For many years we've become accustomed to seeing pictures like this, a team in possession of the ball pinning the opponent back in their half with 5 players positioned horizontally in front of the line of defence. The players are spaced rationally in geometrically equal distances from each other and occupy the same zones in the structure. Football tactics became homogenous, globalised and boring.
We could be entering an age where it is no longer necessary for an 'optimal' attacking structure, some might argue that it was never necessary. As the lines between defence and midfield get smaller and smaller, players need to find solutions in the toughest tactical landscape the game has ever been in, whether we see a radical shift in the way teams organise themselves in the attacking phase is yet to be seen. In this article I'm going to discuss how tactical content and data has influenced our way of seeing football and if the next tactical shift in Europe is a mutation of positionalism and relationism.
The structure became the game's showpiece, we were made to believe that it gave birth to the scintillating exchanges we saw in the early years of positional dominance half way through the last decade. The half spaces revolutionised the way people thought about football, an example of how new concise footballing terminology opened up an array of solutions and ways to think about structured attack that we'd never been exposed to before. Coaches and analysts became obsessed with the creation of superiorities and systematic advantages, which made positional football easier to understand, quicker to assimilate and was able to import concepts wholesale from one group of players and culture to another.
Football has become about rationally occupying space and supporting the ball carrier by positioning ourselves on staggered lines of press, on different heights of the team, in order to achieve the positional superiority in a specific band of the pitch. Everything is done in pursuit of a clean progression of the ball, like Ricardo La Volpe's invention of La Saldia Lavolpiana, dropping the pivot alongside the CB in build up to create the initial superiority (3v2). Football has become a game geared towards the creation of superiorities and how best to exploit them, this idea that the game can be broken down into 3v3s or 4v4s on the overloaded side and 2v1s on the underloaded side, 11v11 is rarely adopted as the main reference.
The half spaces are so important because it allowed a player to receive the ball in a position where they had 360 degrees of orientation, they have a better body orientation in relation to the goal and their passing options. A player on the touchline can only move the ball forwards, backwards or infield (into pressure) and these are all easily defendable, a player operating centrally has more options but might not have full field of vision and can get caught up in the congested nature of the game.
A player in the half space can orientate their body towards passing options, connect with players infield, receive on back foot, turn with space ahead between lines and see players arriving into spaces beside him. They have a better range of options and movements of players into these areas can allow a team to progress more dynamically in a zonal structure. The amount of space the ball carrier can't see from the half space is much smaller, he has a view towards goal and diagonally of open field, operating with less distance to the touchline but facing away from it.
This is an example of how the half spaces and '5 lines of positional attack' are used to maximise the quantity of space that is now exposed to the ball carrier. This is a mode of achieving positional excellence in such finding and maximising space within a team's defensive structure. Players were staggered on different lines of press to aid the up back and through and third man combinations that have become part of universal coaching practise. Some of the best affordances are diagonal- piercing inside the opponents defensive structure rather than only vertically.
These exact concepts have been at the heart of reductionist tactical analysis content that has turned many of us into consumers of football and not enjoyers of the spectacle. I grew up with TIFO, Joe Devine's silky voice coupled with Alex Stewart's encyclopaedic football brain, excellent YouTube channels that fuelled my interest in tactical analysis and not to mention websites such as Spielverlagerung which produced some of the most extensive, well written and thought provoking articles that I had ever read on football tactics and methodology.
I developed an obsession for detail and I could now no longer concentrate my attention to just the player with the ball at his feet. Many of us stopped watching the ball carrier, instead we would scan around the tv screen looking at the players off the ball and fixate on what they were doing, where they were in relation to the 'organisation' and why to see if we recognised patterns and mechanisms. If anything our screens weren't big enough to truly appreciate what was going on, hence why WyScout and tactical cameras on high vantage points became incredibly popular.
