Wednesday, 30.10.2024
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?
In the span of two weeks, Dynamo Kyiv managed to secure a couple of their most impressive wins in their club history. Through being drawn against FC Barcelona in the Group Stages of the 1997/98 Champions League, some of Europe’s managerial titans were able to square off. Valeriy Lobanovskiy would be matched against Louis van Gaal. In the matches, Dynamo were too much for Barcelona thanks to their well-designed strategy, despite having inferior talent.
The 1997 Champions League Final pitted Juventus against Borussia Dortmund. The Bianconeri were under the stewardship of the legendary Marcello Lippi. This was in some ways a game of typical of nineties football however there were some impressive modern features from the iconic Italian side. In a guest analysis James Curzon delves into the game’s details.
The Kaiser of German Football roamed and glided over the football pitches of the world for nearly two decades. There were arguably six defining games of his career. I give you, Franz Beckenbauer, the deep-lying commander who defined a generation.
Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid met Guardiola’s Barcelona at the Bernabeu on the evening of the 10th of December 2011. Mourinho’s men went into the game with a 3 point advantage and were desperate to add to their solitary victory over their arch-rivals in Mourinho’s tenure.
Pressing, Gegenpressing, total football … those are all terms usually associated with the Dutch national team from 1974 or, recently, with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and Bayern Munich. But, during history, there have been other divisive figures who contributed to modern football. Valeriy Lobanovskyi has long gone underappreciated but he put his mark on the sport, and his USSR team gave a strong contribution to the game.
With the sad passing of one of football’s greatest yesterday, I decided to visit footballia and analyse his European Cup win with a great Barcelona side featuring numerous stars such as Guardiola, Laudrup and Koeman – all of whom would progress onto a coaching career. Their opposition was a talented Sampdoria side who, despite struggling domestically, found themselves in the final and challenged Cruyff’s side well with a squad containing Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli.
The 1998 World Cup final went down as one of the greatest days in French history as they won their first World Cup over a Brazil side containing legends such as Rivaldo, Cafu, Roberto Carlos and an (famously unwell) Ronaldo. The French team had their own players of similar stature too with the likes of Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuram and eventual man-of-the-match Zinadine Zidane.
In the early 1990s, the Italian national team were in a distinct crisis. To solve the tactical issues, the Federazione drew on the secret weapon of domestic Italian football: Arrigo Sacchi.
In Marti Perarnau’s excellent book ‘Pep Confidential’, the manager himself states he had two favourite performances from his time in the Catalonian city of Barcelona – A 2010 win against Arsenal and their victory over Neymar’s Santos in the Club World Cup match of 2011.
