Trends in football come and go. As the world has become homogenised, so too has the football world changed with it. Whereas there used to be distinct tactics and styles of play in different parts of the world, now we see that the football world generally plays the same few styles. It’s no longer as easy to spot an Italian team as distinctly different from a German team or an English style of play compared with a Spanish team. Over the last decade or more the focus has been on maintaining possession, dominating the ball and creating overloads and effective positional play to beat opponents. But has this started to change? Is the possession game dead?
Look at the start a promoted team like Hull City have made this Premier League season. They weren’t much fancied in the Championship last year so maybe they didn’t have to adjust their style in the same way as a high-flying Coventry in the Championship have struggled to adjust now they don't have the ball in the top flight. After five league games, Hull City have 8 points, sit 8th in the league and have only lost one match. They are also bottom of the possession stats table with 32.3% average possession. Brentford, with 9 points, 4th position, and still undefeated, have an average possession of 45.2%. What we would say however, is that the current top two possession-based sides, Manchester City and Brighton, sit in 1st and 3rd place in the league respectively.
Football tactical and technical trends have always evolved at a constant pace. If you look way back to the 1870s and 1880s, Scotland revolutionised the game and bamboozled England by implementing a passing game to overtake the kick and rush and dribbling styles. In the 1920s, Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal created the W-M formation after the change in the offside laws changed to only require two players and not three between an attacker and the goal. England won the World Cup in 1966 by changing to the ‘wingless wonders’. And all of that is just in this country!
Styles and tactical evolution around the world have been easy to spot, telling a story about a place and its position in the footballing playbook. The enganche that came out of Argentina, the classic number 10 that added elegance and cutting edge to industrial styles of play, the beautiful game of joga bonito that everyone associates with the great Brazilian teams of 1970 and 1982, and of course Total Football, which came from the Dutch school of the 1960s and 1970s and then crossed Europe to change the way Barcelona played, and still does to this day.
There have always been contrasting styles, like comparing the functional long-ball of a Wimbledon in the 90s or a Stoke in the 00s and the artistry of Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal that might have seemed highfalutin to its opponents. From Jose Mourinho parking the bus and creating a siege mentality to Tiki-Taka football and Pep Guardiola influencing coaches across the world over the past two decades, styles make matches. Long-term tactical evolution shapes the way we watch (and play) football. For a decade or more it felt like every team under the sun from the elite Champions League right the way down to Sunday league level were trying to keep the ball, play it out from the back, and focus on great positional play, just like Pep and Cruyff before him would have wanted. Slowly though, times change, and last season the Premier League was dominated by an Arsenal side characterised by a focus on set pieces, leading to a ‘Set Piece FC’ shout from opposition fans. It wasn’t fancy or exciting, but it certainly did the job and Arsenal are now favourites to retain the title and are heavily fancied in Europe too.
The start of the new Premier League season has seen plenty of victories from teams with lower possession than their opponents, plenty of away victories or draws, as teams sit back, soak up the pressure and look to be direct and incisive in transition. This can also be beautiful to watch when it works well. A functional approach and a focus on set pieces might be the way right now, but can possession ever really be truly dead? Someone’s got to have the ball.
Did you enjoy this post?