When does utopia become dystopia? When football is institutionalised to the point where everybody thinks exactly the same.
MY PERSONAL JOURNAL
Lets rewind a little, I decided to start journaling my thoughts about football on X (and subsequently this blog) to articulate how I've come to feel about the game over the last 15-18 months. In that time I've coached, a UEFA C licence, been doing analyst work in the BUCS Premier (the highest level of university football in England), been studying at university, then was differed 'held back' a year and consistently been taking setbacks as I try to find a way to make a career out of my greatest passion, football.
After the resumption of football during the pandemic i started watching many leagues, European football always fascinated me but in this period i became truly immersed in it. I was inspired by watching Conte’s Inter, Gasperini’s Atalanta, Nagelsmann’s Leipzig, Bielsa’s swashbuckling Leeds, not to mention old videos of Sarri’s Napoli and Guardiola’s teams. This ultimately drew me to Juego de Posición, known globally as Positional play.
I developed an obsession of wanting to know as much about it as possible, to break down the collective idea of a team to the smallest detail . I loved reading tactical blogs or spending hours on Youtube content; engrossed in the articles of spielverlagerung, Total football analysis, Breaking the lines to name a few and of course Tifo (before The Athletic ruined it).
I began note taking, as well as watching any footage from various coaches’ training sessions, studying constraints led approach and methods used by Tuchel and also broadened my understanding of methodologies such as Tactical Periodisation and Microciclo Estructurado. I slowly started to think about how to assimilate this football and bringing these ideas to life. I lived and died by the third man, the pursuit and creation of superiority, the horizontal and vertical corridors of positionalism with its flawless attacking structures of 3-2-5 and 2-3-5.
When I first moved there, I watched even more football than ever, my evenings spent watching whatever match SKY, BT, Premier Sports had chosen. Gradually I started to unearth a pattern, watching them 2pm Ligue 1 mid table clashes, why do both of these teams look the same?
I pushed it to the back of my mind but the feeling kept reappearing, even further down the football pyramid, 3-2-5 vs 4-4-2 mid block or 5-4-1 low block, the 10 drops wide to get on the ball before playing back and moving back to his zone. All the movements I had seen before, I knew before watching a game where which player would operate, which full back moved inside and which full back attacked in behind, if the ST dropped to form the 4-2-2-2 box in build up, everything became robotic, staged and predictable. Mirrored tactics made me become disillusioned.
These doubts in Postionalism had not been new to me, during the last World Cup I started to consider an alternative argument. I had read an interview by Juanma Lillo, the current assistant of Pep Guardiola at Man City, in which he said “we have globalised Positional play, Brazil and Cameron could have swapped shirts at half time and you still wouldn’t have known which side was who”. A seed of doubt was planted in my subconscious, had the lines between rigidity and fluidity been blurred?
- Juanma Lillo: genuis.
This initially puzzled me, in an era of identity and philosophy the idea of the coach shone through, Ralph Ragnick spoke in a Coaches voice seminar about how his players need to be able to play ‘in schalf’ (in their sleep) high intensity counter pressing football, ‘’in their veins and in their hearts’’. Also that as coaches we should strive to implement our own identity, to have our players play in different colour shirts but still look recognisable from a tactical blueprint.
Lillo then went on to coach briefly in Qatar, i read a tactical analysis that a blogger had written on his team. I was confused that a manager who had worked with Guardiola, Sampaoli (two of the most positional coaches of the modern area), had pioneered positionalism in Spain in the 90s and in Columbia with Nacional had abandoned his ideals. Doing so, in pursuit of deciding that a wave of players playing with no structure improvising with no patterns or apparent ‘coaching’ was a better alternative.
This was my first encounter with Relationism. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time but eventually that chaos would shape how I began to think and question football. I was too blinded by the ‘brilliance’ of De Zerbi’s ‘gioco di attesa’ (game of patience) and how everything his sides did was gospel for my positional logic.
Whilst at University I was coaching at the time in a very positional team, they were U14’s and flying at the top of the league, the other two coaches were of positional logic but we often didn’t see eye to eye. I was using all of the positional exercises I had always used, instructing players on movements and where to be positioned. I’d get back to my small room at Uni from training late at night thinking tirelessly about what more I could do to give them the answers.
Enthusiasm had departed from my coaching and what got me hooked in the first place was the hunger to see my ideas come to life on the pitch no longer stimulated me. I looked at the professional game again to find new inspiration but was always left disappointed. I started to doubt my own ideals and question how much of what I was doing was just regurgitating what every other coach said or was doing.
