THE ATHLETIC’S MICHAEL Cox is this week’s guest on Behind the Lines, and given he is one of England’s foremost writers about football tactics, it wasn’t surprising that among his picks as his favourite pieces of football writing was an article about Pep Guardiola.
The surprising bit is it was written in 2004.
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It was then Gabriele Marcotti of The Times met Guardiola in Qatar, who was winding down his playing career at the age of 33, prematurely frozen out of a physical game that no longer prized his gifts.
“If I were a 20-year-old at Barcelona today, I would never make it as a professional”, said Guardiola. “At best I’d be playing in the third division somewhere. I am not quick, I never had the stamina to run and run for 90 minutes like central midfielders have to do today. I am not particularly good in the air, I am not physically strong, I don’t dribble past opponents and I am not a good tackler. But I can pass the ball fairly well.”
It’s impossible to read those words now through anything other than the prism of the manager Guardiola has become. Just five years after that interview, Guardiola won the Champions League as Barcelona manager, and would soon reshape the game in his image to an extent unprecedented in the modern game.
“We sometimes overlook the importance of communication technology and the fact everyone was watching Guardiola’s Barcelona and Guardiola’s Bayern every week”, says Cox. “If Guardiola was a manager in the 1970s, it would have been so much more difficult for ideas to spread across a county, across a continent and across the world. So I think Guardiola’s influence on football is probably greater than anyone in, I would say, the last 70 or 80 years.”
As Cox says, Guardiola isn’t entirely dogmatic, and his Bayern and Manchester City teams have evolved and have played in different ways to his great Barcelona side, but Guardiola’s principles of passing and pressing have been adopted right across Europe. It has led, says Cox, to a near-uniformity in styles.
“Styles across Europe are less distinctive than ever, because of the technology, the movement of players, the movement of managers, and the expansion of the Champions League. There was a game earlier this season between Juventus and Barcelona and they just seemed like two versions of the same style, really, which you would never had said in the 90s, when Juventus were tough, tenacious and tactical and not particularly exciting, and Barcelona were all about a certain style.
“That may be the next iteration of football style: the complete breakdown of different styles in different countries. The stylistic differences are less than ever.”
And what does he see as the tactical trends likely to dominate the next five to ten years?
“It is always difficult to predict. There have only really been two constants over the last 25 years: the speed of the game has got faster and faster, and the universality of players. So the attackers have to be the first defenders, and the defenders have to be the first attackers. That concept has always been in football, but it’s now becoming more and more obvious that players are more similar to each other.
“You see that in new positions all the time. This season we’ve seen Joao Cancelo is a full-back, but he’s also a central midfielder. And to a certain extent, all players now are central midfielders. There are deep central midfielders or advanced central midfielders, but the qualities you need compared to a footballer from the 1990s, they are pretty much all midfielders.
“That is what makes that Guardiola article so incredible, as he is saying passing qualities are dying out, whereas now passing qualities are needed for every position, including goalkeeper.”
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