Somewhere along the line the analysis started to cloud our judgement, we was overexposed to tactical content to the point where we separated the emotion of the game from the tactical paradigm. We had learnt about the game from terminology and concepts that were not only fixed in nature but were concise in name. As I've mentioned before languages like English and German, that have had a big influence in shaping the terminology of modern tactics, are quite concise languages whereas latin languages are more subjective and open to interpretation, they have names for functions not mechanisms and metaphors for tactical concepts instead. For example, in Spanish they say tiar parades - to throw down walls- a playful metaphor referring to a way of breaking down defence through forward tableas.
The attacking structures and fixed 5 lanes of positional attack made games dull and tedious to watch, i grew tired of watching sideways passes against a mid block who had no intention of pressing and would let the opponent have space infront of their block, so they can deter them from finding affordances through and over. The systematic advantages of the 5:5 split between players infront and behind the ball meant that 2-3-5 and 3-2-5 became the most effective system available, we've now arrived at a point where football is so homogenised that we don't talk about formations anymore or systems in the attacking phase.
As Antonio Gagliardi said, ''a role in modern football is no longer a position but a function", the idea of a player playing in a position in a numerical formation of players is obsolete, a player will move inside or outside the pitch 10 yards to occupy a new zone when the team transitions into its structure in the next part of their attacking phase. You could watch Man City, Arsenal or Tottenham and know exactly which 'functions' these players would perform before a ball is even kick, you know Porro and Udogie will move inside every time, you know when Maddision will drop wider so the winger can stay high, these movements are far too predictable and has made games easier to analyse.
Is this what we are stuck with? Lifeless, dull and tedious football, everything is based on the opponent rather than being your own protagonist, waiting for the opponent, waiting for certain defensive actions, behaviours or triggers to accelerate the build up and use robotic mechanisms to unlock these tactical stalemates. Mirrored tactics means the game is left without artists, we have become consumers of tactical content and this has damaged the game more than a lot of people realise. This is where football wants to go, homogenous and globalised practise. They want football to look the same everywhere, coaches are educated the same and the game in tactical media is spoken about with shared terminology and theory.
De Zerbi spoke a lot about the concept of 'gioco di attesa'- game of patience- which provoked me into studying how he used this in his build up. We've spoken for many years about 'La Pausa', I had never associated it with positionalism because the ball retention is used as a tool to dictate tempo and rotate positions so a team can transition from one structure to another, I/e- when a team moves from it's build up shape with more players committed deeper to create a clean progression to a structure where 5 or 6 players are kept high between the lines. La Pausa is the individual's capability to handle the rhythm of the game, how he feels and interprets the game from his own intuition. Even the finest functional teams for example depend on an autonomy of players to use La Pausa in their plays and interpret the environment before accelerating with Tableas.
De Zerbi was using La Pausa to accelerate attacking actions as well, however achieved in a much more systematic and less individual led way. The Shaktar CB's play between each other several times before drawing out the pressure, this is the queue to accelerate the action where the 6 drops to find the other CB as the third man who can drive forward to draw out another player thus creating space in between the lines. Or when De Zerbi orders his defenders to put their sole on the ball, to entice pressure and manufacture space artificially.
La Pausa is no longer used as a tool for a player to slow the game in relation to how they perceive the game, space and time and seek emergent affordances like a give and go or a diagonal, but instead to manufacture space for players operating on higher lines in the teams structure. Players are put under more stress, they need to perform these actions automatically, we completely removed the emotional considerations of a player in favour of overloading them with fixed instructions adhering to the zone attack. Players are forced to think more and perceive less, this is how positionalism is pasteurising individual actions.
This reductionist attitude is reflected in analysis and coaching, coaches want more control than ever before, it's not just control of the ball they are after but control of the individuals decision making process. Look at this example from Luis Enrique when he was with the Spain national team, he guides the session from a high vantage point and links the players up to headphones, he gives tactical solutions to the players more than he does 'coaching'. He manipulates the environment to be the protagonist, not the players.
If you think that this is sinister, in his most recent documentary he is filmed saying in a meeting with his technical staff after watching back clips from a PSG game where a team broke their counter press that any player who doesn't put counter pressure should get an electric shock. Again, it feeds into this narrative that coaches want more control over a players brain, over obsession of assimilating a 'complete' game model shows us what lengths coaches will consider going to. There is no way this can be any good for a players development and the relationship with the game.
