When discussing football in Spain, we might consider the positional play of Pep Guardiola or Luis Enrique.
Culturally and methodologically, Spain is a prominent positional country.
José Alberto López’s Racing Santander are currently at the top of Spain’s second tier — making them a favourite for promotion.
Notwithstanding their impressive results, the most interesting detail about the team playing in El Sardinero is the philosophy they apply to their game model and tactics.
José Alberto López’s Racing Santander are a relationist/functional squad without concepts like symmetries or amplitude.
Innovative, indeed, but this path into relationism has also been insanely organic and natural—as an independent discovery, like the rebirth of relationism amongst many positional teams in Spain.
In this exclusive interview and head coach analysis at Total Football Analysis, José Alberto reflects on his philosophy and methodology while explaining how his Racing Santander became a relationist team.
Who Is José Alberto López?
After a long career in Spanish football, José Alberto López is in everyones mouth because of his work this year at Racing.
His first experience as a head coach in professional football was at Sporting Gijón (2018-2019).
He then worked for Mirandés (2020-2021) and Málaga (2021-2022) before arriving at El Sardinero in 2022.
Now at Racing Santander, José Alberto’s assistant team is made up of Pablo Álvarez (assistant coach), Pedro Dorronsoro (goalkeepers’s trainer), Enric Soriano (analyst), Albert Tataret, and Dani Salvador (physical trainers).
José Alberto López’s Racing Santander Relationism During The Offensive Phase
In positional models, football is about space.
The pitch is made larger, and open space is exploited when the opposing team loses order.
When we sat down with José Alberto, even before entering into the relationism-positional play debate, he clearly explained the intentions of his game model.
It is an entertaining model for the spectator. We want to be brave both offensively and defensively.
During the offensive phase, we try to focus our game on the relations and interactions between our players — in fact, we are the team with the most short passes in the tournament.
All these positional play models that have become trends are very good, but they also tend to anchor the player to play from certain positions.
We try totally the opposite.
We bring our players closer together, acting as facilitators so that players interactions are not perceived as isolated individual efforts but rather as associations that multiply the options to score goals, progress, and create as many scoring opportunities as possible.
From that idea, we have been the team with the most xG generated.
When in possession, Racing Santander’s players locate themselves as close as possible to exploit their relationships through short passes, quick off-the-ball movements, and individual quality.
The winger from the far side gets closer to the play, and one of the full-backs stays to do the rest defence in case of a turnover.
How Did Racing Santander’s Relationism Start?
The most interesting detail about this team is how José Alberto López’s Racing Santander started playing like this.
The coach did not wake up one day and say, ‘I want to play like this’.
All of this, as oc
