‘I never realised that to become a jockey, you had to be a horse first’. - Arrigo Sacchi
When asked about the greatest coach of all time, the usual names are uttered from the soap boxes of modern pundits: Ferguson, Guardiola, maybe Mourinho or Ancelotti. I have become increasingly disappointed that Arrigo Sacchi’s name has slowly been expunged from such debates. This is maybe a product of recency bias, Sacchi himself withdrew from football nearly a quarter of a century ago. He may speak English, but he does not do so in public. Younger Italians know him as a cerebral, sometimes cynical, football pundit on SKY Italia.
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This is not the case among elite coaches. Take Jürgen Klopp for example, reflecting after a UCL win with his iconic Borussia Dortmund team:
‘I never met him, but everything I am as a coach, I owe to him. What he did, with Maldini, with Baresi, with Albertini, we knew we could do it. Not as good of course, but tactical discipline, no problem. My team is 10% of what Arrigo Sacchi’s was’.
He later went on to say that:
‘Arrigo Sacchi completely changed how we think about football’.
Pep Guardiola, too, refused to accept that his 2011 Barcelona team was the best club side in history, in an interview with Rio Ferdinand in 2017:
‘There have been many great teams, not just mine, Sacchi’s Milan for example, wow’.
For those who have read my earlier work, the name Arrigo Sacchi is frequently featured. Today I will take the time to explain why. Sacchi’s playing philosophy, principles of play, results and legacy all point to the making of an all-time great.
I: Playing Philosophy
(The greatest picture in the history of football: Maldini, Baresi, Gullit, Ancelotti, Riykaard, Galli, Baresi, Donadoni, Costacurta, Colombo, Tassoti. Nou Camp, 1989, European Cup Final)
Arrigo Sacchi did not just win titles; he changed the game of football itself. He was not wedded to orthodoxy and turned almost every Italian coaching convention on its head. The story began in the town of Fusignano, in Ravenna, Italy. This is where the philosophy of Arrigo Sacchi was forged, an ethical ideal of what football ought to be. Sacchi maintained, with the false modesty of all genii, and the contrarianism that made him great, that he was simply restoring was football once was.
‘I don’t like talking about revolutions. When people call me a revolutionary, I always like to point out: ‘The true revolutionaries are the rest of them. How did football begin? As a team game based on attack. Other people transformed it into a defensive, individualistic game. I’m the one who stays true to the origins. I’m the ultimate conservative’.
Sacchi’s ideal developed by watching the great Real Madrid team of the 1950s in the television of his neighbour and mentor, Lorenzo Zaganari who won the European Cup five years in a row, from 1956 to 1960. This was the Real Madrid of Ferenc Puskas, Alfredo Gento, and of course Alfredo Di Stefano.
This was the origin of Sacchi’s philosophy. Attacking football that was not just effective but aesthetically pleasing. They used the whole width of the pitch and were occupied with stretching the opponent in order to unbalance them. Sacchi said of Gento.
‘Gento played so wide that his real marker was the linesman. He’d play the ball forward, set off at a hundred miles per hour – uncatchable – and he’d try to dribble the corner flag.’
While as a young boy, he may not have been able to articulate it with the command he did as an adult. Sacchi was beginning to get a sense of what made teams great – controlling the space.
Sacchi also found this ideal embodied in Rinus Michel’s Dutch national team of the early 1970s.
Though Michel’s team never won the 1974 World Cup, it is the team we first think of when we think about the tournament. Colloquially, the team is regarded as the pioneer of ‘Total Football’, the idea that positions are not fixed on the pitch, but mere starting points. They executed rotations both with and around the ball carrier that bamboozled opponents trying to make them man to man. While Ari Haan, Willem van Hanegem, Johan Neeskins and Jonny Rep were pivotal, it was the genius of Johan Cruyff (who later brought total football to Barcelona, first as a player and then as head coach, mentoring a certain Josep Guardiola Sala along the way) that ensured this game concept manifested on the pitch. ‘Total Football’ is less of a tactic or even a set of principles, but an attitude to football, the idea that players should be in constant movement, both on and off the ball.
