on the benck, Aymoré Moreira just left the managing job to Pelé and Garrincha and went mind his own business, Saldanha and Zagallo were the best ones because they let an army of “number 10s” express themselves on the field with no tactical instruction and so on. Throughout decades, the good attacking football was seen as the purest expression of offensive talent, where the manager should do very little (or, idealy, nothing).
1. The impact of the “Juego de Posición”
Pep Guardiola’s FC Barcelona was a huge scare to those who used to defend that attacking well didn’t depend on the manager. The spaniard took over Barcelona in 2008 and when he left the club, in 2012, he’d conquered 14 trophies out of 19 possible, including 3 Spanish League (he only lost when Mourinho’s Real Madrid reached 100 points) and 2 Champions League. Furthermore, Guardiola led Barcelona to a treble, unprecedented in Spanish football, and not long after a “sextuple” (6 trophies in a single season), unprecedented in world football. His Barcelona also scored at least 90 goals in every single league campaign, reaching 100 goals in two of them.
The results are already scary by themselves, but the way Guardiola’s Barcelona was what really shook the world. They seemed to play a sport of their own, a separate game that gave the impression of being light years away of anything their opponents could try. Historical trashings of Real Madrid and two Champions League finals (both against Ferguson’s Man United, then the best team of England) that were true monologues represented seasons in which Barcelona isolated themselves in their own level and forced the other teams to catch up. This is what really changed football all around the world: it was clear that Guardiola’s team was filled with talent, but his attacking tactics were anything but random. Quite the opposite: Barcelona’s attack was highly coordinated, with thoroughly synchronized movements and a very clear structure. It was time to leave behind the ideas that attacking well meant giving total freedom to talented players and to start studying Guardiola’s Juego de Posición.
The Juego de Posición (game of positions, in a free translation, or Positional Play, as it became known. I won’t call it Positional Play for reasons I’ll describe soon) starts from a concept called positional attack (or, like Guardiola likes to call it, zonal attack). To understand it, we first need to grasp the concepts of space and time.
Football is a game that is defined by the players and the ball. However, between a player and the ball, there is space and there is time. For a player to control the ball, he needs to be in full control of the space he’s in (and the space around him) and also of the timing of his actions. If he’s in full control of both of these things, he’ll be able to be in control of the ball. The concept of positional attack defends that the best way for a player to control the ball is by first dominating the space: if a player masters his space (for example, being completely free of any marking), he’ll then have the time to receive the ball, think and act. Therefore, positional attack starts by the control of space to then control time and, thereafter, the ball. If a team has full control of the spaces of the pitch, he’ll be able to master time and then the ball. This infers something very important: the team that uses the positional attack needs a rational and symmetrical way to occupy the spaces on the pitch. The players need to have their positions very well delimited and shouldn’t abandon them under any circumstances. Otherwise, the occupation of spaces would be compromised and the team wouldn’t be able to dominate them properly. It’s important to add that this doesn’t mean that positional attack forbids any kind of movement of the players, but these movements should happen only inside a positional logic and respecting the estructure of the team. Therefore, when a player leaves his position, another player has to occupy it, and a third player needs to occupy the second player’s position and so on. Movements inside a positional attack need to happen through the exchange of positions that doesn’t change the original structure.
From the positional attack, Guardiola, Cruyff, Van Gaal and Juanma Lillo (among others) built the Juego de Posición. It’s extremely important to distinguish the positional attack from the Juego de Posición: they’re not, not even in a million years, the same thing. The positional attack is a premise of the Juego de Posición. Therefore, every team that uses the Juego de Posición uses the positional attack, but the opposite isn’t true. For a team to be a legitimate user of the Juego de Posición, it must apply several attacking (and defensive) concepts and mechanisms that go far beyond the positional attack. That is why i won’t refer to the Juego de Posición as Positional Play: to avoid any confusion between this and the positional attack.
