Premier League football embarks on another transitional season
More than ever, the beautiful game is a game of moments
There’s a ton of science in football now.
A lot of it is unpopular, not least among supporters of my vintage and older, but I think most of it’s pretty interesting. I do believe in the science of performance – not in a Jake Humphrey way – so I’m hardly a luddite.
But that feeling when your team is about to take a free kick and you just know, in your bones, that it’s going in?
Explain that, science.
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Premier League football embarks on another transitional season
Football has become a game of transition. The basic building blocks of modern coaching and tactics are football’s three phases: in possession, out of possession, and transition. The possession phases are phases of stasis. The team in possession has the ball. The team out of possession doesn’t. You’d recognise the pattern.
Transition is dynamic by definition. The moments when possession changes hands and the play immediately before and after it happens, increasingly make the match. This is where games are won and lost, where magic and mistakes happen and football rediscovers its purity.
Around fifteen years ago, possession was football’s tactical buzzword. Barcelona and indeed Spain liked to play with the ball, controlling games by moving it sharply and quickly enough to keep the opposition at arm’s length. There was much more to their game – it wouldn’t have worked for them otherwise – but their success spread the gospel of possession.
You can’t, it was said, score without the ball. You can’t concede while you have possession. The thing is, there’s much more to that too. The team without the ball might be closer to scoring than the opposition and transition is the irresistible chaos that makes it happen. Possession is now optional.
The two opposing possession phases are about moving chess pieces and teams playing with the ball frequently encounter defences disciplined enough that playing through them isn’t easy. So many good sides struggle with that and genuinely incisive creative players are acquired at a premium as a result.
Transition is potent because it generates change. It’s a game of traps and gaps, of flaws in shape rather than the practised rigidity of a team out of possession.
In its simplest form, it’s the turning of defence into attack, often high up the pitch. Squeeze the game out of possession, win the ball high up the pitch and pick off the holes left behind.
This is the power of the press and the counter-press. Innovators of different styles of pressing include Dynamo Kyiv and Torpedo Moscow coach Viktor Maslov and Rinus Michels, who brought Totaalvoetbal to life in the 1960s. Influenced by Maslov and Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Ernst Happel came to love pressing as much as brandy.
Arrigo Sacchi, the head coach of AC Milan and Italy in the 1990s, understood transition in three dimensions. Counter-pressing – trying to win the ball back as quickly as possible while the game is still in transition after losing it – is now a fundamental part of football.
The fingerprints of Sacchi and his tactical progenitors are everywhere in the modern game. Counter-pressing was the essence of Liverpool’s successes under Jürgen Klopp and produced their most exciting football of that period. He achieved plenty by employing a similar approach at Borussia Dortmund.
As well as masterminding Barcelona’s possession football in the years around 2009, Pep Guardiola’s tactical make-up is tied closely to Happel and Michels through his relationship with Johan Cruyff. His interpretation of the high press has brought success in England with Manchester City, though having a small army of the world’s best players helps too.
These are transition tactics and they work. According to various studies, around two-thirds of all goals in football are scored in transition. Teams are focusing on it more than ever as both a cause and an effect. Lovers of fast, exciting football are the beneficiaries.
In 2023/24 more than half of the teams in the Premier League created more than fifty shooting opportunities from high turnovers. While technical reports acknowledge that chances generated in possession are a little more presentable, the benefits of giving up the ball and mastering quick counters in transition are tempting for teams who struggle against a lower block.
Those quick counters are also getting quicker and more frequent in the Premier League. They are exciting examples of precision play. Arguably, they’re the pinnacle of athleticism in football and the ability to turn it on to devastating effect. Transition is how the winners win in 2024.
While the advent of goal-line technology and VAR have driven a wedge into the singular nature of the sport (offside, high lines and pressing are all interwoven and affected by video review at the highest level), the technical understanding of pressing and counter-pressing – and the knowledge, discipline and technique required to make them work – is becoming more and more recognised lower down the football pyramid in England, even into non-league.
Ultimately, we’re all playing the same game. We take the same risks in search of the same rewards, and lower-league and non-league football minds are getting sharper by the week. What’s proven at the top is applied further down. It can work there too, albeit wearing a slightly different mask.
The transition phase is invaluable. It’s exciting and essential to football’s appeal at all levels and all over the world. These moments might be the last place – for the time being – where football can be truly unpredictable.
And that, as all right-thinking supporters know in their blood, is basically the whole damned point of all this. Predictable football is dead football.
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“As I am very familiar with the players and the cycle of international football, it makes sense for me to guide the team while the FA continues the process to recruit a new manager. My main priority is to ensure continuity and our goal is to secure promotion in the Uefa Nations League.”
Lee Carsley on taking over as England’s interim manager after the resignation of Gareth Southgate. Carsley is an FA man and will already be in the frame for the role within the corridors of Wembley. If he achieves his aim in the Nations League, he might well end up taking a similar route into the job as his predecessor.
Salty beef extracts
Beautiful Idiots & Brilliant Lunatics: Fisher vs Redhill - No time to catch your breath (Unexpected Delirium)
The Premier League 2024/25, Part One: Arsenal to Brighton (Unexpected Delirium)
Attendance As Point-Scoring In The 21st C Soccer Struggle (A World Cup to Win)
We need a conflab over FABs (The Football Fan)
I’m visiting all 92 football league clubs this season – and I need your help (i)
A strange north-south divide: how Oxford City face marathon football season (The Guardian)
Chasing the 'Ghost' - a superstar struck down by lightning (BBC Sport)
Dessert
I’m a sucker for Mizuno football boots but I sometimes forget they make kits too. I won’t forget Augsburg’s new third kit in a hurry.
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