- An example of one of my training excercises
Relationism began to rear its head again, this time through viral clips of Brazilian side Fluminense and then Swedish side Malmö, i was in ore of some of the exchanges, how fluid it looked, how easily they took apart the opponent with 8 or 9 players playing on the touchline. I began to read Jamie Hamilton and Gorka Melchor's articles and slowly uncovered the meaning behind the chaos I was seeing and became exposed to new nuances and terminology that grabbed my attention. I was now being exposed to the unknown, something completely alien and it blew my imagination wide open.
I asked myself why it resonated with me, as it completely went against all I ever believed in as a coach. Does it go back to my school days? I grew up in London where we played in the
estate, the cages, FIFA street was the go to video game of that time and my favourite player was Gareth Bale. I moved to the countryside, which felt like a foreign country compared to what I had left behind in London, and found myself living in a calder-sac, there was no street football and at school the teachers had banned it.
I moved again back closer to London, more urbanised, more concrete and less green, we played in the cage at lunch and felt liberty from it. There was a boy in my year called Andrew, you’d have mistaken him for Neymar in the cage, he danced past players as if they weren’t there. Some days he looked untouchable, for the school team however he was put at LB and was a ghost in most games. The cages and those Year 10vs 11 'classicos' were as close as we ever came to the adrenaline, excitement and purity of the beautiful game.
I began to identify myself with Relationism because embracing the unknown takes courage, but mostly because by doing so you are rejecting the status quo, rejecting conformity and modernity in pursuit of something that feels pure and not manufactured. Some politicians and activists make a career out of oppressing what has become the norm, it gives them a purpose to wake up in the morning with something to fight against rather than accept what society has become.
Football has always been a game where David can beat Goliath and where the establishment doesn't always have to win. Football loves new ideas but it also loves globalisation and then conformity. The world itself seems to be in its own relationist/positionalist tug of war, people can have freedom but as long as it fits into the ideals and parameters of how we (the establishment) want you to live. When does Utopia become dystopia? When Football becomes institutionalised to the point where everybody thinks the same.
A REGURGITATION OF IDEAS
In today’s game none of the 22 players on the pitch are the true protagonists, only the 2 men in the opposing technical areas. Therefore, the production of chances in Relationism is taken back by the game's true protagonists. In Football, mirrored tactics have become the norm, I've lost count how many times I've turned on to see two 3-2-5's playing against each other or building up with the same scripts and queues as eluded to earlier. This moves away from the essence of Cryuff, total football wasn't conceived to be rigid yet this is what the concept has mutated into.
The Player is treated as an abstract in positionalism and separate from the human, football is performed by human beings and they can be quite eccentric, which can be reflected in their decision making and creative process. Humans often thrive in environments of self expression, opposed to positional play where the environment and imposed parameters constraints these desired behaviours. Subjectivity, consciousness, all these concepts are being embodied on the pitch and the humanity aspect must be at the forefront of coaching practise.
Football is now seen through many different lenses and paradigms, we are told to consider the psychological and physiological in addition to the tactical/technical. However you could even go further and study the philosophical, or from an artistic or aesthetic perspective or social- cultural, in fact there are very few aspects of study that doesn't overlap with skill acquisition or sporting performance.
The education and conversations surrounding these topics must be more sophisticated and widely spoken, that's not to say all coaches should be trained physiologists or read the work of Karl Jung before training, but it would open up a better dialogue if we was more aware of the purpose of these paradigms rather than just using them in loose speech- like we do with a coach and his 'philosophy'. A coach talks about his philosophy but it actually has nothing to do with it, he's just describing a vague preference of how he wants his teams to play football. Philosophy is something far broader and complex, which as coaches we do not consider.
Everything that happens in positionalism is pre defined, the movements, the passing patterns, everything is afforded by the structure and not the behaviours of the player. A player's self expression, spontaneuiity and creativity is compromised in pursuit of globalised structure and repetitive actions. Games become tedious, dull and unappealing, this is why Relationism must disrupt the status quo.
This is bad for football and for the characteristics of the coaches that we produce, it bothers me that in Europe every single up and coming coach seems to have identical game models. In fact, in a room full of A licence candidates from any federation in Europe I can almost guarantee that all the coaches share an identical game model, not to mention their session plans or influences. The problem is not positionalism itself, yet tactical diversity has made way for tactical conformity.
Francesco Farioli: Clone?
However that's not the biggest problem, when coaches talk about positionalism they're speaking from outside or external influence, a lot of coaches form their playing idea now based on their studies and observing elite managers opposed to 'regurgitating' the ideas they were exposed to as a player. This puts an extra responsibility on coaching education, something that in my country is significantly overpriced and poor in quality. We don't like to admit it but as coaches our love for the game gets exploited, we pay extortionate amounts for courses (£650 to do the UEFA C Licence) to enter a profession where we are very replaceable, have little say or importance in the hierarchy of academy structure and the pay represents that.Who educates our coaches? The tutors offer very little value as well making a living from being cloned by the FA, I've met several educators who speak from the same script, "football is an invasion game" and death by four corner model. This isn’t a world I want to inhabit ; fans, analysts and coaches will grow tired of what the game is becoming, being able to be part of a revolution like this excites me.
