Are Wenger's Tactics Stuck In 2006?

The evolution of football tactics is, essentially, just an arms race between attack and defence. Someone invents a new way of getting the spherical object into that net thing, and then everyone else copies it while frantically trying to figure out a way to defend against it. Often these new ways of attacking are the result in changes to the law or the offside rule, or sometimes they’re just insights from football geniuses who see the problem afresh and can reinvent the game in their own imagination. There are so many examples to choose from but I don’t want to rehash the whole history of the game because it’s already been done so well by @jonawils and @zonal_marking in their various books and articles - particularly this one and this which explain quite well the situation we now  find ourselves in.

For many years 4-4-2 was the orthodoxy but then around the turn of the millennium it was superseded by 4-2-3-1. This article explains some of the reasons how and why that happened but the most important consequence was that it led to more lateral movement by the attacking players in the final third of the pitch. In the old days of 4-4-2, the responsibility for screening the full back rested with the wide midfielder. That meant, effectively, that he was tethered to his side of the pitch, otherwise he’d find himself too far away when his team lost the ball, leaving his full-back potentially exposed to a 2 v 1. When teams started playing with the extra defensive midfielder, or the ‘Makalele’ role as it was dubbed, it suddenly freed the wide players to cut inside with impunity, safe in the knowledge that the aforesaid Mr Makalele would be there to plug the gap behind him.

Once the wingers were able to cut inside instead of just running up and down in straight lines, lots of attacking possibilities opened up. We saw right or left footed players playing on the ‘wrong’ flank and increasingly, we saw central strikers play with the freedom to drift wide into the channels. Suddenly central defenders had a dilemma. What happens when the striker they’re marking wanders wide left or right? Let him go? But what happens when your full-back gets overloaded? Probably better to go give him a hand out there. Poor full-back, it’s really not fair that Ashley Cole, Robert Pires AND Theirry Henry are all running at him at the same time. Hold on little buddy, I’m coming….  Oh but wait…. now there’s a big gap in the middle of the penalty box and someone else has drifted into it unmarked…. Oh…  Oh… Bugger! Hmmm, this defending lark has suddenly got a bit more difficult; can’t we go back to the good old days of 4-4-2 where I just stand on the penalty spot and kick lumps out of my designated striker?

And so we entered the halcyon days of 4-2-3-1; false nines, striker-less formations and tiki-taka football, the high priests, of course, were the great Barcelona side of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta. The fluidity of their attacking play and the way they manipulated both players and ball around the pitch was such that no defence could cope for very long. The arms race had tilted decisively in favour of the attack. Naturally, the whole world rushed to copy the style, spawning a plethora of budget Barcelonas, with varying degrees of success; mostly dependent on whether you had a Xavi pulling the strings, a Fabregas or for the less fortunate ones, a Jamie Redknapp.

These possession teams no longer attacked by getting the ball wide and crossing it to the big man in the box because they realised it was much more efficient to work the ball into what became known in coaching parlance as zone 14 (the area by the D just outside the box) and attack from there by moving the defenders around and threading intricate passes through the defence. In short, the best teams didn’t cross the ball very much anymore but attacked through the middle instead.

But nothing lasts forever. In 2011, a far-sighted manager with a deep understanding of the subject was faced with the prospect of playing the real Barcelona side at the height of its powers with his own budget version in a Champions League knock-out tie. He sat down, had a think about it and came up with a plan to nullify their strengths. In one of the amusing ironies of this story, that manager was, of course, Arsène Wenger.