THE POSITIONIST
‘I think the coach is very important. But, fortunately, it’s still the players who play football’
Roberto Baggio
‘We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate’
Ilya Prigogine
‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’
Heraclitus
THE SHOE SELLER
He didn’t make the shoes. He sold them. The shoes were made in a factory, his father’s factory. He grew up in the shoe factory amidst the clanking whirr of automation, surrounded by the mechanisms of repetition. The machines of production relentlessly cycling through their endless pre-programmed processes without need for rest nor love.
He didn’t make the shoes. He sold them. The shoe seller had never formed the curves and grooves of the leather, the shoes had never come to life in his hands, he had never shaped their soles. He travelled around Europe selling his shoes, across the border to Germany and beyond, seeking the best prices for his products. One day he left for Frankfurt in the morning and was back in Fusignano in time for dinner — time is money.
He sought to maximise production so he bought another factory — exploit the economies of scale. More space meant increased capacity, capacity to house more machines. More machines meant more shoes, and more shoes meant more profit. He was a shoe seller and shoe sellers need shoes to sell. The two factories were like beautiful twins, a pair, separate locations but identical processes, mirror images, production was doubled overnight.
Everything was in order, a perfect order. The factory’s floorplans were meticulously planned and everything was in its right place. But the shoe-seller had big ideas, bigger than just selling shoes. He wanted to apply his quantitative savvy to his greatest passion, he wanted to transform the game of football into a fantastic vision of order and perfection.
THE KNIGHT’S MOVE
It was the second time that sealed it. The second time is only the first repetition but the man they called Il Cavaliere (The Knight) had seen enough — a pair of home defeats. Milan 0–1 Parma the first time, Milan 0–1 Parma the second. The deal was done. The one had been chosen. Silvio Berlusconi brought Arrigo Sacchi to AC Milan.
In hindsight they were the perfect match — a delightfully entangled pair. It was a marriage so perfect it was as though it had been arranged by the God’s of Capital themselves. Together the two men formed a potent combination. Football is still coming to terms with the Empire created by that quixotic fusion of Berlusconi’s money, power and entrepreneurial lust paired with Sacchi’s explosive coaching vision.
Football didn’t stand a chance. Sacchi’s Milan beat Maradona’s Napoli to the Serie A title and the new streamlined Rossoneri steamrolled their way to two successive European Cups and two successive Intercontinental Cups. It was nothing short of world domination.
But what was the nature of Sacchi’s innovation? What was the secret to his trick? Berlusconi’s history of corruption and foul play was well documented, but not even a man of his shadowy influence and unscrupulous means could have orchestrated such a monumental coup. It was Sacchi who made the pivotal theoretical move. The Knight may have bankrolled the experiment, but it was the hard-working shoe seller from the heartlands of Emilio Romagna who held the key to realising the phenomenal power of football’s very own Manhattan Project.
THE FIRST ASSUMPTION OF POSITIONISM: WHAT IS ‘SPACE’?
At the heart of this rupturing of football’s ontology is Sacchi’s notion of space. His space is flat, empty and ready to be occupied by things. Whether it’s the blueprint for his new shoe factory or a rectangular diagram of a football pitch, Sacchi sees space as a definable quantitative entity that can be strategically exploited.
It’s easy, just spread the schematic out on the table and play around with arrangement of things. Then impose these pre-planned distribution patterns onto reality. Be it a workday on the factory floor or the ninety-minutes of a football match, resources (both human and non-human) are purposefully placed precisely where they should be.
This is the first assumption of what I have called ‘Positionism’ — that space is static and objective. It is a rejection of a space which is dynamic and ever shifting in relation to our subjective and felt perceptions of it. It doesn’t matter if this space is on a factory floor, a football pitch, a tactics board, a computer screen or even inside your own head, it’s always the same. It’s just another chunk of finite void, a limited commodity to be manipulated in the search for the maximisation of productive power.
