DANGEROUS PROVOCATIONS
Roberto De Zerbi: The Brechtian Coach Who Is Reframing Our Relationship With Football
Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.
- Bertolt Brecht
FIRST HALF
Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.
- Eduardo Galleano, Soccer In Sun And Shadow
IT’S SHITE BEING SCOTTISH
Maybe it’s something to do with being Scottish? From the romantic paintings of The Glasgow Boys to Franz Ferdinand’s art-pop anthems, Scotland has never been a nation shy of making provocative and enduring artistic statements, so it’s always seemed strange to me why our football is so lacking in this aesthetic department. In his novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh did use Archie Gemmell’s 1978 solo goal against Holland as a metaphor for an orgasm but I think it’s fair to say that in recent times Scottish football’s production of ecstatic climaxes has been in desperately short supply.
Football here has always seemed so script-less, lacking in form and structure when compared to so many of our international counterparts. Most of the time it’s as though the players are simply playing off-the-cuff, relying on instinct and natural strengths in the naïve hope that grit, determination and some distorted memory of Caledonian spirit will be enough to nudge the scoreline into favourable territory — a curious non-style based primarily on physicality and fuelled by an unwavering belief that if we just keep our heads up, stick together and keep on fighting the cards will eventually fall in our favour.
I have always preferred a different style of direction; whether it’s through the medium of music, writing, film or football I like things to be deliberate. I prefer the art of organising chaos into definable forms rather than lurching haphazardly in the face of infinite possibility. I prefer the arranging and assembling of reality into recognisable aspects, I prefer the construction of new identities and the suggestion of alternative perspectives.
So maybe it is something to do with being Scottish — maybe my infatuation with a coach like Roberto De Zerbi is just a reaction against the footballing culture I have grown up in. It probably is, but it’s more than that too; it’s gone beyond the point of mere adolescent rebellion and these days it drives my irritation towards football in places far beyond these borders.
It’s like I’ve got an itch I can’t scratch; There’s something deep down inside me that craves for a football that shows me something different, a football that challenges and provokes, a football that stirs the emotions and is worthy of a game so often claimed to be beautiful.
THE THRILL IS GONE
I feel like an addict wandering from late night bar to neon-lit dive in search of a different kind of fix, a shock-starved sleepwalker desperate for arousal; I’ve become neutered by unlimited access to the product; when everything is available everywhere all at once it’s impossible to find even the smallest trace of satisfaction.
I’m Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, tempted out past my bedtime by the illicit danger of a walk on the wild side. I need something stronger, a more potent concoction, my tolerance levels are so damn high these days it takes a Tim Walter fullback rotation for the play to even register.
I scour the internet for clues, doom-scrolling Twitter for hours, days, clip after clip after clip — it’s all ok, I mean it’ll do, I guess it’ll have to. I can always just watch another City game, another one? Really? Is that all you’ve got? It’s usually a decent hit but I know the Catalan’s patterns like the back of my hand, there must be something else?
I’m climbing the fucking walls here, self-monitoring my nervous system to match patterns of ball progression with dopamine release — y’know, real science. 4334d235223542314423241441123233412315142223614515323313412341414321… numbers, why only these numbers? why so scarcely a 6? why never a 7? I study these fucking numbers every night but it doesn’t get me anywhere, they just cancel each other out. No matter how piously I worship them they never show me a sign, they don’t give me any direction, they only end up pushing me further away from the very feeling I’m searching for.
I’m begging here, I’m begging for football to seduce me again like it did way back then to that seven-year-old kid who sat cross legged on the floor, glued wide-eyed to the TV screen as Nessun Dorma soundtracked images of classical renaissance artwork — it was Italia ’90 that first pulled me in, an attraction so strong I devoured every moment of every match; the colours, the graphics, the stadiums, the tension, the heat, the strange slowness of the play; Higuita, Milla, Scifo, Valderama, Caniggia, Stojkovic, Francescoli, Baggio, it was love at first sight.