Yet something annoyed Sacchi when he heard players and pundits alike fawn over the Dutch team. Too much emphasis was being placed on the individual quality of Cruyff, Rep, and Neeskins. There was an assumption that this style of football could not be copied. It was a relic of history that had to be admired, perhaps mourned. But Sacchi believed that there was something deep, essential, and structural about Michel’s team that indeed could be superimposed into modern football. What impressed Sacchi about the Dutch team was not simply the individual brilliance of their protagonists, but their structural unity. Eleven players all on a string, moving and thinking in perfect unison. Despite their dizzying rotations, they never got in each other’s way, as each player knew when and where their room was. Most importantly, they understood that you control a game, both in and out of possession, by controlling space. Their reference points (whether they were aware of it) were habitually their teammate, then the ball, then the opponent. For most other teams it was the opposite.
Most importantly, Michels’ team aligned with Sacchi’s aesthetic ideals.
‘The Dutch also honoured the soul of football born as a team sport and then reduced to an individual one. That team played a game based on domination and beauty, they wanted to win on merit and cared about values. Just as we would later on’.
However, this had to also be adapted to the increased physical and technical football of a generation later. This became his life’s mission. Sacchi did not have the easiest of starts in football. He never played beyond amateur level and began coaching his village team in Fusignano when he was 26 simply because he was not good enough to make the starting line-up anymore.
II: Principles of Play
Philosophical conviction may have defined Sacchi’s team. But it was not why he succeeded. Plenty of coaches have pontificated about their commitment to the Cruyffian ideal in their first press conference, only to be relegated from League 1.
Where Sacchi succeeded was the construction of a set of innovative principles, that enabled his teams to dominate the game both with and without the ball. The goal of these principles to Sacchi was clear:
‘Great clubs have had one thing in common throughout history, regardless of era and tactics. They owned the pitch, and they owned the ball. That means when you have the ball, you dictate play and when you are defending you control the space’.
The genius was found in how Sacchi sought to deliver this ideal. Many have tried and failed. Sacchi believed there was a set of underlying principles of play that had to be non-negotiable, regardless of the skill, talent, and individual brilliance of the players on the team. The job of the coach was to help the players internalise these principles, so they became automatic. These principles were fixed, stable, and transcended individual tactical adjustments one would make before or during a game to adjust to the nuances of the opponent’s game model. Sacchi wanted to create a science of football, not because he believed football was a science, but because objectivity begot creativity and real self-expression. He regarded the team as a living organism, with both a soul and a body. The former is its philosophy, and the latter is its core principles of play. Sacchi’s positional play framework was an attempt to institutionalise the aesthetic beauty of Total Football.
For me, Sacchi’s greatest innovation was the introduction of the principles of positional play. Positional play, as some of my previous articles have touched on, is the hallmark of an elite team. It is less a tactic than it is a methodology, a theory of spatial interpretation within which tactics can be created.
Sacchi believed the real secret of Michels’ Ajax and Netherlands teams was not the individual brilliance of Cruyff or Rep, nor the fluid passing rotations in themselves. It was the overarching structure within these rotations that was trained, adjusted, and improvised within.
(Arrigo Sacchi’s pitch)
This was Sacchi’s positional model. He divided up the pitch into 12 zones. This became the map he used to coordinate the movement of his players in offensive, defensive and transitional situations. While on first look this looks basic, in light of the more complex positional maps of the world’s top coaches today (see Part IV), this systematic approach was indeed transformational in the late 1980s.
Pre-Sacchi, teams indeed had formational structures (think the W-M formation most English teams set up in, or the 5-3-2 popular in Italy at the time known as the ‘door bolt’), but these formations were procured based on subconscious assumptions about reference points on the pitch that Sacchi turned on its head. Sacchi wanted the first reference point of his players, both in and out of possession, to be space on the pitch, not the position of the ball or the position of their opponent. For Sacchi, this was the key to teams like the aforementioned Real Madrid or Dutch teams he grew up admiring.
All eleven players had to have this map in their heads at all times. It became the operating system of the team. The coding language of their intricate rotations, their incredibly well-organised pressing structure, and their high defensive line. Like all great works of art or music, constraints create the conditions for creativity. Sacchi had to create certain rules of zonal occupation in order to organise his team.
