Joao Cancelo: The Breadcrumb Trail Leading us Down the Rabbit Hole of Tactical Complexities in 2021
Fullbacks. Failed wingers or physically impaired centrebacks shunted out wide. The importance of this position is often marginalised when prioritising key roles, often branded the ‘‘easiest position’’ on the football pitch. Interestingly though, it is also the fullback position that offers an apt microcosm of the tactical changes in modern football (2000–2021).
From defensive pawns to auxiliary wingers; rampaging vertically like a rook. From the providers of width to offering central security; leaping into inverted positions like a knight. By 2021 a certain fullback is the queen of his team’s line-up.
The tactical flexibility offered by the fluidity of such roles mirrors the tactical shift in elite football: where occupying/vacating zones trumps occupying a set list of positions. This article examines these tactical evolutions before attempting to explain the game in we are watching in February 2021.
Pep Guardiola is effectively the flag bearer for tactical innovation at the elite level of European football. They say good chess players are always three or four moves ahead of the game, but Guardiola is often only one move ahead of the tactical game — but nearly every time it is the right move and he has the resources to execute these moves.
Part One:
2009: Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona have romped to a League, Copa del Rey and Champions League treble.
Instilling strict positioning when his team are in possession, optimising progressive angles and maximising width to stretch opposition defences. Fostering the world’s best talent in Lionel Messi, Dani Alves is Pep’s facilitator, single-handedly dominating the right flank allowing Messi (and later Pedro) to invert. Teams could not deal with Alves’ vertical freedom, nor could they deal with Barcelona’s possessional and territorial dominance. Football for this team was no longer fulfilling tactical norms dictated by a formation (such as the 433), but more so about filling set positions in specific phases. For Alves, this meant tucking in when Barcelona were defending, pushing wide to offer passing angles in each phase of possession and overlapping when Messi inverted. Teams could not cope with the overloads created. This was the genesis of positional play.
2016: Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich have won three consecutive Bundesliga titles and reached three consecutive Champions League semi-finals, losing each time to inspired Spanish teams — two of the best front lines ever in BBC/MSN, in 2014/ 2015 respectively and then a monumental smash and grab from Simeone’s Atleti.
Guardiola used the Bundesliga as his tactical sandbox; tinkering, experimenting and evolving his model of positional play. Bayern adhered to strict positions in possession, optimising the traits of the attackers. Robben began on the touchline, driving 1v1 against his defender, Muller in the half spaces, Alonso as a deep lying playmaker. The front line often formed a five at times, overpowering nearly all the opposition Bayern faced. The positional innovation was exemplified best by the Phillip Lahm. In a role barely seen before, Lahm inverted in possession to help Bayern create overloads in the build-up phases. This isn’t the natural position of the fullback — mirroring how much of the team often occupied unconventional positions to benefit the team cause. European football had not seen such tactical discipline before.
February 2021: Guardiola’s Manchester City have swept aside all before them as their new-look setup flies from strength to strength. The look destined for the league title.
Having previously adhered to a more positionally rigid 433, with free #8s, Mendy often in the ‘‘Alves role’’ and Walker as an inverted fullback, City won back-to-back league titles with 100 and 98 points. Aside from Liverpool, who’s sublime gegenpressing disrupted City to a significant degree, most teams offered little resistance to the territorial dominance and repeatable methods of chance creation from Pep’s positional juggernaut.
Whether it be through trial and error or microscopic analysis of Guardiola’s side, by 2019/20, teams started to shut City out. Manchester United’s 532 covered the half spaces plus central zones and created defensive overloads centrally and out wide. City were also more frequently exposed on the counter. Liverpool stormed to the league title and it was back to the drawing board for Guardiola.
And then came Covid-19. A break which simultaneously offered Pep the opportunity to devise a new system. A system that offered control in defensive transition and a plethora of penetrative angles in attack. The key here, was moving away from strict positioning altogether, this was the genesis of ultimate fluidity. The player who embodied this system more than anyone else? Guardiola’s queen, his trump card: Joao Cancelo.
Joao Cancelo inverts into a double pivot with Rodri/Fernandinho in 1st phase possession. He moves to more of a halfback position when City are exploiting different angles. He overlaps, he underlaps, he rotates positionally with his team mates in the 2nd phase and final third. He’s a threat with the ball and he’s a threat without it.
Cancelo isn’t alone with his positional fluidity. John Stones is often seen in the right back position, sometimes overlapping his midfield pivot. The leftback (be it Zinchenko, Laporte or Cancelo himself) inverts to a degree in the later phases of build-up. Bernardo Silva roams to a similar effect to Cancelo, but often in the direction from advanced to deeper. Cancelo is all about rotation and progression, from the way he positions himself to his body shape.
Spectators and analysts alike have fawned over his versatility and statistical impact from right back. This adulation isn’t undue of course: Cancelo is in the upper percentiles for… well virtually everything. When compared with other fullbacks that is.
And here comes the key question: should we be viewing him as a fullback?
Taking this notion a step further, should we assign positions to players at all?
The tactical football we are seeing from many top managers in 2021 makes assigning conventional position names seem a bit arbitrary.
The way I view football is an occupation or vacation of zones at any given time on a football pitch. This is primarily in ball possession, and it must be said, is tactical framework only displayed by a small number of top teams. Guardiola’s City and Nagelsmann’s Leipzig are my two primary examples.
Against Liverpool, Leipzig played with a 3–1–2–2 central core in possession, with Adams and Angelino wide. Each player had a complex set of instructions dictating where they should be and when. It is entirely situational.
Kevin Kampl was often a lone pivot ahead of the back three, offering a progressive passing angle through Liverpool’s gegenpressing in 1st phase possession. Dependent on Firmino’s position when pressing, Kampl dropped to make a back four — a 4v3 against Liverpool’s front line.
If Liverpool’s midfield took the bait and pressed, there was space to exploit for Olmo and Nkunku up front. If Liverpool’s midfield sat off, one of Leipzig’s advanced midfield two would drop to offer a wall pass. Vacating wide zones in the first phase meant Liverpool pressed in a narrow shape. Leipzig played in to out, finding a spare man in Adams.
Approaching the final third, Leipzig players again presented us with positional fluidity. Olmo and Nkunku opposed vertical movements to create dilemmas for Liverpool’s back line. Again, overloading centrally created width downstream for Angelino as Liverpool remained laterally compact.
Leipzig players displayed altruism in movement and zones they occupied. The team is one well-oiled machine, rather than a group of cohesively organised men, limited to one position. Perhaps it seems all rather abstract, perhaps a bit watery from an analysis perspective. That’s only natural with such complex, unorthodox systems. But one thing is for certain: assigning conventional formations to this team is all but redundant. From merely the instances discussed above, we can call this team a 3142, a 442, a 3322, a 3124, etcetera.
Denoting a team by a formation is like assigning a formation to the pieces on a chess board in any given play — entirely suboptimal. Convention is just to name the square (zone) a specific piece is in, at a given time, in a specific game-situation. Perhaps where they moved from or where they could feasibly move to. More and more often, analysing the tactically elite level of football feels like tracking the pieces on a chess board across a play. Certain players have certain capabilities. Some move in a vertical axis, some hop laterally and vertically, some diagonally (usually out to in). The primary constraint being the degree of zonal freedom afforded.
So you’re all probably wondering why discuss fullbacks? The answer is simple: the tactical progression fullbacks appears to be linear to the tactical progression of the elite level. Why discuss Cancelo? He is simply the perfect microcosm of the progressive tactical macrocosm we are witnessing each week. So where is the tactical landscape of the game moving to? Its already arrived: zones > positions.
