Have we reached peak pressing point?
When Spain were at their peak
the fear was occasionally expressed,
particularly among British critics, that
if teams could retain possession so
well then football was in danger of
taking on the dynamic of basketball.
One team would have an attack,
then the other would have an attack,
and so on and so on, rather than the
physical and tactical midfield battles
that seemed so essential to the sport.
A decade on, that seems a
remarkable concern to have had.
It is true that roughly one in six
Premier League games features a
split of possession that is greater than
70-30 – which doesn’t necessarily
make for an enthralling spectacle –
but the sport that football can most
resemble in this case is handball,
with the attacking team passing
constantly around the defensive
line, hoping to provoke a space
that can be exploited.
At elite level, sport is now primarily
about transitions, which makes sense.
When one team finds a successful
way to play, that mode is popularised,
and then another team finds a way to
combat it. A possession-driven style
is therefore combatted by working
out ways of interrupting the flow
of passes, pressing hard, breaking
patterns, winning the ball back and
counter-attacking quickly. This is whypressing, in its various forms, has
come to dominate at the highest level
of the game and why those managers
who are reluctant to press high, most
notably Jose Mourinho, have come to
feel slightly old-fashioned.
Such matters are rarely clear cut
and modern football, interlocked as
it is across so many countries, is a
complex network of competing
impulses. However, the symbolic
moment when it became apparent
that the dominance of the Pep
Guardiola-mode of possession
football was at an end came in a
Champions League semi-final in
2014, when his Bayern Munich side
were eviscerated on the break by
Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid.
This wasn’t an opponent sitting
deep and absorbing the punches; it
was a 4-0 hammering. And that
it was led by a graduate of Arrigo
Sacchi’s Milan was appropriate –
even if Ancelotti has tended to be
an easy-going pragmatist rather
than the sort of driven obsessive
who could have imposed a hard
press as a consistent policy.
What was particularly strikingAt elite level, sport is now
primarily about transitions
Jonathan
WILSON
TECHNICALLY SPEAKINGPressing matters
...Jurgen Klopp
(left) and Ralph
HasenhuttlTHE WORLD THIS MONTH
was how Madrid themselves, then
under Mourinho, had been
hammered in the semi-finals the
previous season, beaten 4-1 in the
first leg by the ferocious press of
Borussia Dortmund. That evolution
raises questions about where
Barcelona will go next, given their
appointment of coach Quique Setien,
who appears an adherent to the old
school of radical possession football.
That Dortmund side were, of
course, led by Jurgen Klopp, and
that semi-final was the first concrete
sign that the German school of
pressing might have a significant
influence outside the Bundesliga.
But Germany’s attitude to pressing
was always a little odd.
When Bayern won three European
Cups in a row, between 1974 and
1976, it was widely seen as being a
continuation of the “Total Football”
tradition. That was true in the sense
that they prioritised possession and
the manipulation of position on the
field, but they eschewed the hard
press of Ajax.
Pressing in Germany was for a long
time an outsider pursuit, making its
first impact in the late 1980s as
Helmut Gross, a structural engineer
who had essentially taught himself
tactical theory, and Ralf Rangnick,
who had been fascinated by pressing
since the lower-league side of which
he was player-coach played Valeriy
Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kiev in a
friendly, took up roles at Stuttgart.
Volker Finke, who had never played
football at the highest level, had
notable success with a pressing game
while coach at Freiburg, leading themThe end...Sergio Ramos celebrates
scoring for Real Madrid against
Bayern Munich in 2014