Our Style of Play
I will be sending out weekly emails as promised from the parent and player guidelines. These emails will help you understand what we’re working on in practice, our team philosophy, and education about our style of play.
Our style of play is one made famous by Johann Cruyff in the 70’s at Ajax FC and later brought over to Barcelona called Total Football. Johann Cruyff’s chief disciple, Pep Guardiola, has carried the torch with Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and currently Manchester City. Total Football requires a philosophy called Positional Play, or Juego de Posicion. You will hear me talk a lot about this in the coming year.
Total Football states there are 11 defenders and 11 attackers on the field. The goalie is the first attacker and the last defender. The forwards are the first defenders and the last attackers. This means every player on the pitch must learn how to attack and defend. We move as a unit. This will take time and practice to achieve.
Since our goalie is our first attacker, he must be good with his feet. Unless circumstances require it, you will rarely see the goalie punt the ball up the field. This is because we want to retain possession of the ball as much as we can. Think of hail marries in football or last second shots in basketball. They rarely work. By the goalie rolling the ball out to his defenders, our attack can start from our back line and we keep possession of the ball.
You may think, how can we attack 60 yards away from our opponents goal? Good question. Positional play is constantly looking to build superiority against an opponent. There are three main ways we can achieve this:
1. Numerical superiority - Overloading one side of the field so we have more players than our opponents in a given area.
2. Qualitative superiority - Isolating space to bring up situations where our players abilities are better than our opponent’s player abilities.
3. Positional superiority - We attain superior positioning on the field and thus give us more chances to score.
(For a longer article on this topic, go to:https://www.developingthefuture.club/single-post/2019/07/04/Positional-Play-The-Third-Man-Concept)
As we learn how to bring the ball up the field from the back line, we learn how to shift our opponent’s defensive position in such a way that leaves them disorganized and us with one of the top three circumstances. We want our opponent’s disorganized by the time we reach their defensive back line, hence bringing the ball up from the back and circulating it around which moves the defense. I cannot stress enough how important it is for us as a coaching staff to develop your son into a technically proficient player. This system requires it.
As we shift the defense around, we look to move past “lines” of defense. First we look to move past their forward line, then their midfield line, and finally their defensive line, and we look to do all of this as quickly as possible. This brings up the principle of the third man, which I will talk about next week.
This week we will focus on rondos for the purpose of technical proficiency, movement off the ball, communication, back foot trapping, and game awareness. We’ll also focus on building out of the back for the same reasons as rondos as well as learning how to move past lines of defense, mainly the forwards. Another item we will exercise is goal kicks. I believe in players having a series of premeditative combinations they look for based on our opponent’s defense to move the ball past the opponent’s lines and score. This can start from a goal kick. When our team has rehearsed these over and over and each player knows exactly where his teammates will be and when they will be there, we will see something special.