THE TACTICS OF DESIRE
It only seems fitting that to recapture the rapture of that forgotten ecstatic state I would have to return once more to the romance of Italy, the country whose name Mary Shelley described as having ‘magic in its very syllables’. In football terms, Italy has long been associated with possessing a strong ‘tactical’ bent, a proclivity for a brand of football characterized by a strategic disposition for attrition and reactivity.
But lately a new wave of tacticians is emerging from the depths of the Italian football psyche. Like Anita Ekberg’s siren-goddess luring Marcello Mastroianni into the waters of the Trevi Fountain in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, so too does this new style of play operate from base principles of seduction and attraction.
This is to say, it is not only concerned with a chess-like game-theoretical perspective, the measured analysis of positional vectors and triangulation of connections but is equally (if not more) focussed on emphasising the science of the soul, of bringing us in closer and provoking a surrendering of ourselves to the thrilling potentials of temptation.
SECOND HALF
‘I want my teams to entertain the fans and bring them closer to the team, giving them strong emotional responses.’
- Zdenak Zeman
A GHOST IN THE MACHINE
I first heard the name ‘Roberto De Zerbi’ sometime around 2018. His Sassuolo team were making headlines across Europe, the provincial underdogs were daring to play-out-from-the-back and dominate possession against Serie A’s heavyweights and enjoying an unlikely amount of success in doing so.
‘Playing-out-from-the-back’ is relatively rare but nothing new, Guardiola had been doing it for years already albeit with far greater resources than De Zerbi. But there was something different about how De Zerbi set his team up, at first you couldn’t quite believe what he was asking his players to do.
Against Roma, Sassuolo positioned eight (including the GK) players inside their own third to make a build-up from a goal-kick.
Defensive midfielders Locatelli and Obiang split and stood waiting at the corners of the box while number 10 Djuricic dropped in centrally towards the D. Fullbacks Toljan and Kyriakopolous were high and wide with centre-backs Romagna and Ferrari flanking goalkeeper Consigli close by on either side.
Sassuolo were 3–0 up after 30mins — Roma’s pressers — advancing from a 4141 — were hopelessly outnumbered and out-positioned, they buzzed around furiously trying to apply pressure only to be picked off one-by-one by Sassuolo’s coolly executed passing patterns; Roman flies tempted towards their own elimination by the attractive pull of the neroverdi’s Venus-Trap.
By the time it was announced in 2021 that De Zerbi would be leaving Sassuolo for Shakthar Donetsk I was hooked. All through the disruptions of the pandemic I’d been watching Sassuolo as often as possible, using their games to get the hits I needed. I’d check the TV listings weeks in advance to see which games would be broadcast, I’d record them if I was out coaching, returning to watch them late at night, freezing the action and replaying the most exciting passages over and over — self medicating with increasingly heavy doses of De Zerbi’s overproof footballing spirit.
I waited impatiently all summer, suffering through the mundanity of the Euros. It was only Italy’s early performances that excited me, as if my addiction to De Zerbi was re-wiring my brain to favour some essential Italian-ness I wasn’t yet able to describe. What was it about De Zerbi’s play that satisfied me like no others could? I needed to know; it was driving me mad.
As De Zerbi’s tenure at Shakthar got underway I consumed everything I could get my hands on, but I still couldn’t articulate what was fuelling my seemingly unquenchable thirst for his team’s play. It wasn’t just the formations, the energy of players or the patterns of the play, it was something else, it transcended mere function, it was like a ghost in the machine. And then one night it hit me — it hit me so damn hard I nearly fell off my chair.
BLINDED BY THE SUN
I can understand why it’s so difficult to see. The potential of an alternative way of conceptualising football is suppressed by the myopic framing of the game’s ruling classes; a grand cathedral of media conglomerates, national associations, corporations and cultural enforcers.
But there’s no need for some elaborate conspiracy theory here, a shadowy network of elites working in cahoots to maintain the status quo, no, in today’s fragmented world the conspiracy has become decentralised. These people just think the same way, their perspectives are off-the-shelf, its fast-fashion worldviews for the age of consumption, it’s all so fucking familiar, there’s nothing special about them.