I get a lot of questions from coaches wanting to know how to coach relationism and they often ask me for exercises to template, this defeats the object of what we're trying to move away from in football currently. As coaches we should want to escape from reductionist content, universal practises and scripted outcomes. We need to return to a game where the actions that emerge on the pitch are organic and a result of strong sociological dynamics, where players are attended to each others eccentricities. We have developed this behaviour through tactical media to overlook the fundamentals of human interaction and the phenomenon because we're thirsty for knowledge of the intricacies of the game and its methodological tools.
There are plenty of examples of tactical analysts on X who see a very limited picture of football and to coin a very appropriate Portuguese idiom- 'they believe that they are the last Coco-Cola in the desert'. Raj Chohan was speaking about André's struggles lately at Wolves since moving from Flu, who played the best football in South America over the past 3 seasons, he says his brain ''cant assimilate'' all the information on the pitch because he opts for more local ball zone connections than longer passes in behind or finding an underloaded player. The idea that a professional player can't assimilate an action is very harshly worded, now he is in England he is expected to think more about systematic advantages rather than perceive the environment where he thrives in.
The opinion he has doesn't bother me, it's the wording and the entitlement a lot of these 'analysts' think they should have when they scrutinise a player or coach, who performs in a very complex and hostile environment affected by several overarching factors. ''Not being able to assimilate'' something infers that he is incompetent, an example of how the human aspect is removed from our reductionist and one dimensional way of viewing football, we forget that humans aren't an abstract thing and the way a form of life performs actions is influenced by their environment. But if a player doesn't fit into the mechanics of the Eurocentric 3-2-5 , third man and overload to isolate behaviours then he must not be able to 'assimilate' it in his tiny mind.
This extends to the role hard data has had in tactical media, certain metrics are shoe horned into argumrnts to justify the need for reductionist content and that coherent data supports what we see on the pitch, which isn't always entirely accurate. Tactical content has created a career path for people in the media, there is a big market for it on platforms such as X and organisations like The Athletic have an army of analysts in both the tactical and data science realm who all fall back on the hard data for evidence in their work. Having so many talented data analysts in the industry has hindered the sport, taking the sensitivity out of the spectacle.
One good example of how hard data doesn't always support a footballing argument was a tweet from Jon Mckenzie recently, he had reposted a data set of the 20 Premier league team's on the ball vertical compactness- the difference between the height of their defensive line average in possession vs the average height of their most offensive line. What we saw from the data was City with the lowest compactness with 29.53M, meaning that they play with all 10 players in the opposition half with a very aggressive defensive line, where most of the other teams sat between 35.5 and 38 meters which is considered average.
This led Jon to use this data to infer as a way to make a point about the tactical diversity currently in the Premier League, ''For all the people that claim everyone tries to play like Pep now, they still overlook quite how radically his approach is". To which I pondered, surely this data is presented like this because of how much space the opponent is willing to concede to City compared to other teams? The narrative surrounding teams imitating Pep is to do with teams deploying the same mirrored structures that we see in games, which is more relevant to this argument than the data provided. English football is spoilt with riches and is the epicentre of global football, but i wouldn't say there is much tactical diversity on our shores.
I'm very interested in the data, especially platforms like Soccerment who pioneered with some very interesting metrics a few seasons ago such as field tilt, gegenpressing intensity and expected threat which I believe are more relevant statistics that can help you understand a teams play style a lot better than established metrics from the last decade like PPDA, progressive passes per 90 and possession percentages. I'm not someone who rejects the use of data in football, but I definitely think we are far too influenced by it and therefore has clouded our judgement when it comes to making opinions about the game tactically or individual players.
