Today this is going to involve stairs, walls, walls and slopes. And it will continue to be a column about football. It may even be the most tactical of all. Don’t know.
A few months ago, I got caught up in a wonderful article by Jamie Hamilton on Mediumin which he introduced a concept that I had barely heard until then: relationism. He presented it as a new paradigm in football, a kind of opposition to the widespread positional game, which implied going from anchoring the players in certain areas to maintain order and rationality on the field, to seeking a kind of random mobility around the ball. , without system or apparent structure.
It is not chaos. It’s game. That is the main obsession that emerges from everything Hamilton shares on social networks. Where the schooled eye, the positional eye, sees a disproportionate accumulation of players in the same sector and already trembles in the face of a possible loss of the ball due to lack of balance, the journalist sees opportunities. Poetry. He draws diagonals, sets up ladders and invents plays that are pure unpredictability and, therefore, seem the worst threat against rivals who defend positionally.
But how do you train so much mobility? Is it just getting the players together and letting them flow? Where should the limits of footballers’ freedom on the pitch be? In Coach MeditationsAndreu Enrich speaks about it with a special, philosophical art, following the thread of his admired work Citadelby Saint-Exupéry. He believes the coach’s job is to “build around the players; capture them in a kind of walls and slopes, which they then inhabit, travel through and end up calling equipment”. For Enrich, the coach is an architect who, based on how he designs his “city,” will promote some ways of living—playing—and reduce, almost eliminating, others. This is how the game is modeled.
Perhaps, because of that same urban comparison, because of thinking about the game and preparing the matches from plans taken from AutoCAD, Frenkie De Jong feels that “football is becoming very robotic, too tactical.” He said it in an interview for Voetballamenting that everything is “so programmed” and that players are limited in their relationship options to create “triangles.” Again the architectural, the geometries.
I don’t see in Flick’s Barça that rigidity that restricts the purest positionism, although it does start from zonal intentions to make room for natural connections, where Lamine or Raphinha dance freely. There is a balance between structure and flexibility. Walls with squares. And rules. Flick does not compromise with punctuality, just as he does not compromise with advancing lines and putting pressure on the holder whenever the opponent plays a back pass. On Wednesday against Athletic, Szczęsny played in place of Iñaki Peña because, apparently, the Alicante native arrived late for a team session. It’s the group’s regulations. “Arriving late is a lack of respect and appreciation for others,” says Flick in the All or Nothing from Amazon Prime that they recorded when he was coaching the German national team.
Establishing the red lines well will define what your team is or is not. The streets you will walk through and the slopes you will avoid. But, be careful, shielding yourself with walls encloses people and isolates them. There are players who do not know how to play on a plot, who work better when they cover more ground. I think of Bellingham, of Fede Valverde. In De Jong. I don’t think Ancelotti knows that he is a relationist, but his Madrid attacks more from instincts than from patterns. Only Carlo knows how it got to that.