- UEFA C Licence by the FA
HOW POSITIONISM COMPROMISES EXCEPTIONALITY
Brazil mastered and conquered world football for a few reasons; street football, encouragement of trickery, innovation, interpretation and their use of language. To attract and deceive has always been at the heart of Brazilian football, the skill and technical dazzle was slowly acquired by boys playing in the streets away from the institutionalised academy structures we see today, the rules of street football varied as much as it demanded creativity.
Who teaches these players how to nutmeg, pass inside or outside the foot, flick, faint, drag backs and who tells them when? It happens with spontaneity, none of this is learned in the academy environment (perhaps certain skills are refined but mainly through individual dedication) which caters more for the collective idea and in today's world the coach’s ego- patterns, structures, overarching sub principles.
Language is important to consider, Portuguese (as well as all the romance languages) is very emotive and descriptive where in English we are very concise. We went as far as giving players roles based solely on positions, or the areas they operate on the pitch; full back, central midfielder, winger, striker etc and we even went further by numbering them- you are a 6, an 8, a 10. In other footballing cultures players are given names such as Enganche, literally meaning hook (linking play between defence and midfield), Regista which translates to director in Italian (conducting the play as a deep midfielder would) as well as Metronome, Media Punta (half striker), Carillero (carrier).
These names give much more room for interpretation, they don’t focus on a pre-defined area or location of the pitch but instead functions that also gives players the licence to decide how they want to influence the game. This is different to the ‘functions’ seen in the positional game, where positions have less purpose, they perform movements and mechanisms in relation to the structure or a location/zone.
The same applies to coaching, in Italian it's common to hear coaches referred to as a 'Collaboratore Tecnico' - a technical collaborator. I think that's a much better title than being vaguely referred to as the first team coach. Instead of being delegated down tasks you instead collaborate and you give a bigger responsibility with assimilating the team's playing idea, as the title would suggest.
Exceptionalism was compromised in young players by several factors, the rise of new technology and young people’s access to it, limiting not just their time out playing football but also their individual creative process and imagination. Another reason is it became unsafe to play outside, increased crime and the urbanisation of towns and small cities across the world. Another reason was that it became harder for boys to interact with each other outside of the academy structure, the absence of street football has meant the spontaneity in football and execution of skill has suffered.
Globally we went through a major transition at youth level, in the mirage of modernity that positionalism proposes. Positional Play is imitated and rigidly sectionised training in academies, football is more about scripting, recognition and zone occupation. This has benefits, coaches give players less decisions to make themselves, nothing is left to improvisation (which is deemed a bad thing in football) and gives them more time to think about executing technique, knowing in good confidence where their teammates will be. On the contrary, it overloads players with tactical instructions and can increase their emotional fatigue and stress in recovery after games. All of this led to countries with rich footballing traditions being saturated by the dominance of positional play.
I do have to give the FA credit where it is due, up until 2014 kids as young as 8 or 9 played on 11 a side pitches and in 11 a side goals. Since then the 7 a side and 9 a side formats have been introduced to younger age groups and now we are starting to benefit from this. A number of exciting technical players such as Grealish, Bellingham and Musiala (yes he counts) have all come through in this decade.
Germany have adopted something similar, whee they play games at 3v3 format for younger age groups. However, the decreasing of pitch dimensions likened some football exercises to a basketball game (transition orientated and very back to front), limited space not only rationalises the game but also put an increased emphasis on the physical aspect. You depend less on creativity and intuition in favour of executing the technical and tactical (consistently), a team can easily reach the goal in a SSG in 4 or 5 passes, on the other hand these actions can be driven directly from the influence of the coach or their previous exposure to coaching principles.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
To summarise this unstructured and messy 'hit piece' on several aspects of football, skill acquisition and coaching practise, I felt it would be good to try and put in to words how I've come to feel so strongly about relationism and why it's touched me so profoundly. It's safe to say, I don't agree with what the system proposes about football. I was captivated and obsessed with Positional play for years but now when I watch a game it makes me feel emotionless, I used to watch games and I'd explode with ideas, now I bore of seeing the same episode over and over again.
I go back to a brief point I made, tactical diversity has made way for tactical conformity and relate that to Jamie Hamilton's work- "In relationism there is negotiation within the rules, just because a rule exists it doesn't need to be always adhered to". Maybe we could make sense of all this, positional football at it's best will always provoke me but I'd love to see a Europe that could adapt its model, be more fluid, elegant and less rigid as it did in the days of Cryuff, Michels and Total Voteball. Let the human flourish.
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