In the book Pep Guardiola: the Evolution, the author Martí Perarnau defines the Juego de Posición (more more specifically Guardiola’s model) from some basic elements. The first one is the possession of the ball, which must be the tool to reach a goal (never the goal itself). The second one is numerical superiority in defense and numerical or positional superiority in the midfield. The third one is the maximum width to reach the greatest possible depth, combined with sequences of passes to attract opponents and let the striker free for an individual duel. The fourth is scaling the players to facilitate a compact, synchronized advance on the pitch. The fifth (and probably one of the most important) is the search for the third man (the third man is a mechanism that seeks to find a free player from triangles) and/or the free men between the rival lines in all actions of build-up. The sixth is defensive protection by having the ball, that is, the use of possession to keep the ball away from your goal and to control the pace of the game. The seventh (also very important) is the respect for the positions, encouraging the exchange of players between them so the players wait for the ball to reach them, and not the other way around (as Juanma Lillo says, the ball goes to the positions). The eighth is the excellence in the technical gesture and body position while both receiving and passing, in addition to the search for passes that improve the position of the partner. The ninth is intensity in all actions, and the tenth and last is field dominance and offensive orientation.
“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” — Pep Guardiola.
“In Munich it was believed, at first, that it was a game to keep possession. No! It’s a game of position, not possession. A game to learn how to position yourself and line up when you have the ball and where to press when you don’t” — Domènec Torrent, Guardiola’s former assistant manager.
Thus, Guardiola’s Juego de Posición starts from the positional attack to control the zones of the pitch; therefore, according to Domènec Torrent, the Juego de Posición is about positions, not about the ball. Juanma Lillo prefers to call it the Juego de Ubicación (game of locations, in a free translation), as this term would better unite the two main objectives within this idea: finding the player well positioned on the field and well situated within his posture. The Juego de Posición seeks positional advantages on the pitch from the concepts that Perarnau explained. The positional attack is just one of them.
Guardiola’s Barcelona tactical revolution brought loads of good things, like the idea that attacking tactics are actually planned by the manager and should be target of study like any other type of tactic. Nonetheless, it also brought some bad things. With the thunderous success of the Juego de Posición and the positional attack, everyone started to admire them so much they started to study and theorize only this way of attacking, depreciating any other attacking tactics that didn’t thoroughly follow all the guardiolist concepts. Therefore, that speech of the beginnig of the game basically stayed the same, with only a little tweak: the organized, coordinated and synchronized attacks were only those who used the Juego de Posición. The others are simply products of the player’s talent and are led by managers with good man-managing skills and that doesn’t worry too much about organizing the offensive moves of his team.
2. The role-driven attack
While the minds of Cruyff, Van Gaal, Juanma Lillo, Guardiola and others worked non-stop to build the concepts behid the Juego de Posición, searching for the best way to control the game from the spaces, a different school of managers developed quietly a different way to control the ball. From the cold nights of Scotland, from the banks of the Danube and from the south-american favelas, arose the role-driven attack.
To understand the role-driven attack, we’ll have to go back to the concepts of space and time. If the positional attack starts from the idea that a player must master his space to be able to control his time and therefore dominating the ball, the role-driven attack is the polar opposite.
The role-driven attack defends that if a player has full control of his time, if he’s able to do everything in the rigth time, if he’s able to act (and interact) in the right time, he’ll then master the spaces of the pitch and, therefore, dominate the ball. If the positional attack defends that you have to master the spaces so you can perform your actions well, the role-driven attack defends that you have to perform your actions well so you can master the spaces.
To have full control of the ball in the opposite way to the positional attack, the role-driven attack will also have opposite concepts to the ones of positional attack. Here, symmetry and a rational occupation of spaces aren’t required, as this isn’t the priority. The main characteristic of the role-driven attack is the clustering of several players in one area of the pitch: so that the players can interact each in their own way (and in their own time), the role-driven attack allows them to cluster without following a predefined structure. Thus, the team creates shorter passing lanes, facilitates interaction between the players, increases their movements (since they don’t have to move inside a positional strucutre) and encourages each player’s individual interpretation of the game so he can act respecting his own time. The role-driven attack presents intense movements that happens from clustering, asymmetries, exchange of positions and unmarking. The movement and interaction of so many players in a small area of the pitch is what creates space, which must be quickly occupied by a player so he can keep on interacting. Therefore, the role-driven attack requires players that have a high ability to interpret the game and thus act from their intuition. Otherwise, the game would turn into a mess.