It was one thing to theoretically conceive an entirely new way of interpreting space on the football pitch, it was another thing to forge the necessary intuitions on the pitch for them to permeate the hearts, brains, and veins of the players. This required innovative training methods which were in the beginning excruciating for the players. Alessandro Costacurta laughed and was adamant this madman would not last two months.
Sacchi’s training methods were ground-breaking. They were designed to create automatisms (now a standard concept in Italian coaching discourse, de Zerbi alludes to it frequently in his interviews). These were intuitive decisions and movements that were so ingrained in the players’ minds that the game became a rehearsal of training. Making complex positional decisions on the pitch, consciously, left too much to chance. It would not produce dominant football. Sacchi did not want to leave anything to chance.
To help his players understand that football was not about the ball, but about space, Sacchi simply took the ball out of training. For hours and hours, Sacchi’s team in their 4-4-2 would play 11 vs 11 without a football. The ball was invisible. Juventus once sent spies before their standoff tie in 1988. He reported back to his superiors that Sacchi was simply mad, he could not work out anything:
‘They were playing with an invisible football’.
Sacchi’s fundamental spatial principle was compactness, both with and against the ball. This is where his model began to diverge from that of Michel’s. The great Ajax and Netherlands teams generally made the pitch big in possession and closed the space out of possession. For Sacchi, compactness was a necessity in both phases. This did not mean playing narrow football or avoiding playing through the wings (like we see maybe in the style of Jesse Marsch today) but maintaining close passing distance between the players, and shorter vertical distances between the defensive line and the highest striker.
(In one of the few training sessions Sacchi allowed cameras into, positional compactness was at the centre of everything Sacchi did)
Sacchi believed that the 4-4-2 was the best way to achieve this compactness. Again, the 4-4-2 is a basic formation in this day and age, associated with the two banks of four ‘kick and rush’ style of conservative English teams. But this was not how Sacchi interpreted it. Sacchi believed that 4-4-2 offered him the most compact structure both with and against the ball. The reason why has to be understood in terms of Sacchi’s conception of spatial coverage. In order to achieve the compactness, he desired (15m to 20m in all phases of the game), he did away with the most important position in Italian football – the sweeper or ‘Libero’. It was this compactness that was the defining feature against the ball of Jose Mourinho’s great Porto, Chelsea, and Inter Milan teams of the early 2000s.
Historically, Italian teams had always played with three central defenders, two slightly higher up, and one spare man, the ‘Libero’ who would not have any man-marking responsibilities. The Libero would use their football intelligence and composure on the ball to launch attacks from deep and set the temporalisation of the game. This was the position that John Charles, Bobby Moore, and Franz Beckenbauer made their own. In the 1980s the position was mastered by Juventus’ legendary Gaetano Scirea and his successor in the Italian national team, Franco Baresi. However, Sacchi did not care that Baresi was a ‘Libero’. He believed his ball-playing qualities and football intelligence would be enhanced in his new flat-back four.
Doing away with the deeper ‘Libero’ enabled Milan to play with a high backline. This was essential for a team wanting to win the ball aggressively, high up the pitch. If the distances between the lines of the team were too great, there would be too great a distance the players would have to make to receive it back. Also, if the front or midfield lines pushed up, and the defensive line was held back by a deeper-lying sweeper, teams could simply cut through the huge gulf left between the two lines (think Manchester United this season under Ten Hag). Sacchi wanted his teams to defend in a block, with all ten outfield players. Likewise, in possession, if the distances were too great, there would be too much ground to cover to execute the intricate passing and positional rotations that brought the best out of the skilful offensive players in the team. While this is simply a basic principle in modern coaching methodology, this was unheard of until Sacchi institutionalised these rules in the 1980s.
