Breakthrough Balance: The Secret Behind The World’s Most Dominant Teams
As I was reading Patrick Barclay’s biography of Jose Mourinho, ‘Further Anatomy of a Winner’, I felt a flash of inspiration. I stopped paging through the chapter about his formative years, put the book down and immediately googled ‘UEFA Pro License’ on my iPad. I was going to do my coaching badges in Scotland just like Jose did; but unlike him, I would know everything about the course content before I arrived. That way, I’d blow the instructors away with my knowledge and create my own legendary story of the promising coach I was in my late teens. Little did I know, that the grandiose idea I had in my head was extremely far-fetched.
Not only does it take time to be apart of UEFA’s most elite coach education programme, you also need to have introductory and intermediate badges before you can even be considered as a Pro License candidate. I don’t even have a UEFA C License qualification, so I think it’ll take a few more years before I can head to Largs and impress the s*** out of my course colleagues.
However, what I did find from my google search was an impressive resource. A resource that radically altered my understanding of why some teams score so many goals and concede so few at the same time.
This resource, a thesis paper, also helped me to consider various possibilities, which I used to create certain principles before designing a game model for my U/12 side.
I stumbled upon a new concept that allowed my players and I to understand the game better. And to be honest, whether you’re a fan, a coach or you simply love football tactics, this concept might help you understand the game better too.
Origins of an Idea
Denise Reddy, the Head Coach of Sky Blue F.C. in the National Women’s Soccer League(NWSL), authored the paper as part of her final assignment on the UEFA Pro License course.
It was a study that began with the idea that teams that utilised a high press, were more likely to win the ball back and hence create more goalscoring opportunities. Her initial assumption was that more goals were scored off of turnovers that occurred in higher areas.
However, after analyzing 136 goals in the group stages at the 2014 Fifa World Cup, she discovered that the majority of goals scored, actually originated from turnovers inside a team’s own defensive area(before they went on to score). That’s a whopping 45%
After such a discovery, it would’ve made sense to conclude that teams that won the ball inside their own defensive area, only did so because of their organized high pressing that forced the opposition into long passes and clearances right?
Wrong.
After analyzing 45% of the goals that were scored after winning the ball in a team’s own defensive area, this assumption was also proven wrong. She explained her ideas in a rare interview(quoted from DBU Trænerlounge):
For the theme of her final assignment at the program(UEFA Pro License), she chose ‘Breakthrough Balance’. It was a survey based on matches from the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. But the results that originated from Reddy’s findings meant that she discovered a trend that had nothing to do with her original hypothesis.
“I started to do something completely different. As a (former)defensive player, I’ve always been interested in a “high” defence so the first idea was to look at how many goals were scored at the World Cup as a result of high pressure. But when I made the survey, the result turned out differently to what I was searching for. That’s why I changed the focus halfway. Now the focus was on how attacking teams approached their opponents. The number of teams that lost the ball in the phase from the build-up to the ending game and how many goals scored because of it really surprised me. It’s a World Cup trend that had to be highlighted” Reddy says.
The term ‘ending game’ was defined as ‘Breakthrough Phase’ in the paper. It’s the moment when the attacking team in possession tries to penetrate the opponent in order to create a goalscoring opportunity.
She discovered that many attacking teams were losing possession when trying to enter the Breakthrough Phase(Area 4). But more crucially, the manner in which they tried to penetrate, left them vulnerable to conceding goalscoring chances.
It was at this point that she realized that teams trying to penetrate were lacking balance, hence the term ‘Breakthrough Balance’.
What is Breakthrough Balance?
It is the balance between entering the Breakthrough Phase and how a team prevents its opponents from having defensive breakouts in the moment after losing possession. It comprises of 3 aspects:
1. Organization
Organization consists of players in orchestrated positions creating balance
The balance created by organization will enable better opportunities in the Breakthrough Phase and at the same time have players in positions to regain possession.
(Disclaimer: Pep talk ahead)
Pep Guardiola’s teams have become iconic for their excellent organization in recent years. Although the ability to attack while remaining conscious of defensive turnovers has become a pre-requisite for top teams in recent years, very few managers have been able to coach this idea as excellently as he has.
The aim of organization is to position players in areas where they can create goalscoring opportunities while simultaneously being positioned to prevent goalscoring opportunities.
The image below shows the 2–3–5 shape Manchester City used earlier in the season. With 8 players positioned in the centre or ‘half-spaces’, they not only created the necessary connections to play through the middle, but it also put them in a great position to deal with counter-attacks down the middle. The two players positioned high and wide, gave them width and depth that stretched Feyernoord’s full-backs and pinned them back too.