We mock and condescend the centrally programmed societies of China and North Korea as we lap-up The Premier League’s relentless propaganda. Haven’t you heard? ‘IT’S THE GREATEST LEAGUE IN THE WORLD — AND ITS LIIIIIIIVE!’. We pay thousands of pounds every year to have our braincells destroyed by the inane babble of shiny-suited pundits reclining around inexplicably shaped tables, spice-boy pub talk broadcast from tacky studios exuding some nightmarish hybrid of nightclub gaud and estate agent swish.
Maybe its just me? Maybe I’ve lost my grip on reality? I feel like a wild-eyed crazy running through the streets yelling ‘the end is nigh!’. But De Zerbi’s football has arrived in the nick of time. Just as it seemed all was lost his style provokes us to consider the possibility of something different.
It begs the questions — What do you think you know about football? On what basis are you making evaluations about a team’s performance? What authority deems one action too risky and another one safe? Regardless of medals, experience or expertise your interpretation is not fact, its just your perspective from the cognitive framework within which you currently reside.
AUTEURS OF SEDUCTION
And it is in this sense I see De Zerbi’s football as Brechtian. Berthold Brecht, the seminal German theatrical-theorist, believed the director’s duty is to use their medium as a means of provocation, challenging the audience to critically reflect on the production, to stand apart from the play and become cognisant of the commentary being made; it is to remind viewers that on-stage action is but a representation of reality and not reality itself, and in doing so draw the spectator into closer, more intense and intimate dialogue with the interpretation of reality they are witnessing.
As Anthony Squires explains in his 2019 essay —
‘What was needed, according to Brecht, was ‘de-familiarisation,’ something that would nudge the audience past the mystification of bourgeois ideology. Brecht attempted to achieve de-familiarisation through his famous estrangement effects (Verfremdungseffekte). These were techniques he hoped would produce a critical, cognitive detachment between the audience and what they saw represented. In short, the idea was to make the familiar world seem unfamiliar by turning the audience into self-reflective anthropologists who would ask themselves sociological and historical questions about the material conditions and social relations of their time. Ultimately, Brecht hoped that the audience would come to see these conditions and relations as mutable, and awaken a revolutionary impulse to change them.’
‘Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.’ By applying Brecht’s famous declaration to a coaching context, we can begin to realise the potentials of a game at growing risk of stagnation in the face of corporate and establishment capture.
But to achieve the transformative estrangement effects Brecht was looking for, we — as coaches, players, fans, journalists or any other relevant stakeholder — must be prepared to interpret football with the deliberate intention of jolting audiences out of their existing malaise and tempting them towards the potentials of alternative versions of reality.
DANGEROUS PROVOCATIONS
De Zerbi achieved this by shocking onlookers in Poland. In a match played as part of Shakthar’s Global Tour For Peace, organised in support of Ukrainian resistance against Russia’s invasion, his team performed a build-up of such outrageous audacity even Guardiola himself must have thought he was dreaming as he bore witness to the eerie stillness of The Gdansk Opening.
De Zerbi empowers his players to stand motionless with the ball at their feet, usually with the futsal-style stud control that is so characteristic of Shakthar’s first phase ball-circulation; a silent protest against strategic bad taste. Marlon in particular has become expert in this role, often striking a pose of languid indifference, as if he’s already grown tired of the opponent’s inability to dispossess him. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the Brazilian centre-back put his hand on his hip, tilt his weight to one side and go full contrapposto; The strange displacement of an ancient statue slowing the tempo of modernist acceleration.
Through sequences such as these and a variety of other innovative tactical motifs, De Zerbi and his followers are deconstructing narratives around what football is and how it might be played.
De Zerbi’s strategy transcends mere functionality as his tactical approach provokes us to question even our most deep-seated footballing beliefs. And just as Marlon’s nonchalant in-possession pose seduces the opponent into vacating their positional slots and pressing closer to the ball so too are we as spectators seduced into thinking that maybe, just maybe football’s story isn’t over yet.
