Jonathan Wilson Peak pressing point?
When Spain were at their peak the fear was occasionally expressed, particularly among British critics, that if teams could retain possession so well then football was in danger of taking on the dynamic of basketball. One team would have an attack, then the other would have an attack, and so on and so on, rather than the physical and tactical midfield battles that seemed so essential to the sport.
A decade on, that seems a remarkable concern to have had.
It is true that roughly one in six Premier League games features a split of possession that is greater than 70-30 – which doesn’t necessarily make for an enthralling spectacle – but the sport that football can most resemble in this case is handball, with the attacking team passing constantly around the defensive line, hoping to provoke a space that can be exploited.
At elite level, sport is now primarily about transitions, which makes sense. When one team finds a successful way to play, that mode is popularised, and then another team finds a way to combat it. A possession-driven style is therefore combatted by working out ways of interrupting the flow of passes, pressing hard, breaking patterns, winning the ball back and counter-attacking quickly. This is why pressing, in its various forms, has come to dominate at the highest level of the game and why those managers who are reluctant to press high, most notably Jose Mourinho, have come to feel slightly old-fashioned.
Such matters are rarely clear cut and modern football, interlocked as it is across so many countries, is a complex network of competing impulses. However, the symbolic moment when it became apparent that the dominance of the Pep Guardiola-mode of possession football was at an end came in a Champions League semi-final in 2014, when his Bayern Munich side were eviscerated on the break by Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid.
This wasn’t an opponent sitting deep and absorbing the punches; it was a 4-0 hammering. And that it was led by a graduate of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan was appropriate – even if Ancelotti has tended to be an easy-going pragmatist rather than the sort of driven obsessive who could have imposed a hard press as a consistent policy.
What was particularly striking was how Madrid themselves, then under Mourinho, had been hammered in the semi-finals the previous season, beaten 4-1 in the first leg by the ferocious press of Borussia Dortmund. That evolution raises questions about where Barcelona will go next, given their appointment of coach Quique Setien, who appears an adherent to the old school of radical possession football.
That Dortmund side were, of course, led by Jurgen Klopp, and that semi-final was the first concrete sign that the German school of pressing might have a significant influence outside the Bundesliga.
But Germany’s attitude to pressing was always a little odd.
When Bayern won three European Cups in a row, between 1974 and 1976, it was widely seen as being a continuation of the “Total Football” tradition. That was true in the sense that they prioritised possession and the manipulation of position on the field, but they eschewed the hard press of Ajax.
Pressing in Germany was for a long time an outsider pursuit, making its first impact in the late 1980s as Helmut Gross, a structural engineer who had essentially taught himself tactical theory, and Ralf Rangnick, who had been fascinated by pressing since the lower-league side of which he was player-coach played Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kiev in a friendly, took up roles at Stuttgart.
Volker Finke, who had never played football at the highest level, had notable success with a pressing game while coach at Freiburg, leading them
At elite level, sport is now primarily about transitions
to third place in the Bundesliga in 1995, but their financial status meant they couldn’t sustain that position, and as they fell back it allowed a complacent establishment to believe football was still about the traditional values of leadership and winning individual battles.
Change, though, was coming, and pressing reached its peak in Klopp, who was introduced to the concept by Wolfgang Frank at Mainz.
Frank had been a forward for Eintracht Braunschweig but he was one of a growing band of German coaches obsessed by Sacchi. When Frank was appointed, Mainz were bottom of the German second tier with one point and no goals in eight games. They stayed up that season, though, and the following year finished fourth.
Once pressing had been accepted, Germany took to it with a convert’s zeal. Rangnick had been broadly dismissed as an over-intellectualising crank when he had appeared on German television in the late 1990s to explain the concept of zonal marking that underpins most pressing, but Klopp’s punditry on the 2006 World Cup made such ideas mainstream. The Bundesliga now feels like the world centre of pressing, both through coaches still working in Germany – Julian Nagelsmann, Marco Rose and Lucien Favre – and those who have left, particularly for England – Klopp, Ralph Hasenhuttl, Daniel Farke, David Wagner.
Not that the return to an aggressive, percussive game has been universally welcomed in the game.
“We have progressively taken the NBA route, that of a very ‘athleticised’ sport,” Arsene Wenger said recently. “Today, like basketball, certain creative players are being eliminated, under the simple pretext that they are not athletic enough.
“In time, the danger, for me, is that football develops into a sport where players run like crazy people to win the ball back as quickly as possible, but who don’t know what to do when they actually have it in their possession.”
That he should invoke the basketball comparison in precisely the opposite way to how it was used a decade ago, perhaps, is revealing. Football follows a path until it reaches an extreme at which it begins to resemble something that is not football, at which point an antithetical reaction drives it back. That’s how dialectical development works.