Football can be spoken about through several different paradigms, we can explore it through the tactical, technical or psychological paradigms, a philosophical, socio-cultural or artistic one and even aesthetically. But the most important thing is that human interaction and forms of life is at the nucleus of everything, this is where the real learning about the game is done, not in the reductionist tactical content we've come to consume. This is the biggest mentality shift coaches have to go through when they look to embrace a relationist model, the kind of football that enhances the qualities, emotions and imagination of the player, acting from their own spontaneity and creative being. In other words, the sort of stuff you see less and less of in football today.
Rosisky picks the ball up and plays a toco y me voy tabela and a double tabela and ends up in behind the defence to score, scintillating exchanges where the picture of the game completely changes in a matter of seconds. Again, this is where La Pausa was so important before accelerating up the pitch with these vertical tableas and give and go's. This football is highly inventive, eye catching and flamboyant, no defender wants to be on the end of a move like that, concepts like diagonality are weaponised to enhance generation of optimal progression routes, rather than the fixed triangle in the half and wide spaces I alluded to earlier waiting for the gap in the defensive structure.
Wenger's football clearly resonates with a lot of football enjoyers, perhaps there is an element of nostalgia- players like Santi Cazorla, Samir Nasri and Rosisky were all tokens of the time, every time you uncover footage of their games you feel like you've opened up a time capsule in your subconscious. I believe its a sentiment that goes beyond the feeling of nostalgia, this football has an effect on us because it resonates with a certain culture, the child inside of us identifies with it intensely. We have no other choice than to recreate what was in the past, to resonate with that culture, so we can take advantage of the characteristics of our players and on a deeper level- our people.
The music industry is very much like football, ask yourself why do all the new rock bands sound the same, it's because the industry doesn't like mavericks. I grew up on rock artists that didn't conform to how they were expected to behave, they were renegades, in such the most gifted footballers shared rock star status. The industry doesn't like these guys because they can't control them, just like the tactical paradigm in football. They can mould them into whoever they like without much resistance, because the system and the tactical formation is at the heart of everything (not the individual) whether it's Jack Grealish being confined to being a touchline hugging winger or Damiano David of Maneskin being moulded into the 'Italian Harry Styles', wear the same clothes and copy his hair and makeup.
That's not to say that Arsenal team was full of mavericks, not by a long shot, but I'm talking more about the idea of imposed control that has crept into the game in the modern era. Control is the football term of the age, the game is all about how much one team has and how little control they can give to the other team, in all four phases of the game- not just the possession phase. That's why teams are incredibly more aggressive from their rest defence, the vertical compactness of the team (like in Jon's example) is getting smaller affording the opponent less control. Everything has to be systematically perfect for the the team to function in this 4 phase cycle between possession, out of possession and transitions between both structures and transition to both goals. The player has a conscious responsibility to all this for 90 minutes, every decision has a counter decision that was pre meditated and imposed by the coach.
The infamous Wilshire goal vs Norwich is a summary of footballing excellence, a symphony of artists contributing to the melody in near perfect harmony, 11 years later its still chilling to watch. The players produce the harmony, there is no need for the coach to turn up with the lyric sheet- or in other words provide the team with a tactical solution to beat Norwich's low block. The players have artistic control of what they do with the ball, they conduct their movements in coordination to each other, how attuned they are to the affordances in the environment and most important of all they are in control of their destiny. This team was able to harness a form of life.
The only modern team that manages to encapsulate this expression of football is Scaloni's Argentina, they are able harness a form of life and exploit historical and socio-cultural tendencies, in which these invite the players opportunities to act that resonate with the disposition of Argentinian footballers. They express culturally significant values in the way that they play, resonating intimately with the Argentinian people and their football culture, nurtured by an optimal fit between the action capabilities of the players and the shared intention of everyone who collaborates in these attacking moves.
Scaloni's Argentina rebel against the globalisation and homogenisation of European tactical models, as Mark O' Sullivan mentions in his paper- ''he fosters opportunities for players inhabiting a complex system to directly perceive affordances in the game, based not on second hand information or external influence". Instead of acting from reductionist coaching solutions, they act from their primary information- their game experience and the scent of the game- and their own knowledge, capabilities and shared intention. This makes their attacking moves look telepathic, they see queues and behaviours that you wouldn't spot with a naked eye, yet they are so attended to each others eccentricities that the play develops and flourishes.
