Why the 'do it all midfielder' never seems to live up to the hype
Midfielders with great statistical profiles are praised for being able to "dot it all." Then they move to big clubs and never seem to become the stars we expect them to become. Why not?
Last week Michael Caley and Mike Goodman released a fantastic episode of their Double Pivot Podcast.
The premise was about looking at midfielders, whom they had had previously touted, as at their previous clubs they had dominant on-ball statistical profiles but also had the defensive side of things as well. These guys are labelled as “do it all midfielders.” If you've followed Caley and Goodman on twitter over the years you would know they had long been advocating for bigger clubs to sign these players and eventually they did. Some for record fees. But in nearly every case the player didn’t turn into the star many were expecting them to be.
They wanted to know why that was. Was there something missing in the stats? Did they miss something when they watched them (and those guys watch a lot of football)? Was it tactical or were there other issues?
Being that Caley is a Spurs fan, the focus was mainly on Tanguy Ndombele and Giovanni Lo Celso, while touching on a few others including Paul Pogba. But the list is not exclusive to those three. The podcast focused on the tactical side among other things - perhaps Ndombele and Lo Celso just don’t fit into Antonio Conte’s style? But there were also other things at play. Lo Celso has dealt with injuries while Ndombele has fallen out with four Spurs managers in less than two years, suggesting the problem is probably him.
It’s a fascinating listen mostly because - aside from all the points they have = I think overall their conversation it only begins to scratch the surface of this question.
Why don’t these midfielders become the stars we expect them to be?
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot since listening to that episode and I’ve got a lot thoughts on it. A lot of those thoughts lead to the same place: how modern midfields are constructed at the top level vs a level below, the responsibilities that midfielders have at top clubs against what their responsibilities might be at lower club.
And of course there’s the biggest issue overall; how we as a collective seem to define the word midfielder. Or rather the fact that we lump several different positions and roles into one classification (midfielder), and once you’re classified as that, you’re expected to just play any of the roles that fit into that classification.
That right there is setting players up for failure.
For example, there’s no such thing as a right midfielder anymore. You’re now either a right wing, right back, or right wing back. We acknowledge that. But central midfield still hasn’t gotten that level of distinction. While central midfielders can be broken down into attacking midfielders, defensive midfielders, and box to box midfielders, the water becomes murkier when you play as part of a midfield three. And if you can play as a central midfielder in a three, surely you can play central midfield in a two.
Many players - including almost everyone on this list - have proven time and time again this is not the case, yet we still believe it to be true and hold the same expectations of them. Why?
As I thought about that I kept thinking back to this tweet from Kees van Hemmen about defensive midfielders.
It all starts from development and how midfielders break through. Most of the ones were looking at break through playing in a deep(er) role for a smaller club. Paul Pogba - who was very much viewed as playing in that midfield two especially when he was coming up at United - is a little different because he broke through at a larger club in Juventus, and they were playing with either a three man midfield, or a diamond.
These young players have great skill on the ball but very rarely does a young player breakthrough solely because of his on ball skills. If you’re good on the ball but not doing anything else, you have to be really damn good on the ball for the coach to look past that. Rather, in order for young players to play, they have to do what the coach wants them to do, that means running hard and doing their defensive duties which then show up in the stats.
The more the player plays, the more he starts to develop those on ball skills and become a big asset to his team. When you’re playing for a club like Lyon or Real Sociedad, it becomes clear to the coach that he’s got a pretty good player on his hands, and if you utilize him accordingly you’ll probably win more games.
Sometimes that means pushing a player further forward. Sometimes it means changing from a two man midfield to a 4-3-3 so there’s more coverage behind your good player. Sometimes it means asking your fullback to play more conservatively so your deeper midfielder can push forward more.
Sometimes you don’t change anything. You leave your budding star in that deeper role because you’ve taken a calculated risk that asking attacking and less defending will ultimately be better for you team. Usually that’s because the league you’re playing in isn’t strong enough to exploit that weakness. There’s a difference between good enough for Lyon and good enough for Manchester United.
The players obviously like this arrangement. They get to do more of the fun parts of the game that they’re really good at, and less of the things they don’t like doing (defending). Because they’re playing for mid-ish table clubs there’s enough games that they know they need to hunker down and put in a defensive shift in that it keeps their defensive numbers looking pretty solid.
The increased attacking responsibility boosts their profile and eventually they land their big move - and in this case, we’re focusing on players who’s big move takes them to England.
