I've been thinking a lot about tactics lately, because I'm bored, and I've been thinking a lot about formations. I think video games have influenced a lot of how we think the game is played. Maybe we've begun to think of formations as plug and play, when managers don't seem to think that way. For them positioning is more important, spacing is more important, and movement at the correct time is more important. I don't mean to imply that formations were not once extremely important. When the sport was much more rigid, formations like the W-M and the catenacchio were extremely important. But with the advent of total football, rigid formations became obsolete, and what we were left with was positioning, spacing, and the individual's tendencies in a team context.

For example, Fabio Capello said,

quote:
when asked after the game against Belarus whether England were playing a 4-4-1-1 or 4-2-3-1, manager Fabio Capello bluntly dismissed such notions. “These figures are stupid,” he said. “In the modern game, the only formation is 9-1.”

I think the point that Capello is trying to make is that players don't neatly fit into formations, that the arrangement of players in play is so fluid that for him, his only anchor point was a target man around which the entire play revolved. Of course, Capello was talking about offensive positioning, and I'm sure he would say something differently about defensive positioning.

Slaven Bilic, former Croatia coach, sort of adds to this point. He says,

quote:
Systems are dying. Like 4-5-1, what does it mean? It’s only for journalists or at the beginning of each half. When defending, great teams want many behind the ball. When attacking, players from all sides. We have to be compact, narrow to each other. Italy won the 2006 World Cup with nothing like the [defensive] Italy you usually think of. They finished the semi-final against Germany with Del Piero, Gilardino, Iaquinta and Totti — four strikers. And two full-backs bombing up. It’s about the movement of 10 players now.

I think the point for Bilic is that formations do nothing to indicate the way the game is actually played. What does a 4-5-1 mean when you are defending ten behind the ball? You can have infinite permutations of spacing because the game is fluid. Obviously you can interpret where players are playing, but the term 4-5-1 means nothing in a practical sense. No one can tell me that there is a real difference between a 4-4-2 and a 4-4-1-1. Or a 4-4-1-1 and a 4-2-3-1. Or a 4-3-3 and a 4-1-4-1.

Broadly speaking, there are differences between a 3 man back line and a 3 man midfield, but in the way those systems are employed on the field can be so nuanced that they move beyond simple numerical descriptions.

In my view, formations are the patterns the viewer attempts to impose on the game, since they see the field much differently than the player or the manager. That doesn't mean they are meaningless, but rather interpretive schematics of fluid situations. I think with the explosion of tactical writing since Zonal Marking, we tend to think of formations in too narrow a manner, though I think people are on the right track. When someone says a team needs to switch formations, what they really mean is that a team needs to find more space. Players still have positions, where their natural tendencies are codified into what they can and cannot do.

I think the modern game is about space, about the defense denying space and the attack finding space. In that way Pep's Barcelona teams were revolutionary, because he figured out that most teams ignored the fact that as the field became more compact in the final third, the wider the field became. So as teams denied space in front of goal, they left space in wide areas undermanned, which is where Pep's teams could move the ball without pressure, drawing the opposition up the field again, and creating chances from incisive passing. The real innovation that Mourinho made against Pep in that 2010 Inter-Barca game was simply refusing to move his team up the field, with or without the ball, which disrupted everything about Barca's game.

Spacing is also why a player like Thomas Mueller is so effective. He literally does nothing at a world class level except to find space and finish. He's not a superb dribbler, he's a decent enough passer, crosser, but as this article points out, he's excellent at finding space.

My point here is that I think the way we talk about formations should attempt to resemble what actually happens on the field rather than what the formation tells us they should do. Or we should think and talk about space more than we do, since a formation implies a static situation and things on the field are never static.

Now there are situations when talking about a formation is useful, and for me that comes in terms of defensive positioning, specifically the positioning of the CBs with the CM's. This little box of space is the most highly contested on the whole field, which is why you always see GK's shout at players who don't close down free players in this region quick enough. But even formations don't really describe accurately what goes on in that region.

TL;DR-Do formations really exist? Read it.

This post was edited on 8/1/14 at 12:19 pm