Look at this exchange in Argentina's game, Mac Allister is superb, he scans to see where his teammate is he moves towards the ball to attract the attention of the midfielder and flicks the ball round him into the path of his teammate who is brought down just as he's about to offer the toco y me voy - tabela. In this short move 3-4 players were able to connect simultaneously whilst progressing diagonally up the pitch, the game is in relationship between the players. There are plenty examples of moves like these, also the beautiful Messi, double tabela and wrapped finish goals from outside the box that blow up X during every international break.
A question we can ask ourselves is how can we mutate between relationism and positionalism? Especially given that both paradigms are two different interpretations of the same shared pursuit- possession football and the idea of being protagonist. Relationism can inspire an unprecedented psychological shift in the way tactics and the game is understood and spoken about, especially in reductionist tactical media. If Total football was 'football utopia', when did we begin to move away from its essence? When did the structure that was imposed by coach become more important than the actions that were performed within it?
I had always believed in the 'collective idea' and that the individual can thrive within it, the team having a coherent idea and ethos that exploited the qualities of its most decisive players arriving into the most damaging positions on the pitch. Then I started watching games and no longer felt excited by the spectacle, I became significantly less happy coaching and taking sessions so I looked to the professional game for stimuli and answers, only to be left disappointed. Football needs not only new ideas but those ideas that can resonate with a specific culture, escapism back to a time before reductionist positional coaching, tactical content and universal constraints- the two touchism.
Relationist tendencies can exist within positionalism, the relationships between players must thrive for them to play from shared intention and harness intuition, there must be a respect between space and functionalism that doesn't exist in the positional game. You have two contrasting school's of thought, one playing idea concentrated around the creation of space in relation to its structure, the other concentrating on local connections and relating in the ball zone in spite of space and structure. The players must be able to relate and play together but also respect structure.
The positional scaffolding of the 2-3-5 and 3-2-5 is removed, instead we should think about having a team of shared of both functional and positional players to encourage transient actions. Perhaps a team implements a 'horse shoe structure', 3 or 4 defenders who always start at the base of the team and provide full width and 2 attackers pinned on the offensive line- the players in between are the functional players, they have no reference to position or space but can move with the ball and congest around the ball and encourage diagonality into the attackers. As a definition of 'functional player' we can water it down to suggesting its a player that is given 'free reign', where in reality it means that a player is more collaborative and active in the ebbs and flows of the teams attacking current than a positional one, who establishes the coaches' picture.
We see in Diniz's Cruziero the role that Perriera has, he picks the ball up from the goalkeeper and acts as the teams initiator before pushing back into the crowded area, playing in the chaos and offering tabelas rather than avoiding them. There's a need for players who infiltrate and invade spaces in football, their greatest reference is the ball and have just as profound a relationship with it than any other player. Football played to feet rather than space, at the centre of 'genius'- the whole team moves and flows around the frantic rhythm of movements of the teams current. The player is empowered, he is the protagonist.
Since Diniz took over at Cruzeiro a short while ago we have been exposed to more of the same blissful player led moves that we were witness to during his time at Fluminense, they've embraced his ideas quickly and its leading to some very fluent and awe inspiring football. One of the exchanges that caught my attention was their Paralela move in build up, given that structured build up in Europe won't disappear anytime soon (due to the quality of pressing structures) new innovative and deceptive ways of baiting and beating pressure to create depth in behind with a paralel could be something that positional coaches would look to implement.
The idea of the paralela is to recreate a futsal dynamic, the idea of universal players with constant exchanges of positioning and roles in response to receiving in reduced spaces. The paralela opens up possibilities for diagonals and fast vertical tabelas to get up the pitch. Harnessing the value that constant changes of movement have on a teams attacking play, in the same way La Pausa on the touchline is used as a medium of interpreting the environment and waiting for the connection before accelerating with the toco y me voy- tabela and diagonal progression.
