Coaching: Playing between the lines

The concept of Juego de Posición, or positional play, was used to the full extent by one of the best coaches in the world Pep Guardiola. He has used different variations during his time at Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and now Manchester City, and it is now widely known amongst football fans.

In addition to many other aspects, the concept of positional play requires creating different kinds of superiorities: numerical, qualitative and positional. Numerical superiority means creating overloads and isolation, and we have a piece on some coaching practices for this pattern. Qualitative superiority means getting your player into 1v1 situations against the oppositions worst player which is not a situation of equality and can be exploited to progress the ball further down the pitch. Lastly, positional superiority requires disrupting the opposition defensive shape by players positioning themselves across the pitch in a way that creates spaces and passing lanes to move the ball into.

In this tactical analysis in the form of a coaching piece, I will present a couple of practices that might help players to understand how to create and exploit positional superiority.

Overview

The basic concept of Juego de Posición is players positioning themselves at different heights and depths. However, steady positioning wont help your team much in the attack, so the movement of the players becomes the most important thing. Players arriving in these positions where they are in the blind zone of the opposition to collect the ball without having much pressure on them is a positional advantage. The movements of other players are key in creating this superiority too, with one of the instances being one player drawing the attention and moving away from the opposition player so that his teammate can open himself up for a pass.

You can see one of the in-game examples of this in the shot below. Liverpools players Wijnaldum and Firmino cooperate to create space to carry on the attack. Firstly, Wijnaldum moves diagonally down and to the left to create a passing lane for the Brazilian. The latter, world-famous for such movement during his career at Liverpool, does his usual trick and drops into space between the three Atlético Madrid players. None of the midfield players of Atlético could track this movement in this situation, thus giving Robertson a clear passing option.

We can see another example by looking at one moment in Atalantas Champions League game against Valencia below. One of Atalantas main stars Alejandro Gómez, just like Firmino, likes to drop deep and collect the ball in the unusual areas for the players of his position. This example shows a more spontaneous, but just as impressive movement compared to what we saw in the previous image.

Its Atalantas attack and the whole Valencia team are getting back, Gómez runs in the direction of the goal for some time whilst Valencias full-back is tracking his actions. Freuler(behind the ball carrier in the example) also pushes forward, thus leaving Gosens, who is on the ball, no passing options in the middle. Gómez spots it and drops deeper behind Valencias midfield to receive the ball. This was a counter-attack, not an attack that involves thorough build-up, but it shows the importance of intelligent player movements.

In the next couple of sections, I will go through some practices that will focus on training movements between the lines.

First practice

We will start with a sim