“Ancelotti has given me freedom”, said Thiago Alcântara about Carlo Ancelotti, one of the main names of the tactic school of role-driven attack (more on that later). “More than strategy or tactics, it has been the freedom and confidence that a coach can give you. He allows you to do that because he tells you some minor things so that you can interpret it in your way. He transmits that everything is everyone’s, that the fault is of everyone. He gives you that freedom so that you can become responsible”.
The name “role-driven attack” comes from this idea. If the players must cluster, each one with their own interpretation of the game, and interact from that, this kind of attack is organized based on the roles of the players. The most important thing here isn’t the position, where a player is on the pitch, but how he acts in a football game. How does he moves on the final third? Does he moves from the wing to the midfield or from the midfield to the wing? How does he like to receibe (and pass) the ball? Where on the pitch he’s on his best? All of those are questions a manager that uses the role-driven attack must ask before playing someone, because when a player is on the pitch, he must act according to his interpretation of the game. Hence the name “role-driven attack”: it’s an attack built around the roles of the players.
This style of play started with Jimmy Hogan, an englishman with irish parents who fell in love with Scotland’s passing game and started to spread it throughout Europe in the early 1900s. Quickly, countries like Austria, Hungary and Italy started to practice it, and the role-driven attack got properly named for the first time: the Danubian Game, because of the proximity of these countries to the Danube. In some sort of convergent evolution, the south american countries (mainly Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil) also started to organize their attacks from time to space, as this gave much more freedom to the disruptive and inventive talent that these countries lavished. A few decades later, the Hungarian influence in these countries (specially in Brazil, through Dori Kürschner and Béla Guttmann). Therefore, the role-driven attack dominated world football in the first half of the 20th century: the Urugay side that won the 1930 World Cup, the Italy team that won the World Cup back-to-back in 1934 and 1938, 1934 Austria, 1954 Hungary (the Magical Magyars), 1940s Argentina (that unfortunately couldn’t play a World Cup) and, of course, the Brazilian side three times World Champions in 1958, 1962 and 1970. Furthermore, in club football, teams like the 1950s Real Madrid, Pelé’s Santos and Eusébio’s Benfica were also worthy representatives of the role-driven school. This scenario only started to change in the 1970s, when Rinus Michel’s Ajax and Netherlands began to impress the world using the positional attack, known at the time as Total Football. Despite this, role-driven football kept on calling the shots around the world until the late 1990s.
When positional attack started to grow exponentially in the decades of 2000 and 2010, the role-driven football ended up being the attacking tactics that suffered the most from the speech that placed the Juego de Posición on a pedestal and devalued all other forms of attacking. Since the role-driven attack presumes loads of freedom of movement and an unique interpretation of the game from each player, the team can look a little messy, like an “organized chaos”. This only strengthened the idea that managers who used the role-driven attack left their players completely free on the pitch with no tactical instruction whatsoever, instead of (maybe for a lack of capacity) applying the complex and coordinated positional attack.
3. The modern football
“There is a common misconception that attacking football means trusting the players to express themselves, while defensive football means telling them what to do. […] But in modern football, the opposite is true. The best football [...] is the most rigorously planned, drilled and co-ordinated” — Jack Pitt-Broke, journalist of The Athletic.
Football has evolved throughout the years to become a sport of extremely high performance and of unthinkable demands. Every single space on the pitch is repeatedly studied to find the best way to occupy them, both while attacking and defending. Each milimeter is fiercely disputed, and the time the players have to think and interact only gets smaller and smaller. The growth of the high intensity, quick counterattacking football, the arising of the zonal marking and the systematization of defensive tactics are the main factors that have been making football more and more decided by physique, pace and intensity. Dominating space and time has become an arduous task in a scenario where there’s basically no space nor time.
Faced with this, the speech about managers who don’t instruct their players in attack and leave them completely free simply does not hold up. Such intense, studied and disputed football leaves no room for managers who are not looking for a more tactical, systematic and synchronized approach and who prefer to leave their players free on the field so that they can find the solutions by themselves. A manager like that would be easily stopped by the complexity and intensity of the modern defensive systems and although in the past such figure could have been more common, it has no place in modern football. Perhaps the closest to that is José Mourinho: the portuguese man puts a huge emphasis on defensive tactics and little work on the defensive organization of his teams. This freedom that Mourinho gives to his players when it’s time to attack may be great to counterattacking scenarios, but ends up stumbling over his own legs when he faces more solid defenses that require a greater complexity of movements to crack them open. This ended up being one of the reasons that led to the departure of Mourinho from Real Madrid in 2013, as the players were uncomfortable with receiving little (or no) instruction from the manager when it came to attacking.