Relationism abandons the space- player -structure dynamic evident in most teams, intuition allows for greater fluency and human interactions, players find solutions in the subnormal environment with local structures becoming emergent. Instead of giving players pre defined solutions, the coach can encourage realionist tendencies by reminding them of the affordances in the environment, getting them to find opportunities to link the dots between the toco y me voy - tabela and Escadinha - corta luz. Relationism is about movement and change, the process of becoming rather than being.
I really enjoyed a move I saw from a goal in Brentford's game against Bournemouth recently, I uploaded it to X and it received a very positive response until it was taken down for copyright. The affordances of playing through, coupled with this deceptive movement and line of three is able to free a player inside of Bournemouth's defensive structure. It would be great to see more dummy moves (corta luz) in the Premier league, watching moves like this are so much more aesthetically pleasing than the same 8 underlap or winger out to in run, then cutback finish goal you see scored everything. Functionalism can exist within a positional playing idea and the people now want something more.
As the best teams continue to look for alternative modes of attacking, we've started to see more European teams embrace the tilt this season. It's the natural development of football that we go back to player empowerment and shared intention with deception as a medium of beating lines of pressure, not necessarily as an alternative to systematic advantages and the sectorization of football (the 3v3 and 4v4s across the pitch) but as another way to compliment our attacking play and get the best out of the characteristics and relationships formed between players.
We should be encouraging strengthened player relationships, rather than seeing the far winger or interior holding positions away from the ball solely as a means of occupying space and as a result being disconnected from the spectacle. We should encourage our most technical players to join in with each other, they are not getting in each others way or playing in cul - de - sacs , they are playing with spontaneity and sharing the responsibility of the attack. You don't need elite problem solvers or to fall back on fixed patterns to beat pressure, the play is reliant on players being attuned to each other and moving between the ebbs and flows of the game.
The criticism that Real Madrid this season lack balance and the addition of Mbappe has made them worse shows how misunderstood a lot of people are about the role of human interaction in football, a direct result of our exposure to nothing but geometrically perfect Positional play. Mbappe, Vinicius, Rodrigo and Bellingham all attacking on the left flank is not flawed attack, these clusters and overloads occur organically due to the freedom afforded by the coach, they are allowed to interpret the game with the ball. I would not make a case for calling Madrid a relationist team, although a lot of people have lazily cited relationism as the reason for their troubles, a lot of people don't understand that there is a difference between a relational attack and an incoherent attack- functional vs dysfunctional attack.
The lack of output is not because they play with too many 'functional players', the abundance of these players is Madrid's biggest strength. No defence in the world would want to play in tight spaces against them if they were able of finding creative and deceptive solutions against the 'state of play'- when the defensive picture is set and everything looks to be under control. The game gets slowed down, the queue for La pausa, then a fast toco y me voy- tabela to arrive into the cluster, then the players seek local affordances- a flick or dummied Escadinha before arriving at goal- suddenly in a matter of 5 or 6 seconds the situation went from a state of control, to unbalance and disorder.
Moves like this from the game against FC Barcelona show me that this is the team that Madrid could be, the diagonal forming on the left and the players seek solutions from their own creative being, its a shame that these actions aren't as consistent as they should be. Even though the aggressive tilt or clusters that Madrid have been critiqued for is not present, the emergent action is a result of the dynamic between Mendy, Camavinga and Mbappe. Perhaps the tilt or how many players that are committed to it isn't whats important, its just an ecosystem where these transient actions can emerge more frequently.
Juventus have been seen implementing the tilt with a bias towards the left side with Cambiasso and Yildiz, plus the CB, two midfielders and Koopmeiners. They also use the Yo-Yo principle, when the ball goes to the other side instead of using that as an opportunity to attack the underloaded side the ball would be returned to the left flank where the affordances and overloads were. The smaller distances between players allow for Juve to associate themselves better with the ball, play is more dynamic due to the increase of forward movement after releasing the ball, progressive routes or alignments of players diagonally towards goal also begin to emerge.
