The supremacy of style: Tiki taka and its offsprings
“Idon’t care where you are from... I don’t care... if you tell me that you love football and you don’t love Barcelona, you have a problem.” That was Thierry Henry in 2018 as he reflected on Barcelona’s glory years under Pep Guardiola. In that time, Barcelona won two Champions League titles (2008, 2010) three La Liga titles (2009, 2010, 2011), two club titles (2010, 2012), two UEFA Supercups (2010, 2012), two Spanish Cups (2009, 2012) and three Spanish Super Cups (2010, 2011, 2012). But it wasn’t just the trophies that made them special.
It was the style.
The ball would roll from Xavi to Andres Iniesta to Lionel Messi, and then back to either Xavi or Iniesta, and then to Messi again – all in a few languid seconds as they slowly surging forward, painting intricate designs and sharp angles while hapless opponents chased shadows.
The deeper the opponents dropped, the more congested the passing lanes got, and the more one was able to witness the genius at play. It was possession football designed to break down teams. For how do you play football without the ball?
At the international level, Spain were quick to adopt the tiki taka tactics. They already had the players, and the plan clearly worked. It started with manager Luis Aragones, but peaked under Vicente del Bosque as the national team compiled a record (78 matches, 56 wins, 6 draws, and only 16 losses) that became the envy of the world.
They also won the big trophies – La Roja are the only national team to lift three consecutive major trophies – two back-to-back European Championships in 2008 and 2012, with the meat in that sandwich the tag of being the first European team to win a FIFA World Cup outside of Europe in 2010.
But the longer a tactic is at play, the harder teams try to respond to down it.
Soon, teams figured out what to do – sit back, stay organised to eliminate the little gaps, and hit them hard with lightning quick counters. The counter worked so well that Spain eventually moved on, giving the style a quiet burial.
But ideas don’t die; they just evolve into something different. We see a version of it, for example, when Manchester City, under Guardiola, play in the English Premier League.
“I loathe all that passing for the sake of it, all that tiki taka. It’s so much rubbish and has no purpose,” Guardiola complained to journalist Marti Perarnau in 2014. “You have to pass the ball with a clear intention, with the aim of making it into the opposition’s goal. It’s not about passing for the sake of it.”
The obvious question, then, was what more could be done with all that possession. And we got a glimpse of that in how Argentina turned out in their match against Poland. The passing was quick, the movement was dynamic, and everything linked together with purpose and clarity.
Argentina’s possession numbers were 73.3%, but even that didn’t capture the manner in which they ran circles around the deep-sitting Poles, coming at them from the centre and both flanks, keeping them guessing about how the threat would materialise. After a defeat and a hard-fought win, the real Argentina showed up, playing a brand of football that made Messi the player he is today.
Argentina attempted 862 passes in the match and made 814 of them – a completion rate of 92% that is the highest in a World Cup game since Spain put together 779 passes against Russia in 2018. Not tiki taka, but something just as potent.
From Catenaccio (a defensive tactic first employed by Austria but made famous by Italy) to Total Football (a radical system that Dutch developed in which every player could play every position), from the Libero (the defender – think Franz Beckenbauer – making sudden runs and joining the offence), to teams playing without an out-and-out striker, the teams that innovate are the ones that steal a march over the rest.
We haven’t seen anything very radical at this World Cup yet, but we have seen glimpses of how the present is still being influenced by the past. And that can be a tactic in itself. 92%
PASSES COMPLETED by Argentina in their
Group C match against Poland – the highest in a World Cup game since Spain against
Russia in 2018.