The Juego de Posición that Guardiola implemented at Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City seemed like the perfect answer to modern football. If all the spaces on the pitch were occupied, Guardiola’s revised Juego de Posición would keep on passing the ball around, moving the rival’s defensive block until a free space appeared and could occupied by one of his players, who could receive the ball and have enough time to act. It was a highly drilled, coordinated and synchronized style, perfect for facing closed defenses and aggressive teams. However, for the Juego de Posición to be well executed, the players need to have a huge tactical rigor and a lot of respect for the positions that the coach has drawn for each one of them, and the movements must only happen within the positional structure of the team. Players needed to resist the urge to touch the ball all the time and wait in their position so the team can trigger them at the right moment. Interactions were much more ruled and limited, and some positions (usually wingers) touched very little on the ball throughout the game. Would that be the end of relationism in football, of the role-driven teams?
4. Klopp and Ancelotti: planning freedom
“Football is a game, and you must play it with freedom” — Jürgen Klopp.
“There is no winning system. The winning system is to get players comfortable on the pitch” — Carlo Ancelotti.
“The point of coaching is to try to make football, a game based on many random events, less random” — Peter Krawietz, Jürgen Klopp’s assistant manager.
“For a system to be effective it’s essential to spend a lot of time on the pitch, because a player must know exactly what to do in different situations” — Carlo Ancelotti.
If the huge success of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City ended up causing a huge homogenization in the world football that converged into the positional attack (probably in a failed attempt to mimic the Juego de Posición), a select group of managers stuck to their ideas and worked hard to make them fit for modern football without giving up on their soul, on what makes them unique. Several managers absorbed what they thought was valid from the Juego de Posición and just incorporated that to their ideas, without completely turning to a full-on positional attack. This process was guided by managers such as Fernando Diniz, Lionel Scaloni, Julian Nagelsmann and the protagonists of this text: Carlo Ancelotti and Jürgen Klopp.
Carlo Ancelotti began his coaching career as an assistant manager to Italy’s Arrigo Sacchi (he was part of the staff of that Italian side that lost to Brazil in the 1994 World Cup final) and in 1995 he became a full-time manager when he took over Reggiana. In 1996, he was chosen to lead Parma’s ambitious project, and his ideologies were put in check for the first time. Inspired by arrigo Sacchi, Ancelotti set the team up in a pretty well-defined 4–4–2 with Hernán Crespo and Enrico Chiesa as the attacking duo. However, Parma had a third and very interesting attacking player: Gianfranco Zola. The Italian was a classic second striker, who liked to play centrally and with loads of freedom. Ancelotti, adamant about the idea of using his beloved 4–4–2, decided to put Zola on the right wing. The result was bad for the player and even worse for the team, and Zola ended up leaving Parma for Chelsea a couple months later. Shortly afterwards, Ancelotti refused Roberto Baggio precisely because he didn’t think Baggio, like Zola, would fit his system. These were the experiences that forever changed Ancelotti, in his own words: “I decided, once again (first Zola, then Baggio), to turn down an extraordinary player. I was convinced that I’d tried all possible solutions, but there was a problem: I tried to look for countless solutions without ever considering changing the game system. The solution was not in adaptation, but in change; or rather, in choosing a system that adapted to my players, and not the other way around”. Ancelotti, who was still in the early stages of his managerial career, would be eternally shaped by his tenure at Parma: at Juventus, he gave up the 4–4–2 to use Zidane in his preferred position; at AC Milan, he created the famous “Christmas tree” system to house the “number 10s” of the Rossoneri squad (Rui Costa and Rivaldo at first, then Kaká and Seedorf); at Chelsea, Ancelotti changed his system mid-season to put more forwards on the team and win the Premier League with a goal-scoring record; at Bayern, he used Thiago Alcântara more high-up the pitch and with more freedom to get the most out of the Spanish midfielder; and in his two spells at Real Madrid, he built a system of puentes (bridges) to power-up the team’s attack and compensate for the squad’s lack of intensity without the ball.