One of my followers on X got in contact and asked about some of the terminology surrounding tilts, his interpretation made me curious. In my recent YouTube video about Racing Santander I had described the 10 players relating on the left side of the pitch as a 'hard tilt'. He enquired that if hard tilts exist, would the idea of medium or soft tits exist to differentiate between them. I have never used the terms medium or soft tilt before, I had used hard tilt to place emphasis on the aggressive tilt of players to one side of the pitch - all 10- as in some cases there are tilts with 7 or 8 players which is less aggressive.
I see a lot of these soft or less aggressive in European teams, where structure is not completely abandoned but there are moments of the game where they will use less width and cluster the ball side, tilting allows for the structure is imagined differently. Less aggressive tilts might mean an Escadinha or double Escadinha is less likely to emerge due to the lack of concentration of players in the ball zone, but the tilt will still result in several transient and player led actions to penetrate through deep blocks; paralelas, scooping and tabelas as discussed earlier.
For both Relationism and Positionalism to coexist within a playing idea we must abandon the concept of 'game model' and adopt something akin to playing language as an alternative. Providing a common language can encourage an organic way of understanding and knowledge of the game, stimulate creative attacking ideas in which players can use to create share outcomes and collaborate in intrinsic attacking moves. A Game Model would imply something is pre defined and what is practised in coaching is regulated to this template. A whole generation of players are exposed to the templated model, we must work to return to an era of cultural expression, the pride of our authenticity and footballing traditions- in the mirage of modernity.
Adopting playing language allows for a framework for players to operate within and find solutions from their own creative being and relative to their understanding of the environment. Playing language is the best way for players to get attuned to each others eccentricities, players should perceive more and think less. Language is more associative and playful than a game model or fixed tactical concept where rules and the template must be adhered to. This is where positionalism can learn a lot from relationism, just because the structure is there doesn't mean it always has to be adhered to, there can be negotiation within the structure. Doing so, we tear down the 5 fixed lanes of attack and play from emotion not rationality, diagonal rather than sideways and changing the gears with La pausa, movement, tablea rather than zone occupation and disengaged player relations.
On X I had spoken to Joe Dennison, an English coach currently working in Malawi in Africa, he shared with his followers his interpretation of 'playing language' which provoked a lot of curiosity. He uses different phrases to capture his players imagination about a footballing concept, ''the ball is the sun'' and ''share the power'' is used for encouraging local connections and clusters, ''short switch'' is used for the yo-yo in relationism, ''calm the storm'' and ''dancing on the edge'' is used for tilting and bringing the team closer together.
He talks about the sun represents the ball as being a powerful source of energy for his players and is the guiding light and reference to which they play around, there are many planets in the solar system but only one sun. In such the football must be respected, without it he claims our life form (our game) would not exist, in such interactions with the ball and offering close options are encouraged. Language can be reviewed and adapted, in the same way a language has developed since its inception, we are influenced by new ways of communicating, new ways of doing and words that come in and out of use.
To summarise, I think the next tactical development in Europe is coaches allowing for more player led actions and harnessing player relations in addition to the 'optimal' positional structures we see today. I don't think we will abandon tactical theory surrounding creation of superiorities and the 5 lanes of positional attack. I believe that we will see more coaches become interested in ecological dynamics and socio-cultural constraints in order to challenge the embedded culture of reductionist coaching and content. The biggest tactical development of the last decade was acknowledging that the idea of formations have ceased to exist in football, replaced by mechanisms as Gagliardi said, now its a case of functionalism and transient actions will develop to replace the pre defined and structure emergent ones.
The greatest shift has to come from the federations themselves, as I've mentioned before coaching education is very biased towards the creation of positional coaches and the way in which we speak about football in terminology and theory has been institutionalised. I will finish with a tweet from Cesc Fabregas that one of my followers Tom_Bdt sent to me which I really resonated with. He was responding to Samir Nasri, who had tagged him under a retro Arsenal goal video they'd both been involved in- with Cesc scoring- to which Cesc replies- ''pass and move, pass and move my friend. Nowadays they wouldn't allow you to do this".
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