Pressing was the aesthetic hallmark of Sacchi’s Milan. This was evident even to the casual observers. But contrary to popular belief, pressing is not just about ‘will’ and ‘energy’. This is what many English coaches fail to understand. Pressing is a science and is only successfully unleashed when players are adhering to strict positional principles. It is more than simply chasing the ball like a dog until you win it back. While this may work at times, it renders the team totally ineffective when finally recovering the ball. Sacchi’s pressing structures were neatly choreographed, using the positional zones he had ingrained in the minds of his players. They were to press space, not the ball, or players. (This was adopted to near perfection by Jürgen Klopp’s great Dortmund and Liverpool teams in the last ten years).
(As soon as Milan lost the ball, the opponent was swarmed by four players)
(Milan didn’t press the ball, they pressed the space)
One of the most important conceptual innovations Sacchi was responsible for was showing that attacking and defending were interconnected, not separate phases. You could attack without the ball and defend with the ball. What does this mean? Football, unlike basketball, handball or American football does not have regulations that constrain decision-making in delineated offensive or defensive phases. In football there is no ‘passive play’ rule that forces a team to score within twenty seconds if the referee decides you are not attacking as in handball. Unlike in American football, you cannot substitute your entire team after a turnover. Football is a game of constant flux. Sacchi wanted his team to attack without the ball. This is the definition of pressing.
In offensive situations, Sacchi completely changed the mentality of Italian football. Italian football had always been defensive-minded, heavily influenced by the principles of Inter Milan head coach Helanio Herrera in the 1950s. Build-up rotations were slow, there were few teams who took risks, looking to overload the back line. Sacchi wanted to bring the spirit of the Real Madrid and Dutch teams he so admired to Serie A. Indeed, he had the offensive talent to do this. The Dutch trio of Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Riykaard were responsible for this. Educated in the Dutch total football tradition, and self-consciously the heirs Rep, Neeskins and Cruyff.
But once again, Sacchi did not simply want to emulate these teams, he wanted to build on what they did, with more structure, more systematisation, and organisation. This led much less to chance. Also, much structured offensive play meant that players were in the correct positions with the necessary compactness in case of turnover. Attacking and defending were integrated. This was the genesis of a staple concept in modern football coaching – Restvereitergung or ‘rest defence’. This is the process of aligning your spare offensive players in a certain position when attacking that closes certain rooms on the pitch, pre-empting a turnover, thereby reducing the chances of a counterattack. This can only be procured by the coach if the players are adhering to strict positional constraints both with and against the ball.
Sacchi introduced automatisms in the attack. This was when Sacchi let the players train with the ball. Milan’s players spent hours and hours rehearsing passing combinations designed to out-manoeuvrer the tight man-marking of their opponent. Short tight passes and counter-movements against the ball were designed in abstract by Sacchi. The greatest fruit of this was Riykaard’s goal against Benfica in the 1990 European Cup final. Apart from the result, this was far from a textbook Sacchi performance, his team looked tired and did not press with the same energy as they had been known for. It was far from the demolition of Steaua Bucharest in the previous final. Nevertheless, this is where automatisms kicked in 67 minutes into the game.
This beautiful goal is worth watching in real speed. But let me try to describe it.
Costacurta receives a square pass from Baresi in their defensive third. He carries the ball into the space taking the Benfica forward Hernani out of the game.
Van Basten already knew what his job was when the ball was in his own team’s final third. It was to drop deeper into the space in behind Riykaard and position himself between Benfica’s two central midfielders Jonas Thurn and Valdo. That created a passing lane. Without even looking, he already knew Rijkaard would be making a run in behind the two Benfica central defenders, so with one touch, he slots the ball into that space.
With two touches, one tight one and another large one, Rijkaard is one vs one with Sivino. He uses his remarkable travella technique to give the keeper no chance. Milan wins their second European Cup final in a row, 1-0. The back-to-front move is so fast, that the camera can barely keep up with the attack.
The genius of this goal was not the world-class vision of Costacurta, the passing technique of Van Basten or the touch and finish from Rijkaard. As great as they all were. It was the underlying principles of play that were exhibited to perfection, in a high-pressure situation, subconsciously and automatically.
Notice where Van Basten and Rijkaard make their runs. They do not make their runs in relation to the ball carrier, they make their runs into open space created by the broader structure of their team. Like their defensive principles, it was space, then the ball, then the opponent that determined their decision making. For Sacchi, attacking and defending were governed by the same football principles.
