Possession obsessed: Some coaches tactical approach are dooming their sides to fail
We've entered an era where the tactical approach of a coach may not align with the best tactical approach for a club, and could be putting them at a disadvantage
Author’s note: This post is related to a previous post “There are more than two ways to play football.” It’s not quite a Part II, but it’s written with the assumption that you’ve read the previous piece.
Less than 10 minutes into Southampton's mid-September match against Manchester United, the commentator remarked on Southampton manager Russell Martin, saying, “He’s a man whose plan B is simply to execute plan A better.” Martin’s plan A is a possession based approach. Southampton want to play with the ball rather than off the ball.
Against United they actually looked quite good for the first half hour until United realized their players are much better than Southampton’s players. Suddenly things got much more difficult for the Saints who lost 3-0 and didn’t attempt a shot over the last 60 minutes. And this wasn’t even a good United team. They didn’t score a goal in any of their next three Premier League matches!
If I were running Southampton I’d have sacked Martin right there after the match. But it turns out Southampton actually hired Martin because of this style of play.
Martin’s tactical plan isn’t bad per say - possession is what is currently considered the good type of football and attacking football 1 - but to go with this strategy at Southampton is not only idiotic, it likely hurts their chances of remaining in the Premier League.
To fully understand this, let’s take a quick and extremely simplistic look back at the history of football tactics.
Way back when the game of football was pretty simple. 11 players on each team convened on a pitch that was primarily mud. The game consisted of both teams trying to hoof the ball as close to their opponents goal as possible from where they’d try to score. There were positional aspects but it was a very individualist game. There wasn’t much passing2. When the ball came to you you tried to do something with it and the team with the better players pretty much always won.
Eventually some coach came along and said hey, if my players can play as a cohesive team, the power of a collective unit can tilt the odds over the team with better players. Put simply, play as a team to shut down your opponents best players and stifle what they do best, then figure out how to attack their weaknesses. That’s basically the history of tactics in all sports.
Football would continue evolving from that - though England was always a bit behind the rest of Europe - but let’s fast forward to the mid 2000’s when we got Jose Mourinho coining the term “parking the bus” and Rafa Benitez bringing him “compactness” to Liverpool. The two ushered in an incredibly defensive era for the Premier League as they made their teams extremely difficult to play against.
As time went on teams not only realized the value of staying compact but also how staying compact and deep could make it very difficult for better teams to beat you. The lower the block, the more players the other team sent forward, which suddenly left them vulnerable to counter attacks the other way.
Whereas tactics really started as a way to stop your opponents best players and making their life tough, in other words defense, we now had to get more and more creative with offensive tactics as teams had to figure out how to break down these low blocks. Possession based principles focus on trying to move defenses around and create space to attack, without having to expose yourself to counter attacks.
That in a nutshell is essentially the chess match that is currently modern football. The smaller teams figured out the top teams’ weakness and how to beat them. In turn the top teams figured out their weakness against the smaller teams and are addressing that area to reduce their chances of losing to a weaker team.
Neither of those systems are perfect, which is why sometimes the bigger team will still decimate their opponent and why the bigger team with the better players doesn’t always win.
Then you have managers like3 Russell Martin who spit in the face of this. They are going to play their way no matter what. In Martin’s case that means expansive possession based football. Through the first seven Premier League matches Southampton were the most similar in possession build-up to Manchester City.
How’s this working out for Southampton? Through eight games they have just one point. That point against a team who two years ago were playing in League One. They’ve scored just six goals and nearly all their attacking bright spots have come thanks to the spectacular abilities of an 18 year old who won’t be playing for Southampton for long.
Southampton are trying to play like the big boys but with vastly inferior players. By doing this they’ve handed the full tactical advantage to their opponent. They’re not trying to thwart them, they’re not trying to attack their weaknesses. They’re trying to do the same thing as their opponents but with lower quality players. That’s going to end poorly for them every time.
We saw this happen last season. Vincent Kompany’s expansive style of play saw him lead Burnley back up to the Premier League from the Championship. Kompany insisted on continuing to play this style and Burnley were promptly relegated.
Here’s the thing about possession based football. It’s the football everyone is striving for but that itself is foolish. In order for it to work, you need to have the best players. You also need to have a very good focal point up top. If you have anything less than that it runs the risk of becoming very stale very quickly, almost to the point where you’re beating yourself.
Sure Pep Guardiola has dominated every league he’s been in, he’s also had the best players every step of the way. His only successes in Europe though have come when he’s had Lionel Messi - by far one of the two best players to ever play the game - and Erling Haaland - one of the two best goal scorers in the game right now - spearheading his attack. The team with the most success in Europe over the past decade? That’d be Real Madrid, who play a lot without the ball.
A manager refusing to bend his principles and adapt doesn’t make him a great manager. It makes him naive. Unless you have the very best players, at some point you’re going to come across a team with better players than you. If you plan on facing that better team with the same style of play they have, you’re going to lose. There’s only about two or three teams in the world who can currently go toe-to-toe with any other club.
Even managers of top 10 teams in the world - but outside the top three - need to be able to adapt their tactics when they have to play someone better than them. If they can’t, they’ll never push their team any further than where they currently are.
It works the same way just a little further down the table. A team may be great at playing the big teams, but you’re also going to come across smaller teams that are happy to let you have the ball. A good manager needs to understand positional/possession based approaches for those matches so his team can be well rounded.
Certainly this wave of young coaches who all play this expansive style of play aren’t idiots. They have to know this. Yet it doesn’t seem like any of them are adapting.
We can thank Bayern Munich for that.
Last summer Bayern hired the recently relegated Vincent Kompany. Let’s be clear, Kompany was something like Bayern’s ninth choice for the job, which was hilariously being turned down by everyone. It was a move that I very much defended at the time and it came simply because Kompany played exactly the style Bayern were looking for.
We’re seeing more and more big clubs don’t care about who you’ve managed or how many trophies you’ve won. They care about what kind of style of play you put out on the pitch. If you can show that you’ve done that, they’re going to look past your results. Of course Burnley were relegated playing this way, they were facing much better players! That doesn’t mean Kompany didn’t know what he was doing.
That’s opened the eyes to many managers who have realized you can “fail upwards".” The traditional path of working your way up the ladder doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t have to go from Southampton to Everton and have success at each club to get a chance to manage a top six club. You just need to show that you can coach the right style of play that the big clubs are looking for, which right now is considered to be the possession based approach.
This has put the small clubs in a hell of a spot as we’re now in a situation where the best tactical approach for a coach might not align with the best tactical approach for the long term stability of the club.
Russell Martin might have been the best man for Southampton last season in the Championship, but he’s not the right man to keep them in the Premier League. When they go down next year Martin will once again be a great fit, but who’s to say he’ll still be at the club? Who’s to say a bigger club may not snatch him up? Or that Southampton won’t sack him during the season?
After eight games, Martin is now acting like someone who wants to be sacked. He’s blaming everyone else in press conferences, throwing players under the bus - you know, the standard ‘it’s not my tactics it’s these bums on the pitch’ excuse. If potential future clubs are only looking at the style of play you’re deploying, better to cut your portfolio now then risk exposing yourself as not being able to coach any other ideas. And even better if you can avoid throwing a relegation onto your resume.
How is a smaller club supposed to navigate having a manager who may be looking after his own interests rather than the interests club? Do you sack him right after the success of securing promotion and bring in someone with a different style of play? How are you going to sell that to your fanbase?
There’s clearly an inefficiency here. Managers who are auditioning for bigger and better jobs are in effect sabotaging their current clubs chances of survival. That in turn makes life easier for their relegation rivals who have one fewer team to worry about.
There’s also an inefficiency at the club side.
Clubs should not be tolerant of this. Yet clubs are continuing to look for managers who play a specific style, which more and more seems to be this expansive possession based style. They’re gobbling up guys that show that’s the style they play. This can only work so long because as more teams do the same thing, the bigger advantage the clubs with the best players will have. It’s a race to maintain the status quo.
Pep Guardiola is likely to leave Manchester City at the end of the season. Maybe that ushers in a new era and some new manager with new ideas captures everyones imagination. Until that happens I don’t see the status quo changing. Football has become polarized. Every team has become either a possession team or counter attacking team with the latter often characterized as a negative thing.
Teams want to play the former not the latter. They’re embracing styles of play even at the expense of results and staying in the top flight. Until someone comes along and shows it’s possible to do both, bottom of the table clubs will find themselves at a disadvantage when they have coaches who’s ambitions are different from their own.
But again it’s not just the clubs at the bottom of the table. The clubs higher up are looking to do the same thing. Everyone wants a coach who plays possession football, but if everyone is racing to hire those coaches then everyone is racing to run in place.
The evolution of tactics has always been driven by underdogs trying to figure out how to level the playing field against a better team. You find the flaws in the system and attack them. The bigger team then recalibrates to eliminate those flaws and we go again.
Everyone running to the same solution is the opposite of progress. You can’t do what the bigger teams do but with lesser players. You’ll lose every time. If you want to compete and even punch above your weight class you have to be different. You have to keep thinking of new ways to approach these situations.
Currently both the traditional media and the social media discourse fawn over coaches who show the ability to press high up the pitch and control possession of the game. If you do that, you’ll get the label of a bright coach.
Personally, I don’t buy it. The best coaches aren’t the ones who have a set system and stick with it. The best coaches are the ones who understand the principles behind multiple different systems. They understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own squad and they pull different ideas to create something that will fit this collection of players at this given time. They’ll make tweaks based on the opponents they face, maximizing your chances by defending against your opponents strengths and attacking their weaknesses.
At the end of the day games are going to be decided by the players. The most a coach can do is put in a tactical plan to try and level the playing field. If coaches are simply trying to copy what the bigger teams are doing and are unwilling to change, you’ve given back any advantage that having a coach can bring you.
That’s not what a good coach is.
even though often it can be very defensive
because the leather balls and pitches that were primarily mud pretty much prevented them from doing much
He’s not the only one