Once we accept this formulation of space (which I have also described at length here) we can move on to the second crucial theoretical assumption of Positionism.
THE SECOND ASSUMPTION OF POSITIONISM: SPACE AS A PRIMARY REFERENCE
Now that we have our conceptualisation of space we must decide what to do with it. Thankfully, Sacchi leaves us in no doubt as to the role which space will play in his interpretation of football; an interpretation which I have called Positionism.
At this point it’s important to note I am not claiming that Sacchi ‘invented’ Positionism per se. I’d actually argue that Positionism invented itself; an example of the virtual becoming actual, a kind of emergent artificial intelligence using humans as its diligent uploaders.
What I am proposing is that Sacchi gives us perhaps the most clear and explicit theoretical description of Positionism and then, through his coaching, practically demonstrates what a distinct version of it can look like on the field of play.
Sacchi explains: ‘Our players had four reference points: the ball, the space, the opponent and his own teammates. Every movement had to happen in relation to these reference points. Each player had to decide which of these reference points should determine his movements.’
So here we have Sacchi’s concept of the player’s decisional references. There are four. The ball, the space, the opponent, the teammate. They are not given any particular hierarchical order; they start off as equal with the player deciding which one is the most relevant reference in any given situation.
The problem with this configuration is that it assumes space to be of the same order as the other three references. It is not. Space is a derivative of the interactions between the ball, teammates and opponents and is thus not of the same or equal order as them.
Space is of a different nature to the other three references but, thanks to its conceptualisation as an easily definable finite quantity (see assumption 1), Sacchi has elevated it to a position of primary importance along with the ball, teammates and opponents. This is the Positionist sleight of hand, the smuggling in of flat, abstract, finite space to a position of primary importance in the ontological structure of the game.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF POSITIONISM
With our two assumptions successfully assumed we are now in a position from which to deduce the ideology’s most fundamental principle.
The base proposal of Positionism is that future possibilities can only be derived from what is already known to be real.
Our set of understandings of what constitutes the ‘real’ are the positions from which future possibilities can be derived.
In Positionism these positions are allowed to be static. We know this because, by way of our previous assumptions, the space being used as a primary reference is a static entity. The ball, teammates and opponents are not static entities — they are always already in motion during open play.
By allowing a static entity (space) equal power to the other non-static references we are claiming that static-ness itself is valid as a primary generator of future states. But, by definition, something static such as Sacchi’s space cannot be a prime-mover. Because it doesn’t move. It’s seen the same regardless of the pitch and regardless of the day — Sacchi’s footballing space is viewed as objective.
Positionism proposes that a fixed, finite, known, definable, objectively real concept of ‘space’ can be used as a primary reference from which all player arrangement, distribution, movements, decisions and interactions can be derived.
Players are assigned to various de-lineated sectors of the field. This is your space — that is not. Play here and not there. And from this set of spatial restrictions the football can then begin. The interactions and complexity can commence only once the player’s spatial references have been established. Because remember, in Positionism static space is valid as a primary reference.
Positionism claims that some fixed, static idea of what is real is the source from which everything else can be derived. This is not the case. And once you allow a static concept to be the boss, everything collapses into a singularity — a totality. Now Positionism has you exactly where it wants you — its check-mate, game over.
RELATIONISM — ACTUALISING THE VIRTUAL
To further demonstrate the nature of Positionism’s fundamental characteristics we can look to an alternative perspective I have — for better or worse — labelled as Relationism.
Relationism differs form Positionism in that it does not believe future possibilities derive from fixed, known, established concepts. Rather, Relationism proposes (by way of concepts borrowed from French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze) that novel future states emerge to be actual through the establishing of contacts with an infinite set of virtual possibilities which are as yet unknown to us. The virtual is a realm of potentiality — the kindling is already pregnant with the potential of fire, all it needs to actualise it is a spark.
Think of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. By what deductive reasoning can we predict such a change of form, such a radical morphogenesis?