The beauty was also in its apparent simplicity. The ball went from Costacurta to the back of the net in 5 touches. Why waste touches dribbling through a defensive block when the ball travels faster than you? Sacchi loved vertical football, on the floor. It was not until Jupp Heynckes’ 2013 Bayern Munich team the football world saw a team emulate this ultra-direct interpretation of possession-based football. Another Sacchi admirer.
Structuring automatisms in training that are to be implemented on match day is commonplace even at low-level professional teams nowadays. Coaches often complain that even if basic moves were rehearsed, they often never translate onto the pitch with anywhere near the efficiency as on the training ground. Why does it work for Guardiola or Arteta but not the majority of professional coaches? Most coaches still structure attacking patterns of play in a man-orientated manner. This was as true in the 1980s as it is now. The difference with Sacchi was that he structured his player movement based on spatial occupation, rather than ball reaction or opponent reaction. Sacchi invented the spatially orientated structured pattern of play. It is what we see when we watch the great Pep Guardiola team seem to pass around their opponent with ease, always finding the spare man. This is what it means to play dominant football. You move the ball to move the opponent. You move the ball by moving into predetermined spaces (sometimes called rooms in Germany or zones in England). Sacchi was turning football into geometry.
In offensive situations, Sacchi valued the collective over the individual, not because he was a jealous authoritarian football coach, envious that his players could do more this a tennis ball than he could with a football, but because he believed it was a structure that begot freedom. This took some convincing too, particularly for Marco van Basten, an initial Sacchi sceptic. Sacchi, reflecting on his work with the Dutch superstar said.
‘To show Marco the right position to take up when pressing I had to shout into the megaphone a thousand times. Another thousand times, I had to draw him a diagram. I had to make him understand that when our attack was over, he shouldn’t just take a rest up a siding – he needed to stay in an active position, ready to receive a pass or hunt down the ball. When the lesson entered his brain and he was fully convinced of his own worth, Marco became a phenomenon at pressing too’.
(Van Basten won the Baloon D’Or three times playing for AC Milan)
When Sacchi chose players for his team, he did not let individual talent alone decide who played. Perhaps the most famous example of this was his treatment of Claudio Borghi, who was signed by owner Silvio Berlusconi to play alongside the Dutch duo Marco Van Basten and Ruud Gullit (Riykaard was signed a year later). In the early 1980s, Borghi was regarded as the greatest talent Argentina had produced since Maradona. Milan’s owner, Silvio Berlusconi signed him in 1987, the same year he brought Sacchi to Milan from Parma. This was a big deal. Unlike today, teams had a limit on foreign players imposed by UEFA (two until 1988, then changed to three). This was a statement transfer. Berlusconi was adamant he had struck gold and found the next superstar. Sacchi had other ideas. Sacchi refused to play Borghi, on the grounds that:
‘a true player plays with and for the team, everywhere on the pitch, at all times. Borghi played only for the ball. Of all the attributes and attitudes, I look for in a player, he did not possess a single one’
(Claudio Borghi did not become the next Maradona, he resumed a journeyman career in the mid-tables of the South American leagues)
In a month-long standoff with Berlusconi, which ended with Sacchi threatening to resign unless Borghi was replaced with Frank Rijkaard, Berlusconi yielded to his protégé. Borghi was sold and resumed a journeyman career in the South American leagues, the ‘new Maradona’ made only nine appearances for the Argentinian national team. Berlusconi knew he was working with someone who saw football entirely differently from anyone he had previously hired. He yielded to that genius. The rest was history.
III: Result
So what did all this achieve?
Sacchi won Serie A once in the 1987-88 season and two consecutive European Cups in 1989 and 1990. While this is a greater managerial palmares than 99% of professional football coaches, it hardly puts him, trophy-wise, in the upper echelons within the top one per cent. Sacchi’s trophy haul pales in comparison to the thirteen Premier League titles of Sir Alex Ferguson, or the fifteen league titles in Spain, Germany, and England of Pep Guardiola. Sacchi’s own protégé, