Why are there no more left backs?
Looking around the top clubs in Europe there seems to be a dearth of left backs which begs the question, why are they no longer being developed?
England opened their Euro 2024 campaign with an extremely underwhelming 1-0 win against Serbia. On the one hand, it’s good that they held Serbia to just six shots without ever really getting out of second gear. On the other hand that really doesn’t tell the story of the match.
England struggled to pretty much do *anything* in the match, and a big part of that was how unbalanced the team was. Gareth Southgate opted to start the left footed Phil Foden at left wing, which given his form this season is understandable. But Foden isn’t a wingers winger - he’s an attacking midfielder who can play wide, but when he does he likes to drift inside and play more centrally. This could work if you have a fullback who can overlap down the left flank and provide width.
However without Luke Shaw, England were forced to start the right footed Kieran Trippier at left back. Trippier doesn’t provide that overlapping bit down the left leading to a pass map that looks like this.
Not having a specialist left back was often cited as a reason for Manchester United’s struggles this season as United were also frequently missing the services of Shaw. On the surface this seems like a totally plausible excuse. However cracks start to appears when you look at who’s playing left back for some of the top teams around United.
The top teams in the Premier League spent most of the season without using a natural left back. Josko Gvardiol was a center back when he signed for Manchester City. The Croatian started 26 Premier League matches at left back for City. At least he’s left footed. Arsenal’s top left backs last season were split between the right footed Oleksandr Zinchenko and the right footed Takehiro Tomiyasu - neither of which are natural left backs. Injuries to Andy Robertson meant Liverpool saw a lot of right footed center back Joe Gomez filling in at left back. Centerback Dan Burns saw a lot of action at left back for Newcastle as did Levi Colwill for Chelsea.
All of this makes you wonder, where the hell have all left backs gone? Why are there seemingly no more good ones?
It’s a simple question that also has a pretty simple answer.
Ask anyone who has ever coached youth sports and they’ll tell you that there are positions where you just throw the worst kid to try and hide them. In baseball, you stick them in right field. In football up until the late oughts, you put them at right back.
There wasn’t anything complicated behind this reasoning either. Up until the turn of the last decade1 wingers played on their natural side. Seeing as only about 10 percent of the world is left handed each team probably had one or two left footed kids so by default one of those kids would be slotted in to left wing. They may not have deserved to play there, but they did because they were left footed!2
As the pool of kids who “could” play on the left wing was much smaller than all the other positions on the pitch, the odds of your opponents left winger not being very good were pretty high. Therefore you stuck your weaker kid at right back where he was less likely to hurt you.
This scales upwards even to the pro ranks. If the worst players at the youth ranks are played at fullback, they’re probably not going to be the ones moving up to the next level. Thus at every subsequent level new players are shifted out to fullback.
For a long time fullback was just the position that players who couldn’t be centerbacks got moved to3. For a left back, footedness didn’t matter too much as the priority was defending against the right winger - who would typically be the other teams best player. In possession it wasn’t as important because you had your left footed winger who could go down the pitch and whip in a cross playing on your side.
Just over a decade ago things started changing. Now wingers were moving to the opposite side of the pitch where they could cut inside on their stronger foot and shoot. Suddenly your best players were no longer right wingers but left wingers, and as a result you couldn’t just stick your worst player at right back anymore.
Better players were moved into that position, and as fullbacks attacking responsibilities grew, coaches continued to put high quality players at right back. This lead to an influx of highly talented right backs that we had never seen before. Three years ago Gareth Southgate named four right backs in his squad for Euro 2020.
This evolution has obviously impacted the left back position too. Every team is looking for a left footed player to play on the right wing - but it’s not like the number of lefties in the world has gone up. The pool of left footed players is still extremely small.
I covered a similar topic on Kwestthoughts two years ago - why the do-it-all midfielder hardly exists anymore. At the crux of the issue was this 2022 thread from Kees van Hemmen.
Kees’ argument is there’s a lack of defensive midfielders because as soon as someone shows good skills on the ball, managers push them higher up the pitch so they could use those skills to further impact the match. Jude Bellingham was more of a number 8 when he broke through at Birmingham City. He started out like that at Borussia Dortmund only to be pushed higher up and now operate as more of a number 10 or the most advanced midfielder in a three.
The same thing applies to left back. At a young age, any left footed kid who shows any kind of promise are immediately pushed up to the right wing.
Trent Alexander-Arnold has been open about the fact that his move from midfield to right back was a deliberate one. You could afford to move talented right footed players back to fullback because it’s not going to be too difficult to find another talented right footed midfielder or right footed left winger.
It’s completely the opposite for a left back. As soon as you show high level ability on the ball- with both feet - you’re no longer going to be a left back. It didn’t take long for Harry Redknapp to realize that Gareth Bale could make a much bigger impact further up the pitch and was being wasted at left back. Bale became a left winger during the dying days of 4-4-2 and eventually moved over to the right side where he was a prolific right winger. More recently Bakayo Saka played half a season at left back before jumping up to the right wing for Arsenal.
Those moves happened at the top level. I can’t tell you how often it happens at the youth level but I imagine quite a bit.
An April article in The Athletic cited another issue making it even harder to find strong left backs in the rise of coaches who want a left footed centerback for the left side. Years ago, Lisandro Martinez would have been converted to a left back. These days it’s no question that he’s a center back4.
Fullback was simply an end of the line position. If you’ve got game changing abilities, you’re moved elsewhere on the pitch, while the position is filled by players who are deemed no longer good enough to play somewhere else.
Even that pipeline has already undergone major changes. A decade ago as wingers were moving from their natural side wings to the other wings, the fullback position started carrying on the responsibilities that used to belong to wingers such as holding width and whipping in crosses. Wingers who were pretty one dimensional such as Antonio Valencia, Ashley Young, or Victor Moses, naturally just became fullbacks to prolong their careers.
As Michael Cox points out, it’s far different moving from right wing to right back than it is to move from right wing across the pitch to left back. With players now going straight to the opposite wing of their stronger foot, that path of moving from winger to fullback hardly exists anymore.
This only serves to further muddy the pipeline on developing left backs. The most promising ones immediately get pushed up the pitch5, the larger ones who can pick out a pass are being played as centerbacks.
Given how small the pool of left footed players is, who exactly is left?
Once we remove the left footers being pushed up to attack and those being played as centerbacks we need to consider if the ones that are left are actually better than their right footed counter parts?
If coaches at the youth levels are picking certain players for certain positions simply because they’re left footed that intrinsically means they may not be picking the best players. Players could be getting opportunities that someone else deserves more simply because they’re one of two left footers.
The bar to reach the next level is thus lower for a left footed player than for a right footed one. There’s just so many more players the right footer has to out perform.
That being said, having a left footed left back is now a big advantage for a team. Thanks to the natural evolution that is always occurring within the sport, we just can’t develop them.
And probably much later at the youth level
This infuriated me growing up. My coaches told me I was the best center forward on the team, but I often had to play out wide because I was the only left footer on the team. Even though I was better than the other kids at the position I want to play, I couldn’t play there.
Just like in American Football cornerbacks are just players who weren’t good enough to be wide receivers
Manchester United fans will also remember Louis van Gaal deployed the under sized left footed Daley Blind at center back for a season
And considering how small that pool is, the standard for “good left footed right winger” is lower than what the standard for “good right footed left winger” would be
The research that's out there has found that hand dominance and foot dominance correlate much higher for right handers/footers than left hand/footers. Not only are there fewer left handers in the population at large, the population of left footers would seem to be even smaller which would seem to support the point made here (from the father of a left handed left footed soccer player).
Which makes it all the more curious that United gave up so early on Alvaro Fernandez…