This is a great example of Organization used at the highest level. In fact, if you remember, this was one of City’s toughest games of the season but they ground out a 1–0 win thanks to a late Raheem Sterling winner. Feyenoord were incredibly tough to break down, but City’s positional balance throughout the game led to the inevitable goalscoring opportunity, which they scored in the dying minutes of the game.
2. Decision-Making
Decision-Making made by both the ball carrier and off-the-ball attacking players in the breakthrough phase and the moments following a loss of possession becomes the essence of finding balance.
Teams that ceded possession upon entering the Breakthrough Phase not only did so because of poor organization. Players on and off the ball made poor decisions that led to the loss of ball possession.
The no. 1 cause of lost possession was dribbling, particularly in central areas. 39/161 of turnovers occurred in B4, the central area and 19 of those were on the dribble.
Central areas are congested with defensive players, which makes losing the ball on the dribble inevitable. Numerical superiority is hard to achieve and a lack of space makes it even harder to play in. Added to that, losing the ball in central areas means that conceding from a goal becomes more likely. It’s the best area to begin a counter-attack from. Effective counter-attacking teams only require the centre and the half-spaces to go forward in.
Teams entering the Breakthrough Phase should consider various questions before deciding on the best decisions to make. As Denise Reddy puts it in the paper:
Players decision-making both in attack and when possession is lost needs to be based off of their awareness of the situation
This is where a well-designed system and clearly defined principles of play become vital. They give the player freedom to decide on the best decision’s to make according to the situation, rather than restricting them with rigid instructions. In fact, one could even argue that the best systems are designed around the characteristics of its individuals.
In the video below, Guardiola explains how defensive organization allows Ronaldinho the freedom to dribble as many times as he wants to. Football is a game of many variables, therefore a player can only make a situational decision with confidence if he knows that the team’s organization won’t become unbalanced after a turnover.
3. Restforsvar
Defending and the Re-Press are the two aspects of Restforsvar
Players that aren’t part of the attack should be positioned according to the players the opponents are leaving higher up the pitch.
Players involved in the attack should be positioned so that when losing the ball a transition is stopped as quickly as possible.
Here’s an example of Germany’s Restforsvar, after losing possession:
Here’s an example of Chelsea’s poor Restforsvar. Nemanja Matic loses possession on the dribble, in midfield. However, no Chelsea player managed to cover his position to create balance. The result? A lightning-quick counter-attack, ending in a goal.
Only by organizing the Restforsvar can a team play with security and assurance.
Here’s a quote that outlines this approach in Part One of the book ‘Pep Confidential’ by Martí Perarnau:
If he’s working so hard on the defensive organization, it is because he wants to attack. One day in Säbener Strasse, I said to him: ‘You work on defensive strategy the most.’ His response was short: ‘Because it’s absolutely essential if I want to attack a lot. Defensive organization is the cornerstone of everything else I want to achieve in my football.’
Pep Guardiola prioritizes defensive organization and uses it as a foundation upon which his teams can build their attack. It’s no secret that he thinks of himself as a pragmatic coach, and this quote simply supports that fact.
Last season Manchester City finished 3rd for Goals Against, while this season they’re currently on their way to finishing 1st. On top of a great Restforsvar, Guardiola’s teams spend long periods of the game in possession and we all know that teams can’t score without the ball right?
It’s no wonder that he has dominated world football for so long.
Conclusion
In the paper by Denise Reddy, you’ll probably find a few more quotes taken from the ‘Pep Confidential’, as they reinforce the concepts that she discovered after her analysis. The term Breakthrough Balance does well to articulate the need for good organisation and decision-making all at once. Optimizing scoring opportunities and minimizing the risks of a counter-attack is an idea that all coaches should make apart of their playing philosophy. In doing so they can train their teams accordingly and get them to play more efficiently.
Some might say that Guardiola’s teams play beautiful football. He is always asked if he trains his teams to play beautiful football during interviews. I think his teams play efficient football. Efficient football leads to beautiful results and that to me is the genius of Pep Guardiola.
- Here’s a link to the paper ‘Breakthrough Balance: A quantitative analysis on how to optimize scoring opportunities at the same time minimizing the risks of a counter-attack’
https://www.dbu.dk/~/media/files/dbu_broendby/traenerlounge/opgaver_p/breakthrough%20balance.pdf
