What can we learn from Manchester United vs Barcelona 2011:
Some thoughts on what can be learned tactically from watching historical games
Watching football from the past is fundamentally an axiom questioning experience. It demonstrates what we take as implicit was not always so. In my understanding, the epochal moment which cemented Pep Guardiola’s brand of football as untouchable, the future and The End of History was the dismantling of Manchester United in 2011, which rather a destruction, was a soul-sucking experience worthy of generating an existential crisis.
My understanding of the mythos was one of complete domination as United were left disenchanted facing an unstoppable Barcelona who seemingly had force field around them, preventing Manchester United players from coming within a certain radius. The first 10 minutes juxtaposed this as the intensity of United’s pressure was enough to force awkward decisions and direct balls with Busquets often looking an isolated figure in deep central regions (before the 4-2-4! How horrible!), disconnected from the rest of the team with play funnelled down the flanks. However, as the game progressed, the picture painted by chroniclers of yore became ever more apparent as United became increasingly tired and dejected at the futility of their half-press.
Tactically, rather than being drawn to Barcelona, it was Manchester United’s attempt to counter them which captured my eye as being most distant. The pressing was very individualistic, with few triggers leading the team collectively forward to isolate players but rather it was conceptualised as a series of individual duels despite United lacking the numbers to commit to a rigid man-oriented set-up. It also drew light on the concept of man-orientation and the implicit axioms embedded in my understanding of the term generated from the modern game which assumes certain levels of maintained proximity to jump a player after play has been pistoned, and to leave a player once they have dropped sufficiently deep and reform a block. From this, I garnered the way I use language in football takes far too many inferential leaps, assuming layers of presuppositions which were not even axiomatic in 2011. Notable was the struggle of communication between Chicharito and Rooney (who was fantastic despite working of scraps) in dealing with Barcelona’s split centre backs, as the plan seemed to be one cover Busquets, the other press the ball and rotate, something somewhat common in more passive schemes in modernity, but which they struggled with because of the huge distances and lack of collectivity generally to compact the space, limit options and force compaction for Barca to maintain connections. What happens on the first line cannot be myopically separated from elsewhere – a contemporary analysis (albeit a poor one) may separate the features for legible understanding, but this only works because of implicit assumptions of general spatial compaction – which understanding would generate confusion without these presuppositions ground into their subconscious. There is also then a communicative aspect of the past where people can benefit because it gets them questioning axioms and looking into the sub-components which underwrite their thoughts. For the modern eye, this Barcelona team looked get-at-able from a pressing perspective but perplexed a Manchester United side struggled to comprehend the stucture.
Other interesting factors included Barcelona frequently having two wide players on the same flank simultaneously and Patrice Evra doubling up centrally with Vidic when David Villa made an inwards run, leading to what can safely be considered sub-optimal defensive spacing. However, perhaps the most interesting contrast was Xavi and Iniesta frequently remaining in close proximity and rotating to find access vertically contrasted to the rigidity of spacing in modern Manchester City. This provoked some general philosophizing on my part because I already had a base theory floating around my mind which can be summarised as conceptualising facing man-oriented defending as attacking space because you control the distances and zonal as finding space. Does the ball move to you, or do you move to the ball? A positional versus dynamic superiority1 Against a zonal compact block, you need to ‘rationally’ occupy space to create openings and manipulate space for dynamic situations to occur in dangerous areas. Move out wide, create 1v1’s and use the magnetism of players to generate overload to isolate situations. You move deeper to create transitional moments through vertical stretching and encourage man-orientation from the opposition, then dynamic interpersonal qualitative and socio-relationship factors come into play. For Barcelona 2011, the space creation required less complexity which allowed the dynamic attacking and occupation of space to occur earlier, and thus place greater emphasis on the aforementioned features.
This hammered in the message: you are not playing against game theoretic abstract perfections. What Barca done in 2011 was better situated to their context than playing a 4-1-5 touchline winger, inverted fullback, underlapping midfielder system. It provoked questions like when do revolutions become advantageous? When does abstract suboptimality become more pragmatic than ‘optimal’ approaches? Reacting to the deficiencies of an opponent is part of optimal strategy therefore accounting for the opposition becomes necessary – no matter rain or shine – because their exploitable deviations could possibly upset the abstract perfection which is calibrated against facing another abstract perfection whereby an approach loses said categorisation as abstract perfection because of its easy exploitability.
Take something near and dear, the touchline winger. The logic of the touchline winger is that you want to place your unstoppable guy in space after controlling central regions to isolate them 1v1 against the opposing full back to gain ground and infiltrate more dangerous areas. This makes sense in the hyper-compact world in which we live where getting space in between the lines and being able to hold onto the ball in those regions against a structured defence is possible for 1 second maximum (1.5 if you’re Jamal Musiala). However, in 2011 you’re wasting your best player out wide because they can consistently receive in space in more central regions where they can be more directly dangerous. To access space in the interior, less dribbling and baiting needs to occur because of base defensive structures which are less compact.
This aspect of axiom questioning is where I think studying the history of football potentially has the most utility from a tactical perspective because it provides insights in the unquestioned and allows you to see the chain of development and the reasonings behind such changes. Looking into the past in this regard can give you new tools and ideas for analysing the present by evaluating similarities and differences, and where the applicability of certain tools could be altered for contemporary relevance. Rather than perceiving the past from a place of chronological snobbery, it should be viewed as crucial to leading us to where we are today, and that the concepts of today; however rational and simplistic they may seem took a long time to develop, would be difficult to originate and are in a way a product their time. Much like the history of developing ideas holistically, watching the past allows you to see how each team was responding to the inadequacies of those before them, with the best constantly updating as to prevent ossification in the current meta. This means we should not take current positional play rules as gospel, but rather analyse why they work, and why despite the ostensible theory remaining the same in peoples understanding, teams have developed. 5 zones, the 15-pass rule etc., are heuristics to be practically applied with underlying logic situated to particular contexts that need to be constantly re-examined.
It is a difficult task because even personally I feel ossified in the lessons of de Zerbi, Conte and Guardiola and my interpretations of them as coaches (my understanding of the term 'positional play' is likely radically different to someone who experienced their formative years in 2010 - because their idea of Pep Guardiola and mine is radically different, despite him likely being the inspiration for both. Over the past year or so I have been worried that my formative framework for understanding football has been set to an extent; I am not a blank slate but have biases and preferences which have developed in the current era. In a caricaturish manner, I feel myself constantly thinking a team should focus more on getting dribblers into wide areas because its not even worth attempting to attack centre against a structured block. The ‘unstoppable guy’ concept against mid-to-low blocks has cemented itself deep into my thinking and is a product of the current zeitgeist, as to is the ‘4-1-5 consolidated, 4-2-4 transitional’ meta which even as a slogan takes a lot as implicit in the understanding of each term; embedded is far more than just shapes. The process of developing ideas and becoming attached to those ideas is inevitable but watching football from the past at least generates interesting questions separate from the current zeitgeist.
It should be noted, these things are more complex, but I would describe near-side deep build-up dynamics as representing moving to the ball whereas far-sided dynamics, the ball moves to you. The closer you are to the ball, the more dynamic factors become pertinent to adapt to the ever-evolving spatial circumstances. De Zerbian build-up is often about creatively finding the exit route after the entry is controlled, and the subsequent transition is controlled through the base entry stucture of the 4-2-4 - there are 'predictable exit and entry routes' but how you find them when space compacts is dynamic.