Typically these clubs are pretty set with their front three/four. They’re looking for more creativity or ball progression from their deeper players. They spend a lot of money on these players because that’s what they do. The player is highly touted. He’s not a 10, he’s a number 8 who can do it all. Sure his best moments have come when playing in a three but you go on Transfermarkt and see that he’s spent plenty of time playing deep in a 4-2-3-1 as well. This is exactly what we need!
The player knows the club is spending money for what they can do on the ball, not for their defending - which is something they have been happily doing less and less of as they’ve gotten older.
Only then the season starts and the club deploys them as a deep midfielder in some variation of a 4-2-3-1 formation. The player brings a lot to the attack but defensively he’s just not cutting it. This is where the warning signs should be obvious. Just because a player has played as part of a midfield two at some point in his career (usually the early parts) doesn’t mean he can still play there. Or that he should. In most cases, they players have evolved and became different players. They’ve focused more on developing the on ball parts of their game and not so much the defensive areas. Add that to the fact that they probably weren’t all that good at the defensive side of things to begin with, they were just merely ‘good enough.’ And there’s a huge difference between ‘good enough defensively’ to be able to play in a deep midfield role at a top club in England than at a mid-table club in Spain or France.
As such the best option would be to to play a 4-3-3 with your high priced midfielder playing as the most advanced. That doesn’t always work though, sometimes you already have that furthest forward attacking midfielder entrenched in the squad. If you play a 4-3-3 how will that work? But why should we have to be switching to a 4-3-3 to accommodate this guy? Why do we need other players to ‘unlock’ him? He was supposed to be someone who could ‘do it all!’
As I mentioned before, the podcast episode centered around Ndombele, Lo Celso, and Pogba but the list isn’t exclusive to them. Donny van de Beek is of the same mold. Dele Alli played deeper when he broke through but you would never put him there now. Bruno Fernandes often played in a two at Sporting but United hardly use him there and when he briefly does appear there you can see why1. Right now we hear a lot about how Hannibal Mejbri “can” play deeper, but do we really think that’s where he’ll end up? Hell no. Hell, even Christian Eriksen played in a two in his early days at Ajax.
For some like Bruno or early career Dele Alli the transition is easy. You can see their far more of a number 10/second striker type player than a midfielder. But for others like Pogba, Van de Beek, Ndombele, or Lo Celso it’s less clear. These players fall more onto the ‘attacking 8’ end of the spectrum than a true number 10, and thus they do their best work as the most advanced player in a midfield three.2
Suddenly in order to get the best out of these guys you find that you still need two workman/defensive midfielders playing behind them so what problem did they even solve?
This got me thinking of the idea of “how do we even build midfields anyway?” I soon thought, if we’re not there already, we’ve very close to getting to the point where the top teams in England simply can’t play with a two man midfield. The positions and roles have become too specialized and we’re not developing players that can handle it.
There’s this idea that for Paul Pogba to play in a pivot for Manchester United he needs to be next to someone who provides the energy and makes all the tackles and interceptions. That’s simply not true.
Pogba’s probably never going to be good enough defensively to play deep against the top teams, that’s fine. But against everyone else he needs to be next to someone who can pass the ball. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer stopped using the Pogba-McTominay pivot because the same thing kept happening - teams would double or triple Pogba and leave McTominay wide open challenging him to beat them with his passing. He couldn’t.
During Pogba’s time at United he’s been at his best when playing in a midfield three or on the left wing of a 4-2-3-1 - a very similar position and has in common that there’s still two midfielders behind him.3 His most successful stints when playing deeper in a 4-2-3-1 were when he played next to Michael Carrick in 2016-17 and next to Nemanja Matic at the start of 2017-18 as well as 2019-20. Two midfielders that can share the burden of passing.
The problem is, they just don’t make them like Carrick or Matic anymore. Matic sort of happened by accident, he was an attacking midfielder who lacked pace and was dropped deeper.
Carrick is a completely different story. Carrick may be yearned for and appreciated now that his playing days are done, but he was one of if not the most under-appreciated player during his career. He was rarely used by England and United (and their fans) were trying to phase him out for years! He was too boring! We wanted someone exciting in midfield.
But of the problem with Carrick was, he didn’t have any pace. In today’s game, where we want our center backs to be able to play with the ball at their feet like midfielders, if a player with Carrick’s profile came around they’d immediately be dropped back and developed as a center back.
Hell, Daley Blind was exactly the kind of player United needed in their midfield and it didn’t take long after he arrived for the consensus to be “he doesn’t have enough pace to play in midfield, drop him back.” And when he was deemed too small to play centerback, he was shifted to left back.
And that brings us back to the Kees tweet.
