Saturday, 12.07.2025
The first half of Brighton against Manchester City was a great example of how City’s positional play adapts to create stability as well as positional superiority against their opponents. This analysis will therefore focus on City’s possession game against Brighton’s midfield press in the first 45 minutes, and not touch upon the second half.
Roberto de Zerbi’s team show us one of the most interesting positional play approaches recently. The concept of positional play became very popular these days, still a lot of coaches and teams misinterpret it and just throwing the concept around without a deeper understanding. Although, Sassuolo is a good example for the opposite.
In the last games of the season, Leverkusen used an interesting approach in their positional play, creating a 3-2-2-3 (midfield-box) staggering from the initial 4-2-3-1 shape, which basically changed the whole dynamics of their positional play.
“We found a lot of problems when attacking a 5-4-1 when the striker is marking our holding midfielder and 10 players are defending so deep. We are thinking about how you could attack against that system.” – Pep Guardiola when previewing the 2018/2019 EPL season.
Despite new signings Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang–and despite a seemingly narrow result–the North London derby was a straightforward affair. Thanks to superior positional play and clever pressing, Spurs were able to cement their dominance in the north of London.
The first season in Manchester under Pep Guardiola has been a little inconsistent, although the clear signs of improvements are steadily visible. With the arrival of Guardiola a whole adaptation process started for the team, which was basically and most importantly the presentation and implementation of the Positional Play. Here TP in August has already previewed the issues City has had in the previous season, and the possible changes that Guardiola may bring to Manchester City.
Tottenham have really exceeded expectations this season. With Leicester deservingly taking most of the back page headlines this season, the heroics Mauricio Pochettino and his men have performed so far this season have arguably gone slightly under the radar. They have just come off the back beating 2014/14 champions Manchester City, putting them in second place just two points behind leaders Leicester. Spurs shouldn’t only be given credit for this league position they find themselves in, but also for the style which has delivered them this success.
Football is often framed in terms of vertical and horizontal play – attacking “directly” upfield versus spreading the pitch wide. Yet between these axes lies an equally crucial but subtler dimension: diagonality. Diagonal passes, runs, and structures connect the vertical with the horizontal, unlocking angles that pure north-south or east-west approaches cannot. In geometric terms, a player in a central position has roughly eight directions to play the ball (forward, backward, left, right, plus four diagonal angles), whereas near the touchline there are only five (forward, backward, square inside, square outside, and two diagonals) 1 . Those extra diagonal options dramatically expand the attacking vocabulary. Diagonality is not just a hybrid of vertical and horizontal – it is a first-principles concept in its own right, one that influences how space is created, perceived, and exploited at the highest levels of the game.
Early in the 2017/2018 season, Julian Nagelsmann met Jurgen Klopp in opposing dugouts for the first time. The young coach demonstrated some effective ways of playing against Liverpool’s narrow 4-3-3 press using their 3-1-4-2. This analysis will breakdown those tactics, but does it constitute as a retro analysis?
Frenkie de Jong broke through onto the world stage in a standout 2018/19 season for Ajax, earning him a big money transfer to Barcelona this past summer. He has been one of the best players in world football over the last year.
