This team knows what they are playing. Play by memory. It is understood. Flow. It is every coach’s dream: for his team to express their common idea of the game on the field and do it with ease, without rigidities. It is not easy to reach that point where all the players interpret a match situation in the same way and respond on the field with a solution validated by the team. The common way. The good solution.
My football – and life – torture has always been understanding that there are as many good solutions as there are possibilities, with the infinite loop that this entails in a game as complex as football. I remain convinced that the same tactical situation—so to speak—can be resolved in multiple ways, but the more we open ourselves to the range of what is possible in the game, the more we confuse the player. And aren’t we coaches supposed to be here to make things easier for the players?
It is not easy to play football but, when you look at it, it is not as difficult as we sometimes make it. We are in a time of talking a lot about the game model, tactical principles, concepts, and so much theoretical framework, I don’t know if it orders us or confuses us. Many of the things that we rush to turn into a brilliant tactical invention had been tested decades ago, only now we sophisticated their analysis through threads on what used to be Twitter. We explain with difficult words what we see in the field and convert instinctive actions into strategic patterns. I celebrate and enjoy these times of thinking rationally about football but I am going to continue prescribing simplicity to reduce layers and be able to get to the essence. To the player. To the solution that she sees and feels. To the solution that I want the rest of the team to see and feel.
It’s about connecting brains, bringing intentions together. The goal is to ensure that the goalkeeper does not give an inside pass to his midfielder just when he has already discarded support and begins to leave the area. It happened to Eric García and Ter Stegen in Monaco and was repeated on Wednesday by Gazzaniga and Iván Martín in Montilivi. The point is that when the defense thinks about playing back so that its goalkeeper can clear, she connects with her idea and prepares to ward off the danger. Things didn’t flow between María Méndez and Misa a few weeks ago in Madrid’s Champions League round in Portugal, nor between Itziar Pinillos and Laura Coronado in Zubieta for Levante Badalona. It’s about each pass having a meaning and the team understanding what each pass that is given means.
It seems easy. You have to make it so. Ancelotti is the king of making difficult things simple and on Wednesday in France he scratched the surface of the playing problems of his new Madrid with Mbappé and without Kroos to touch the root: if I have forwards who ask for verticality, we cannot take so long to give the passes . It sounds easy. Making it so will be the magic.
Flick is achieving it in Barcelona and, while from the outside they try to find out what has changed so much that Barça now plays so loosely – if they train differently, if there is more emphasis on physical preparation, if they make more or fewer videos, if his calm personality—the players reduce it all to one thing: we understand what the coach asks of us. Know what you have in your head. Know how to express it. And then, let the game play.