When you get these players who show promise, we tend to just push them forward because when you’re playing for a smaller club they don’t have time to build around you and bring in good players ahead of you. They’re best chance to win games and have a magical season is to just push you further forward and let you do your thing. If they don’t have the quality attacking players up the pitch, keeping you deep isn’t going to do much.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet I posted last week.
This question came from all the things I was thinking about above. As Carl Anka pointed out, this was a tad sneaky as I mentioned specifically 26 year old Scholes, who was an attacking box to box rather who typically played a bit further forward than the 4-4-2 central midfielder we tend to remember him as. While that’s true and not particularly what I was going for with the question - I don’t think the answer changes.
If Paul Scholes were to walk into the United dressing room today - whether it’s the 2000 version of him or the 2008 version of him - you’d be playing him in a midfield three.
Simply put, you cannot play Scholes at the base of a 4-2-3-1 in 2022. If Paul Pogba is a liability defensively in that position, Scholes would be even worse.4 You can’t put Scholes next to a McTominay or Fred because teams would play it the same way they play Pogba-McTominay or Pogba-Fred, which is far more tactically advanced than the common tactics teams were deploying during Scholes’ playing days. A Scholes-Pogba pair would alleviate that issue but would be laughable defensively.
Even at the tail end of Scholes’ career, when he was a deep midfielder it’s often misremembered. Scholes-Carrick is considered the first choice midfield pair of the 2007-08 League and Champions League winning team, yet they only started together in the Premier League 15 times. In the latter rounds of the Champions League they had Ji Sung Park in there as a third midfielder for defensive purposes, while Owen Hargreaves started at right back against Barcelona giving them more support. In the Champions League final Hargreaves came into midfield as United played more of a 4-3-3.
If even Scholes would need to be deployed in a three, it shouldn’t be a knock on the other guys that they need that set up as well.
Which brings us back to the clubs. We’re simply not developing the kind of players needed that will make a two man midfield work at the top level. Players like Fred and Scott McTominay do most of the things you’d be looking for from players in that position, but they don’t have the passing ability to progress the ball up to the attacking players on their own. On the other side, we’re not developing the “defensive passers” that would be needed to play next to someone like a Pogba, Ndombele, or Lo Celso.
It’s no surprise that the two most dominant teams of the last five years in the Premier League use two different version of a 4-3-3. In both cases, the defensive midfielder at the base is there for exactly that, defense. He holds his position, delays opponents until his team resets, stops transitions.
Neither Rodri nor Fabinho have the greatest passing numbers but they don’t need to5, the teams compensate for that in other areas. Liverpool use their fullbacks with Trent Alexander-Arnold being far more of a number 10 than a right back. City play with much more attacking number 8’s but use their fullbacks to provide balance and support in midfield. They also have the coach who has the most positional based system in the world. Assuming you can play a 4-3-3 with duel attacking 8’s just because City do is a recipe for disaster if you’re not implementing all the other principles that Pep has built into his team.
Like I said, if we’re not already at this moment, we will be soon. And the teams that are slow to adapt to this are going to struggle to compete at the top.
So where does that leave these “do it all midfielders?”
It kinda leaves them… nowhere. In today’s game, where everything has become so specialized you don’t really want a player who can ‘do it all.’ There’s no room for that anymore. You want players focusing on the things that they do best and that’s it.
When Rodri first came to City Pep spoke about how he was trying to get him to stop making runs forward. You’re here to do x, we don’t want you doing y as well even if you can.
That means we probably have to change the way we’re scouting and probably how the team is built. Just because a player has played deeper in his career doesn’t quite mean that’s what you should expect of him when you sign him two years later.
Why do these do it all midfielders never seem to become the stars we expect them to be? Because we saddle them with unrealistic expectations. We do that because we wrongly assume that just because they have done it all in the past means they can do it all in a tougher league week after week. It happens because we’re mis-categorizing them and ask them to do too much.
It’s because the position of “do it all midfielder” doesn’t exist anymore.
Hey what a coincidence that the player United immediately said, “let’s forget about midfield and just play you closer to goal” is the one who became a superstar!
Van de Beek is considered a 10 but his best moments at United have been playing in more of a three, with Bruno Fernandes on the pitch, rather than as a pure 10
At Juventus, he played on the left of a diamond and thus had two players who could cover for him
nor is hard to find midfielders with better tackles or interception numbers, but this plays into the idea that the best defensive midfielders would actually have lower Tkl+Int numbers but that’s a post for another day
“He was rarely used by England and United (and their fans) were trying to phase him out for years! He was too boring! We wanted someone exciting in midfield.”
This is not true. He was / is adored by Utd fans who appreciated his talents. Apart from this decent article.