Jürgen Klopp’s career was drastically different: the German was not a successful player like Ancelotti and did not got a job with Arrigo Sacchi right away. In fact, Klopp ended up becoming player-manager for Mainz when the team was struggling in Bundesliga 2 in 2001. He ended up doing so well that the team kept him in that role until the end of the season and offered him the full-time manager position for the next season. Klopp would eventually lead Mainz to the club’s first German top flight promotion in 2004 and kept them in the Bundesliga for 2 years, when they were relegated in 2007 and failed to reach promotion again in 2008. His work at Mainz took him to Borussia Dortmund, where Klopp won a two Bundesliga titles in a row (2011 and 2012), one German Cup (2012) and reached the Champions League final (2013). Until then, Klopp’s teams practiced a very unique style: high pressure, huge intensity and quick counterattacks, the famous “heavy metal football”. However, his final years at Borussia and his subsequent job (at Liverpool) forced Klopp to take two steps back: to give his teams more consistency, the German needed to learn to control possession. To achieve that, some things were non-negotiable for him: his team couldn’t lose intensity and his players couldn’t lose freedom.
4.1. Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool FC
Klopp’s role-driven system is based on his main characteristic as a manager: it’s a tool he’s found to maintain the intensity of his teams even in scenarios where Liverpool would have 60% possession. If Klopp spread his players out too much on the field, his team would have to make longer passes and advancing on the pich as a block would be way more difficult. In a role-driven attack, where players are closer to each other and there is greater freedom of movement, the team would form shorter passing lanes. In addition, instead of Liverpool occupying the spaces to then attack, the Reds’ attack generates the spaces through a lot of movement, position exchanges and short, quick passes. This ends up creating confusion in the opposing defense that, when trying to cover so many players in one small place, ends up opening gaps that are perfect for the infiltration of players like Salah, Mané or Luis Díaz. Klopp’s idea is not to occupy the spaces, but to leave them empty so that his players can attack them quickly.
Fabinho and Thiago always start a little deeper on the pitch: the Brazilian defensive midfielder is a unique threat in infiltrations towards the attack with his physical strength, and Thiago is far less antagonistic to the Klopp model than many might think. He obvioulsy lacks some intensity without the ball, but the midfielder was trained in Brazilian football and is very comfortable playing this faster football, with short passes, unmarks and lots of “one-two”s. Thiago can both be part of Klopp’s intense attacking rhythm and give the team a greater repertoire to pause the tempo of the game when necessary. In attack, Mané is a false 9 with an enviable technical ability, while Luis Díaz is the classic South American vertical, dribbler winger, perfect for attacking the spaces. Finally, there is an interesting mechanism on the right flank of the field: Arnold is a full-back with the technical ability of a number 10 and, therefore, Klopp prefers to place him more internally; Henderson is a midfielder with spectacular long passes and loads of stamina, and Salah is an inverted winger who loves to cut inside and shoot. Therefore, Klopp creates a rotation between these players: Arnold leaves the wing and drives inwards, Henderson leaves the midfield to attack the wing and Salah leaves the wing to cut inside. Following these movements, the three exchange positions a lot and take turns to attack the right wing.
The clustering of the Liverpool players is essential to passing the ball quickly. If Klopp used a more positional approach, either his team would have to pass the ball more calmly, playing with two or more touches (for Klopp, heresy) or Liverpool would have to try long balls to their forwards, which would drastically reduce their effectiveness and quality on attack. Giving players shorter passing lanes and in greater number (since there are always a lot of players in the ball sector) allows them to pass the ball much faster. In addition, by placing players in their preferred positions, they will be much more comfortable on the pitch and will be able to add much more to that speed that Liverpool want to apply when in possession: when doing what he’s used to doing, a player will act much more quickly and naturally, while a “new” position will require him to get used to scenarios that are unnatural to him, compromising his acting and the fluidity of his movements. Therefore, Klopp uses the clustering and freedom of his role-driven attack to rotate the ball with greater speed, without letting his opponent breathe. By organizing his team from time, his players are able to instill intensity in the game much more successfully.
