Alex Keble

There was an awkward moment during Jurgen Klopp’s appearance on Monday Night Football when Sky Sports presenter David Jones chose a line of questioning that betrayed the tactical ignorance of English punditry. Having asked the Liverpool manager whether he used one or four forwards during the 5-1 defeat of Hull City and receiving a dismissive answer – “I actually don’t think about it.[…] It’s all about being flexible” – he seemed a bit confused: “so… in possession it’s almost 3-7?”

Klopp laughed. “I don’t want to read about this in the newspaper! No, it’s not. In possession it can be everything. These positions could be anybody.”

The English media is obsessed with analysing formations. Perhaps the most prominent debate of the 2016/17 Premier League season so far has been the relative merits of a 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 at Manchester United, with pundits almost unanimous in their assumption that Paul Pogba is limited in the former and Wayne Rooney in the latter. Tactical analysis is still a fairly new concept in England. Just ten years ago any football fans concerned with the minutiae of football strategy were confined to a geeky corner of the internet, and so it is not surprising that mainstream analysis remains several years behind the zeitgeist. As the likes of Klopp and Pep Guardiola will slowly teach us over the coming years, the Pogba Question and the Rooney Debate fail to reflect the complexity of modern tactics.

“These schematics are nothing more than telephone numbers”, Guardiola tells Marti Perarnau in Pep Confidential. The formation grid, he says, “isn’t meaningful”. Anyone who has watched a Manchester City game this season will understand what he’s getting at: Guardiola’s system is remarkably malleable, with attackers freely interchanging positions in the final third as they attempt to destabilise the opposition’s shape. This is not to say that there is no structure – far from it – but that the precise movements are so complex as to completely disregard the rigidity of a formation grid. As his mentor Juanma Lillo told Perarnau: “you’ll never see players in those [formation] positions, not even when they first come out onto the pitch”.

But it isn’t just the extreme exponents - such as Klopp and Guardiola - that make formation analysis redundant. The sheer square footage that each player covers during a match contradicts the bizarre notion that players move in lines or grids - which in truth are only ever visible during sustained periods of deep defending. One of the most interesting moments of Klopp’s interview on Monday night was when he denied that the 3-5-2 was particularly different from his own system: move the most central of the three defenders just five yards forward and one of the strikers five yards back and – voila – suddenly you have a 4-2-3-1. When the lines become zig-zags – and they always do –the demarcations become meaningless.

Watford’s superb 3-1 victory over Manchester United was first and foremost a tactical victory. Though ostensibly a 3-5-2, Daryl Janmaat roamed wildly on the right flank and Odion Ighalo peeled frequently to the left wing – making the formation flit seamlessly between 3-5-2, 4-4-2, and 4-3-3. This is not an isolated incident; the majority of top level teams switch formations between defence and attack (Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid, for example, won the Champions League by flipping from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2 when defending, so that Cristiano Ronaldo could hang up front).

There are, of course, basic differences between some formations – Marco Bielsa’s 3-3-1-3 is obviously different from a Tony Pulis 5-4-1, for example, and broadly speaking it is still useful to determine roughly what system a manager is employing. A flat, direct 4-4-2 is obviously different from a fluid 4-3-3.

But for the purposes of intricate tactical analysis – be it predicting patterns pre-match or questioning how to get the best out of Pogba and Rooney - the minutiae of individual instruction and overall team cohesion is considerably more important than dotting counters on a team sheet.

Discussing the relative merits of the 4-2-3-1 compared to the 4-3-3 is particularly outdated. Historically, the distinction was meaningful: a 4-2-3-1 is distinguished by its double pivote and focus on attacking playmakers, whilst the 4-3-3 uses proper touchline-hugging wingers and a more yo-yo approach to central midfield balance. But in the modern game, most coaches and teams combine elements of both systems; the sheer intelligence of the box-to-box midfielder (and his relationship with his team-mates) in 2016 often makes it difficult to discriminate between the triangle of the 4-2-3-1 and the flatter 4-3-3, whilst few clubs truly use wingers in the old-fashioned sense any more.

Pogba defied his critics against Leicester City last weekend by performing superbly as part of what pundits labelled a 4-2-3-1: but what does this actually mean? Marcus Rashford hugged the left touchline like a wide forward in a 4-3-3, Zlatan Ibrahimovic drifted backwards like a false nine, and Jesse Lingard (supposedly playing right wing) and Juan Mata floated in the half-spaces on either flank like free-roaming central attacking midfielders.

From a rigid formation perspective it was chaos, but when you analysed the details it was a brilliantly interwoven pattern. Mourinho targeted Leicester’s soft right flank (where Riyad Mahrez lazily tracks back) and their four-man midfield by compressing play into small pockets of the pitch, creating numerous short-passing options that overwhelmed the visitors. The intelligence of Lingard’s, Mata’s, and Rashford’s movement pulled Leicester apart; it was an attacking display made possible by the deliberate rejection of a static formation.

Of course, tactics are just one variable that determines the result of a football match. Confidence has arguably a greater impact, and in fact so dramatically alters the speed, movement, and technical proficiency of the players that tactical coherence tends to be conflated with morale. Footballers are not chess pieces, and the relative merits of a strategy are drastically altered by the instinctual intelligence that comes with feeling good; from winning second balls to switching on at set-pieces, from clever passing triangles to elegantly shifting between formations, high self-esteem leads to fluency whilst low self-esteem causes hesitancy and disjointedness. That players automatically tweak tactical instructions mid-match to adapt to their surroundings – something encouraged by managers like Klopp and Guardiola – only adds to the difficulty of serious tactical analysis.

It is time to end our obsession with formations and the simplistic dissection that it inevitably leads to. Football is too sophisticated and tactics too malleable to define Rooney or Pogba by the shape of eleven dots on a team sheet, and it should come as no surprise when lazy pundits were proven wrong by Pogba’s colossal display last weekend. As for Rooney, only time will tell if his decline is permanent or the result of damaged self-esteem, but it is highly unlikely that the chosen formation is affecting a player who has roamed in the same pockets of attacking midfield space for his entire career.

The football pitch is an astonishingly complex space, mathematically speaking. The number of variables affecting how those 22 players interact creates a living organism that upon close analysis unfolds and unfolds its causal web until discussing something as inflexible as a formation seems incredibly banal.

“Do we talk too much about formations? Are we too bogged down in it?” To be fair to David Jones he did address the central problem in simplistically interpreting that frenzied, swarming Liverpool counter-press, and conducted a very good interview with Klopp. In time, he and Guardiola will teach us to stop obsessing over what are, after all, just telephone numbers.