The Relationist does not attempt to logically derive from first principles, to appeal to the god-like power of some concretised set of pre-agreed ‘governing dynamics’. Maybe when solving a math puzzle or logic game such techniques are valid, but in football we find ourselves far indeed from such confined and restricted territory.
We must be prepared to imagine that the future is unimaginable. To imagine ourselves as a cloud of interactions, lurching, bubbling, swirling and mixing in a constant state of flux. And as these interactions occur and previous states are destabilized we open possible routes to any combination of the infinite virtual realities that are ‘out there’ waiting for their potentials to be actualised.
It is precisely through destabilization and movement — not stability and fixedness — that reality finds opportunities to develop in interesting, novel and unpredictable ways.
So, Relationism differs from Positionism in its fundamental understanding of how reality emerges. Positionism holds that all possible future states can be derived from our understanding of fixed concepts, from well-established and agreed-upon facts about the nature of our reality. As we have seen, this manifested itself in football perhaps most explicitly through Sacchi’s configuration of finite space as a primary reference for the interactions of his players.
Relationism proposes something different — that reality (the actual) emerges not by way of some linear process of rational deduction. Instead, the accessing of different virtual futures occurs through the (significantly random) establishment of new connections. Opportunities for these connections are generated by the collisions and movement of matter in the universe — they are made possible by moments of instability and uncertainty.
Think of a piece of Classical music. The piece is composed, written down and preserved. Performances are then derived from the already complete score with the conductor acting as an ‘arranger’. The Classical conductor (A role Sacchi has great admiration for) controls the dynamics of the performance as the musicians execute the requisite actions to ensure the notes and timings are repeated just as they have been many times before.
Think now of free-from jazz. In this musical context the players are not working from a pre-defined composition. The musicians have a freedom to self-organise, to find grooves and phrases in a far more spontaneous and improvised manner. There will be repetitions of riffs, patterns and motifs, but these repetitions are varied and sporadic, emerging and dissipating organically as the musicians feel for the next new direction the performance might take.
Our ‘position’ at any given moment in football should not be thought of as a direct result of our previous ‘position’. Rather, positions emerge and reveal themselves to the players as a result of infinite interactions and relations between the ball, teammates and opponents.
POSITIONISM IN PRACTICE: REPETITION OVER DIFFERENCE
We can think about Positionism in a practical sense by considering the degree and type of repetitions produced by a team. When a team is trained in an overtly positional manner certain patterns of ball-progression and defensive movements will quickly emerge. This is because the structure of the players is dictated by the coach’s desire to occupy space rationally — space as a primary reference.
Because players are — to a greater or lesser degree — confined to certain sectors of the pitch it is necessary for a Positionist team to progress the ball via passing. This passing can be long or short depending on the style. Passing between zones — rather than dribbling or intuitive close proximity combinations — has become a trademark of Positionist teams from the very early days of structured football, via the classic seventies iterations of Cruyff and Lobanovski right through to the present-day interpretations of Guardiola or De Zerbi.
Because the players are arranged in pre-set structures (with various arrangements often toggled between during a single game) it makes perfect sense that the passing routes of these teams will soon start to repeat themselves. This is why we see teams like Guardiola’s Manchester City score many similar goals — carefully choreographed building up via passing between zones, reception of the ball by ‘interiors’ located in spaces that have been identified as strategically important, penetration of the opponent backline through rotations of wide triangles and finishing via low crosses and cutbacks.
These repetitions occur because the interactions of the players are derived from a static starting point — space as a primary reference. In extreme Positionist interpretations such as those of Sacchi or Conte (and many others including youth coaches), these repetitive patterns (both offensive and defensive) are embedded in the player’s consciousness through the use of ‘automations’.
Automations are patterns of movement or ball progression trained without an opponent, or even, as in Sacchi’s case, without the ball!
‘I told them to imagine that the keeper had the ball’ says Sacchi, ‘and each of them had to envisage what would be the next best option, to try to dribble or the short pass. Then you could see them receive the ball, and Donadoni and Van Basten would change position. That is how we trained them to think collectively about leaving their marker’.
