Positional Play

Johan Cruyff is regarded as one of the greatest players and coaches of all time. He is remembered for the very attractive, unique technical approach to football he employed at Barcelona, which he inherited from Rinus Michels’ ideology at Ajax.

This is why Ajax, historically, would forever be an essential piece to modern-day football.

Cruyff took the idea to Barcelona where he developed it. By carrying the Dutch philosophy or Ajax system to Barcelona, he also inspired other coaches at that time in Spain to adopt the philosophy. That is why, to date, it appears as if every LaLiga team adopted some variation of positional play, which casuals would be known to refer to as “Tiki Taka.”

In fact, the Spanish national team adopted this system of football as their philosophy for years, and this was made possible due to the midfield maestros of Iniesta and Xavi primarily, who pioneered this style of football under one of Cruyff’s notable protégé, Pep Josip Guardiola.

Guardiola, would later attempt to integrate his style of play at Barcelona which brought him European success twice, a treble and a historic quadruple and enabled him to triumph over Real Madrid in the El Classico games at any given opportunity.

He only failed at Bayern notably, trying to implement such a system as he did not have the profile of players he wanted, and Germany was accustomed to a more high volume, explosive type of attacking football, hence he tried to adapt.

Also, Bayern Munich’s board was not interested in dumping players that previously won them a domestic treble and did well in Europe because a manager of theirs believed they weren’t the “right profile.”

Pep Guardiola would eventually move on to Manchester City, where due to the amazing backing, availability of funds, a world-class coaching staff, scouting network and sporting director — he was able to build a team to work with his system.

Pep Guardiola is not the only notable coach to implement the philosophy of positional play in different variations. Recently, we’ve seen former Ajax coach and Manchester United coach, a Cruyff protègé as well as implementing this philosophy, the current Celtic Coach, Agne Postecoglu, Brighton Coach, Roberto De Zerbi, Mikel Arteta, a former assistant to Pep at Manchester City and former Barca coach who formed the MSN, Luis Enrique. These are a few off the top of my head.

Identities of popular leagues.

Before positional play’s rapid adoption, each league was known for a unique playing style and identity.

• England was known for the system of football called the “Second ball.” This had to do with launching the ball more often from goalkicks and expecting towering forwards to win duels and then progress the ball up the field, therefore beating a press. English football was described as direct and counter-attacking. It is never boring and full of so much adrenaline.

• Germany played a similar type of football that relied on player strength, breakneck pace off the counter in open spaces, and intense pressing. This is where the gegenpressing originated from, was developed, and implemented by Ralf Rangnick and the more popular Jürgen Klopp at Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool in the Premier League.

• Spanish football was a variation of the Dutch philosophy or positional play system. Described as boring sometimes, gradual and technical - Barca added a lot of flair to this type of football, which was easy on the eyes to watch and interesting. While Real Madrid stuck to a distinct counter-attackingg football style that has proven to be a kryptonite for the system.

• The Netherlands still play using their Totaalvoetbal, which is also known as Total Football. They believe in flexibility, ball retention, sustained by passing, and positional play.

When we talk about positional play, we mean several things.

Primarily:

• The ability of a team to progress the ball up the pitch via passing channels.
• Underloading and overloading different parts of the pitch to create spaces.
• Flexibility of the teammates to take up different positions and play to efficiency.
• Retention of the ball and the ability to create triangles, diamonds, and passing structures. Creating halfspaces.

Requirements to play positional play:

Positional play requires not just intelligent players but good passers of the ball, who can execute ball progression into space as this is a key feature, and also retain the ball in tight spaces. Positional play demands patience in the build-up phase and a lot of risky, otherwise obvious passes or press baits to divert the ball into underloaded sections. Some players naturally support this type of football due to their playstyle or profile. Some do not. These players can be trained on this system to understand positional play by zoning parts of the pitch, the traditional two men in the middle against a passing circle, and several other means.

The flow of positional play:

Positional play begins from playing out from the back, which is a fundamental aspect of the system. To do this, one would require a technically secure goalkeeper, central defensive midfielder, centre-back, and fullback.

In such a system, the importance of a Goalkeeper who excels with the ball at his feet and is intelligent, a good risk-taker, and a little bit press-resistant can not be overemphasised This enables you to generate numerical superiority. Numerical superiority in regard to positional play is a concept whereby players outnumber their opponents in a particular zone of the pitch, therefore dominating possession and creating overloads. The goalkeeper stepping either into midfield, a centre back or fullback role, distorts the pressing structure of the opposition, hence leading to the availability of a spareman that is available and unmarked.

Ball progression up the pitch is executed by the spareman acting either as the ball progressor or the decoy to create an opening for the player who is technically secure to move the ball up the pitch.

As progression occurs, there is a continuous interchange or swap between numerical superiority and positional superiority. Positional superiority is crucial in the final third and the opponents half to get players into halfspaces or zones where they have time on the ball to effectively create chances, shoot, or pose a threat to the opposition. In many cases, when you see a team implementing positional play with its most creative player available on the ball with time, this is due to the proper execution of positional superiority.

An example of this was Messi in Barcelona, under Pep Guardiola as a false nine. Despite all this.

Now, positional play isn’t always going to work as a charm by overloading, underloading, numerical superiority, and positional superiority alone. Although it enables a team to effectively edge its opponents.

This is why the last superiority in positional play, known as qualitative superiority, works. This is solely dependent on the quality of the players that you have. For example, by using positional superiority, you get a player behind the lines and against a defence, and by qualitative superiority, the player being a 1v1 specialist could effectively beat his man and create chances.

This is basically positional play in a nutshell despite the article being very sparse. I did drop references just in case you are interested in this type of article.

The style keeps involving every day, and there is so much I can only cover in one article. There are other aspects to the game, such as the adoption of inverted wing backs, centre backs that can play in a three man defence, flexible wingers, much recently the false centre back like we saw with Beckenbauer, and also under Cruyff replicated much recently with John Stones under Guardiola’s Manchester City.

Hope you enjoyed this one, see you in the next.