Furthermore, organizing his attack from time to space results in another big advantage for Klopp. If the positional attack seeks to conquer time from spaces, the role-driven attack wants to create spaces from time, and this is another key to the quick and intense game that Klopp is looking for. For the German, it’s much more comfortable to empty the spaces on the field and allow his players to occupy them through infiltrations and movements. Again comparing with positional football: if Guardiola wants all the spaces occupied, Klopp wants them empty: no matter where it is, an empty space on the field is terrain for acceleration. For this, the German uses the movement, the unmarking and the speed of his players. Liverpool have lots of extremely mobile attacking players, who are very comfortable with abandoning their positions, playing with a few touches and presenting themselves soon after. In a German reinterpretation of the Argentine toco y me voy, Klopp uses his players’ interactions and unmarks to open gaps in the opponent’s defensive block. Furthermore, Liverpool’s forwards (in 21/22, Salah, Mané and Luis Díaz) were created within intensity and speed, always ready to accelerate the game. Without the open field that a counterattack would give them, the trio are more than happy to speed up the play in the small spaces that Liverpool’s movement creates. However, there is another space that Klopp’s team loves to explore. The role-driven attack usually creates a mechanism called “strong side and weak side” (very common in basketball): the strong side is the sector of the pitch where the team concentrates more players (in Liverpool’s case, the right side), while the weak side is the opposite side that naturally becomes more emptied. Therefore, it’s very common to see role-driven attacks that cluster on one side to attract the opponent’s defensive block there, which naturally opens a huge gap in the opposite side. Then, the team can exploit this empty space by inverting the play. Liverpool is one of the teams that best executes this strategy by using Andrew Robertson: Klopp’s left-back hardly stays still on the left wing giving width to the team; he usually positions himself a little deeper, ready to be receive the bal in an inversion and attack the emptied left flank with his famous overlaps. That way, Liverpool achieves yet another way of imprinting speed and intensity in the game even when they have the ball: by concentrating the play on one side and inverting it to the other, the team faces an open field scenario that can be explored by Robertson, a full-back with a lot of stamina and an excellent crossing.
4.2. Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid
Ancelotti and Klopp started from the same point but took drastically different paths. If Klopp uses the clustering and movements of the role-driven attack to add verticality the game, Ancelotti is the complete opposite: the Italian, at the height of his “quiet leadership”, prefers to use his role-driven attack to pass the ball calmly, using much more the technical quality of his players rather than their physical attributes. Over the last few years, Real Madrid has become a specialist in facing pressure from their opponents since the goal kick and, using the immense talent of their players (such as Alaba, Tchouaméni, Carvajal, Kroos and Modric), beat the pressure lines little by little, without rushing the play and thus reach the attacking third (normally with positional and numerical superiority). In addition, clustering in the attacking third players like Kroos, Modric and Benzema is a recipe for success: since they are very close, they can easily pass the ball between them, unmark themselves and show the technical quality that only a few teams can dream of having.
Even though Real Madrid usually starts in a 4–3–3, they actually resemble a team with two defensive midfielders and a number 10 (like a 4–2–3–1 , for example) when they have the ball. Tchouaméni is the first defensive midfielder and naturally starts deeper on the pitch, but the Frenchman is usually joined by Toni Kroos. The German started out as a wide midfielder, excelled at Bayern as an attacking midfielder and, as his career progressed, he started to play in deeper and deeper roles, becoming a midfielder who starts building up his team from the back rather than a classic “number 10”. Therefore, Kroos plays closer to Tchouaméni on the pitch and is usually the one who receives the ball out right in front of the centre-backs (or right next to them). The number 10 role goes to the one who wear Real Madrid’s number 10: Luka Modric did not follow Kroos’ path and developed himself as an attacking midfielder. He roams freely through the entire attacking third, showing his absurd ball carrying ability and genius passing. An important player in this midfield turns out to be Ferland Mendy: the French full-back is not a masterpiece of technique and stands out for his defensive solidity, but he does not compromise the team when attacking. Mendy usually starts at left-back, but drives inwards like an inverted fullback, positioning himself usually in front of Kroos and Tchouaméni, and is a safe passing option when it comes to moving the ball around there. This movement by Mendy ends up helping another player: Vinícius Júnior. The Brazilian reached high heights under Ancelotti and became one of the best forwards in the world, adding technical ability and effectiveness to a game that already boasted unstoppable speed and disconcerting dribbling. Therefore, Vinícius feels very comfortable starting the game in a wider position to, at the right moment, cut towards the oponent goal. Next to him there’s Benzema, an unique number 9. Beyond scoring many goals (he scored more than 40 last season), he’s a technically excellent player, very comfortable leaving the opposite area and building-up up the attack like a typical false 9, performing stunning interactions with Modric, Kroos and Vinícius Júnior, for example. This season, there’s also the regular presence of Rodrygo, who stood out playing in more central areas as a false 9 or attacking midfielder rather than the wide ones, contributing a lot with his technical ability and his intensity. Finally, Carvajal and Valverde are the “weak side” players, but that’s not all, as Ancelotti gives both a lot of freedom to participate in the play by driving towards the strong side.