Sacchi developed a training exercise designed to help players get free from their marker without using any markers, or even the ball. This is Positionism. The use of systematically planned switches and rotations between pre-assigned zones to generate superiorities rather than shifting the emphasis to the intuitive and interpretive powers of the world’s best players. A regime of cerebral abstractions supressing lived embodiment.
‘Sacchi had imprinted some tactical concepts and that Milan side almost played on memory.’ Remembers former Milan forward Aldo Serena. ‘The movements were perfect at the back; the midfielders came back to help. And all of this was because of Sacchi’s maniacal work which actually ended with him stressing and exhausting all the players.’
For a brief time Sacchi’s Milan were unstoppable. At Milan, Sacchi’s extremist Positionism was still primarily focussed on the defensive structures and movements of the players. While still structured in possession, the Milan players had licence to switch and rotate between the positional slots. In this sense the attacking configuration was more akin to that of Lobanovski than Conte; as long as the notes of the grand composition stayed the same it didn’t matter who played them. As long as someone played the part correctly the synergy and harmony of the music would soar.
As long as they had the ability to do so, Sacchi allowed his players to play each other’s instruments, and at Milan he was fortunate to have been blessed with one the greatest ensembles to ever take to the stage. Ruud Gullit’s inexplicably disallowed goal against Real Madrid in the first leg of the 1989 European Cup semi-final demonstrates the player’s capacity for this approach. Centre-forward Van Basten drops deep to receive, he plays central defender Baresi who has moved higher, left midfielder Donadoni penetrates centrally and second-striker Gullit completes the movement.
At Milan, Sacchi’s Positionism was animated by some of the best players the world has ever seen — at times, Sacchi’s Milan (driven by the mercurial Dutch trio of Gullit, Van Basten and Rijkaard) got perhaps as close as anyone to replicating the dizzying carousel of Cruyff and Michels’ classical Positionist interpretation. But while his success was unprecedented, it was also brief. Sacchi was never again able to recreate the success of those three years at Milan.
His tenures with the Italian national team (despite reaching the final of USA ’94) and Atletico Madrid were stifling and uninspiring. It was as though Sacchi no longer had the confidence in his players to switch and rotate so freely within the attacking structure. As a result, he increasingly resorted to applying the same hard-line Positionism he had used with Milan’s defensive organisation to his team’s play in the attacking phase.
THE FOOTBALL FACTORY
Through Sacchi and the Positionist lineage he represents, we see the principles of the factory creep into football. The overarching approach is based on repetition — how could it be otherwise? Because the player’s interactions are always already conditioned by their pre-assigned spatial orientation, the variance of possible outcomes is drastically reduced.
Of course, just like in the factory, this structural control is desirable for many coaches/managers as it reduces uncertainty and maintains stable, consistent levels of production. In its most banal and predictable forms this method becomes nothing short of what the writer known as ‘Jozsef Bozsik’ has called ‘Footballing Fordism’ — A ‘Fast-Food’ Positionism’ which is easily repeatable but far from nourishing.
It is what Juanma Lillo — writing like a repentant father — referred to as the global homogenisation of football. Quick two-touch passing between nodes in a network. Endless circulations and triangulations, even spacing between players, rational occupation of space. There is a tragedy to Lillo’s realisation, a poetic sadness to how the 57-year-old now laments his role as an accelerator of this homogenisation process, to how he regrets his life’s work as one of the leading architects of the great Positionist football factory.
I repeat: Sacchi didn’t make the shoes, he sold them. The shoes were made on masse via automation, his livelihood was fuelled by the production method of the factory. A method based on structural floor-plans and endless repetitions of pre-assigned tasks and actions designed to ensure maximum efficiency and productivity — time is money.
In Sacchi’s influential coaching film, Coaching The Italian 4–4–2, made in conjunction with the Italian Football Federation, we are informed that, ‘in these exercises particular care should be given to the repeated-ness of the execution. It is very useful to make the team carry out very quick actions using the whole field without the opponent to make the players assimilate and perfect the attack-plan as automatic.’
