Pep Guardiola — The Ultimate Thinker
Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola: A tactically obsessed coach and manager with a blueprint for dominance — The Ultimate Thinker
In 2007, Pep Guardiola announced himself on the professional stage of coaching/management and has however influenced how football is played. Teams have had to adapt how they play to match up with the type of football he mass introduced to the world.
Football, like all sports, is founded on the basis of equality. The laws of the game stipulate how many players each team is allowed to play with (7, 9, 11 depending on the age of the players). The laws attempt to create a level playing field in which each team has the same possibilities of winning.
However, over the course of the last 100 years, this game has been played enough times, by some wonderfully critical thinkers who have figured out that by positioning players in different spaces, they were able to create these numerical superiorities, or have more players than the other team in given spaces. This concept is crucial to the success of maintaining possession of the ball and ultimately, improving the odds of winning the match.
Watch Pep’s Funny Dressing tactical Changes
For Guardiola, this is critical in the build-up of play.
It’s fundamental to his coaching and playing philosophy, which of course was passed down to him by his mentor Johan Cruyff. Both mentor and disciple knew the importance of the ball, and that it was impossible to score without it. For this reason, both men implemented styles which rely heavily on being in control of the ball. Possession is king.
At this point, we begin to see why numerical superiority came to the forefront of possession-based football. It is easier to keep the ball when there are three attackers and only one defender, or four attackers versus their two defenders.
The logic is simple, and any grown adult can rationalize it when it’s presented in the context of simple math. However, when put in the scenario of an ever-changing landscape of an 11-a-side match, the lines of simple and complex can blur.
As with everything, the best place to start is with the why. As Guardiola always mentions in his pressers, “the objective is to get the ball to our attacking players, who have unbalancing qualities and are the ones who are going to increase our probabilities of scoring a goal”.