Thus, Real Madrid’s role-driven attack is much more focused on boosting the team’s technical quality than accelerating the play at all times. Ancelotti once again shows his ability to adapt to different scenarios by exploring in depth the characteristics of the players he has in his hands, specially his midfield trio and his centre-forward. Ancelotti showed in AC Milan, Chelsea and FC Bayern teams much more vertical and agressive (even though his Real Madrid did show spectacular counterattacks, mainly from the speed of Vinícius Júnior, Rodrygo and Valverde). Instead of accelerating the play at all times like Klopp’s Liverpool, this Real Madrid prefers to pass the ball more calmly to attract the opponent and then speed things up with Vinícius or Valverde. Ancelotti boosts the likes of Modric, Kroos, Tchouaméni and Benzema, who have complete freedom under the Italin to roam around the attacking field and receive the ball where they deem necessary. In addition, the clustering of players also makes the ball move faster, not to immediately move it to the attack like Klopp, but to maintain possession more effectively and encourage the interaction of these players. Therefore, from passes, movements and unmarks, Real Madrid easily takes over the attacking third, gain full control of their opponent, place the ball wherever they want and have complete control of the time and rhythm of the game. And, by owning time, Real Madrid also owns spaces.
An interesting mechanism of Real Madrid is Carlo Ancelotti’s are the puentes, or “bridges”. The Italian had this idea in his first spell at los blancos, in 2015. Ancelotti realized that, when setting up his midfield (at the time, Kroos, Modric and James Rodríguez) in a straight line, the team ended up taking a lot of horizontal passes and had a really hard time in driving the ball to the attack: Real Madrid’s game was “flat”. To solve this, Ancelotti used one more virtue of his role-driven attack. From their respective roles, the Italian began to put his players on the field in different lanes: Kroos was deeper, Modric was a little higher and James was the attacking midfielder who made the link with the attack. In addition, Ancelotti also took advantage of the technical quality of Sérgio Ramos when he advanced with the ball and Benzema’s ability to leave the attack like a false 9. Thus, the puentes ofensivas (offensive bridges) emerged: instead of setting up his players in lines, Ancelotti positioned each one in a lane of the field according to their roles, forming “bridges” between one sector of the field to another. This mechanism is well known in Brazilian football as escadinhas (staircases), because the positioning of the players and the way the team drives towards attack resembles someone climbing a ladder, step by step. On his second spell, Ancelotti used the bridges once more: Real Madrid’s first man is usually Militão; Alaba, his partner at centre-back, jumps forward and participates more in the attack; ahead of Alaba is Tchouaméni or Kroos, as both exchange positions; next comes Mendy; then Modric; finally, Benzema and Vinícius also exchange positions and alternate in the role of the team’s most advanced player. Obviously, players are completely free to change positions, but always following the “bridges” logic.
4.3. How to plan freedom?
In order to build teams that show loads of freedom on the pitch, Klopp and Ancelotti had to develop a meticulous and complex training methodology. After all, it’s already established that leaving your players on the field without any instruction is not something viable in today’s football: Klopp and Ancelotti’s teams needed to have a pre-programmed and largely complex game plan so that they could overcome any adversities that a game may offer them.
In the book Klopp: Bring the Noise, the author Raphael Honigstein counts with the help of Peter Krawietz (Liverpool’s assistant manager) to explain Klopp’s working method. According to Krawietz, the second year of every single Klopp’s spells always was focused on developing mechanisms to hold possession. “The idea was to control the pace of the game with the ball and use the period between games to adopt a way of playing football that could ideally be replicated flexibly when under pressure,” says Krawietz.