AN ANTITODE TO CONFORMITY: IS RELATIONISM A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE?
Sacchi is still lionised to this day as a great (perhaps the greatest?) tactical innovator. But what if the shoe-seller from Fusignano wasn’t an innovator at all? What if he was a conformist? What if his methods were merely the application of the same Positionist philosophy that has dominated so much of Western thought through the scientific and industrial revolutions and now into 2023 and the domination of global techno-capitalism? A philosophy rooted in the idea that the future can be deduced from some fixed notion of reality.
This way of thinking doesn’t get us anywhere. It just keeps on enhancing the capabilities of the Positional approach — reinforcing it through positive feedback loops. It doesn’t offer us any genuine alternatives. Why should space come first? And why should space be thought of has some reductive finite entity in the first place? Nothing of these ideas are present in the rules of football so none of it needs to be conformed or adhered to.
Positionism is far from being one thing. We have already referenced the radically different interpretations — Sacchi and Guardiola don’t play the same way. Positionism can be possession-based or it can prefer to surrender the ball. It can use short or long passes; it can place emphasis on physicality or technical superiority. But these stylistic twists are exactly that; they are but different flavours of Positionism.
So, if Positionism is so pervasive, have we ever seen a truly Relational team? There have certainly been — and still are — various hybrids, some of whose use of spatial refencing is so loose it becomes no more than a faint background hum — a light sprinkling, a mere suggestion of Positionism. The great Brazilian and Argentine lineages are but two of the more well-known examples of a more Relational (often referred to as functional in Brazil — ‘jogo funcional’) approach.
In these localised interpretations ball progression is enabled not through the quick passing of the ball from zone to zone, but from players moving towards the ball carrier and arranging themselves in close proximity patterns to make available short connections, give and go’s, one-two’s, toco y me voy.
The great Flamengo team of the late 70s/early 8os (who defeated Liverpool 3–0 in the Intercontinental Cup Final of 1981) played as though they were as free to move as a group of friends playing altinha on the warm white sands of their home city’s Copacabana beach. The routes of ball progression are not pre-planned or automated, they are not constrained by a fixed authority or concept, the path of the ball is realised in real-time, formed amidst the chaotic parallax of interactions between human players. In these sequences the dice is rolled, the coach has relinquished all control, chance itself is harnessed as a generator of new beginnings.
We must fully digest the idea of hybridity and appreciate that it is completely normal for a team to have some players operating more positionally, while others adopt a more relational approach. As we have seen, Positionism and Relationism start from fundamentally different understandings of how reality emerges, but that doesn’t mean that both can’t be used in a complimentary manner. At the 2022 World Cup, Croatia’s midfield three of Brozovic, Kovacic and Modric play in a Relational manner while the remainder of the players adhere to more Positionist principles.
And now an even more uncut Relationism is beginning to emerge. Back in Rio de Janeiro, forty years since Zico and friends wowed the world, we are now seeing perhaps the most radically Relational team to ever make a significant impact at the elite level of football. It must be something in the water down there. Fernando Diniz’s Fluminense’s arrangements seem to defy codification by standardised numerical notation. Such is the variance of their distributions we are left reaching for organic metaphors like clouds or flocks to account for their beguiling modes of collective coherence.
Diniz travelled to Manchester to watch Guardiola’s City team play. He commented on what he saw. ‘..from what I saw I was able to recognise what positional play really is…the game starts, after two minutes there’s only positional play. The players obey the determined space, where they have to stay…there’s a line through the middle determining who’s on the left side of the left side, who’s on the right side of the right side, and the players move in their space and the ball arrives in these spaces…we (Fluminense) are almost apositional rather than positional…the pitch is more open, it’s a freer game…so I think the biggest difference is one game is much more tied to positions and the other is more free. I think it has more to do with the culture’.