Honigstein says that Klopp’s staff spends hours training to get the team to adhere to certain patterns of movement; they were not predetermined runs, but some “agreed procedures” (Krawietz) to create spaces in specific regions of the pitch where opponents were supposedlymore vulnerable. Honigstein describes one move as “two players running without the ball, taking the marking with them and opening up space in the middle for a third player to run towards the goal”. A simple move, but one that would be fatal if executed in synchronously.
Here comes Klopp’s own words. In a recent interview, the German spoke about how important it is to give freedom to his players, because “they need to play a game. Football is a game, and you must play it with freedom”. Klopp says he has a lot of information that he doesn’t give his players, not to “keep” it to himself, but to watch how that player naturally performs in a few different scenarios. He gives the example of when a new player arrives at the club: Klopp says he doesn’t give him any information and, at first, just lets him play. Thus, Klopp can learn about the player and the things he already does naturally to, in a second moment, find out what to adjust, what not to change and what the player should stop doing. “A lot happens in one-on-one talks,” Klopp said.
In a similar idea, Ancelotti also prefers to give his players less information at first to understand how his squad naturally reacts to certain situations and, over time, slowly adjust and synchronize his players’ movements. In his book “My Christmas Tree”, Ancelotti states that “for a system to be effective, it’s essential that they (the players) spend a lot of time on the pitch (training), because the player must know exactly what to do in the most different competitive situations. This objective can only be achieved with practical work that allows drilling several times the most realistic possible situations”.
Ancelotti gives an example of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan: “We did endless tactical training; certain mechanisms were not natural; the fatigue was inhuman. Sacchi repeated to us several times: ‘We have to follow a script that you should know by heart’. In the end , each one knew exactly what to do in any game situation, a fact that provided a lot of peace of mind”. The Italian also defends that “when we have to train teams without a predefined structure and we want the game to be natural and effective, we have to give priority to tactical work, even to the detriment of the physical one”.
In order to build his team tactically, Ancelotti uses “individual tasks”. Depending on a player’s position and role, the Italian assigns him an “individual task” and, based on that, builds the team “from the inside out”: instead of choosing a system and training his players to fit on it, he first learns his players’ moves and characteristics to build a system. “Individual tasks are closely linked to the 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 makes up the team”, he explains.
By that way, Ancelotti and Klopp develop their work very slowly. They don’t choose a predetermined complex system, that may hold the “recipe” to attack any team in the league and then fit their players into it.Slowly, learning the characteristics, qualities, flaws and natural movements of their players, Ancelotti and Klopp start to build a system from there. This takes something that is more valuable than gold in the managerial world: time. To build a system from their players’ individualities, Ancelotti and Klopp need to learn how each one of them behaves and then find a way to synchronize all those moves in a way that each player is boosted in his own way. Therefore, normally the following seasons of their works present a much better level: the Liverpool of 18/19 is much better than the one of 17/18; the Borussia of 10/11 and 11/12 is better than the one of 09/10; the Milan of 2006/2007 is better than the one of 2002/2003; Real Madrid has been playing better in 22/23 than they did in 21/22, and even in 14/15 the team played better than in 13/14, even though the end of the season was disastrous because of injuries. In addition to being time-consuming, this method of working can seem strange in some scenarios: at Bayern, Ancelotti’s “long and unspecified” training sessions (used to explore players’ movements and assign them small individual tasks, without imposing a system beforehand) caused confusion in the players of the Bavarian club, who were conditioned to 3 years under the rigid tactical tutelage of Pep Guardiola.
The two coaches who disputed the last Champions League final start from the same idea and arrive at completely different results. Klopp is the intensity, the verticality, the infiltrations and inversions of plays, emptying a space to immediately occupy it and follow the frenetic pace of the manager; Ancelotti is the calm, the pause, the “bridges”, the potentialization of talents and the calm leadership, because his team always seems to be in control of the actions even when the scenario turns out to be uncomfortable. Football, increasingly intense, planned and studied, seems to have given the key to beautiful football for those who have learnt how to plan freedom.