Relationism is not a justification to allow the players to do whatever they want. This is crucial. Rather, relationism seeks to use references other than finite space as the loci for collective coherence. It is the use of some combination of ball, teammate, opponent (all dynamic, fluid references) to derive positioning and arrangement. And because none of these references have fixed, pre-defined locations it follows that it will be the players who are interpreting their own distribution patterns on the pitch. If a player struggles to meet these interpretive requirements, they must be helped, coached and guided.
SPOOKY (INTER)ACTIONS
But can it really work? Is a completely Relational approach a viable alternative? Can a team actually play — Goalkeeper aside — without pre-assigned Positions? Science would suggest yes. The pioneering work of scientists such as Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine into the generative power of non-equilibrium system states shows us that in order to move beyond the Positionist paradigm we must form new relationships with variance, chance and disorder.
Perhaps this way of thinking can also be compared to the classical and quantum paradigms in physics. Last year’s Nobel Prize for Physics has challenged the notion of realism (a term meaning that particles have definite properties whether interacted with or not). The alternative (anti-realisms) exist in a wave-function of possibilities that can define different states of its properties. These anti-realisms are influenced by the interaction (‘measurement’) itself.
The research has shown the latter to be true. These quantum particles have no values specific to them before they are interacted with. This can be applied to positionism and relationism. Relationism basically implies that everything happens in relation to the players and their relationships, space and time changing their properties by the interaction of and with the players.
So, what if we accept that the properties of these quantum entities do not in fact reveal themselves until the moment of measurement or observation? That no-one — not even Einstein — can accurately predict the unfolding of reality until the dice have settled on a number? The idea of some pre-planned, already-determined sequence of events dissolves under scrutiny at the atomistic level. Maybe there are simply no such things as ‘fixed-positions’ — maybe these static states are but mere illusion?
Coaches like Julian Nagelsmann and Mikel Arteta are already oscillating between positional dogmatism and more relationist ideas while others, such as Marcelo Bielsa, cling to utopian visions of teams comprised entirely of robots. This, obviously, is impossible. And relationism just starts at the opposite end of the spectrum. Not with electric dreams of robots and pre-defined properties of space, but with the human and the variable probabilities of our natural tendencies and randomness.
Whatever happens on the pitch, the players are entangled by each other and define the properties of the game by their interactions, not by some hidden variables of space and time that are identified by the coach beforehand.
Einstein couldn’t accept the Quantum Theory of the Norwegian Nils Bohr and the radical implications it had for the nature of causality — what Einstein described as ‘spooky action at a distance’. The pair of 20th century physics titans clashed at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Belgium resulting in the famous exchange between them:
Einstein: God does not play dice with the universe.
Bohr: Einstein, stop telling God what to do.
At the heart of all of this is chance. How do we understand and interpret the role played by chance in the football universe? It is my proposal that Positionism fights a deterministic battle against chance which is ultimately unwinnable — casting chance as a problem to be overcome rather than a beautiful, mysterious and eternal partner with whom to dance.
The high-priest of contemporary Positionism, Pep Guardiola often refers to the negative characteristics of chance or chaos. And the Catalan’s desire for control has influenced the game perhaps more than anyone since Sacchi. But all systems of control eventually collapse — chaos eventually envelopes them. The question is: how do you react when this confrontation with uncertainty inevitably comes?
Who is brave enough to play dice with football?
EPILOGUE: A FOOTBALL TEAM IS NOT A RACEHORSE
Sacchi famously once said that ‘a jockey does not have to have been a horse’. His choice of metaphor tells us all we need to know. A football team is not a racehorse. It is not an animal to be steered and controlled. Sacchi put blinkers on his players to keep them from playing too much. He had already mapped their trajectory for them. He knew the outcome in advance.
A football match is not a horse race — some linear progression from A to B. Sacchi’s fantasies of control permeate through his method. But it is us — to satisfy those same fantasies — who have praised, copied and repeated his method for so long.
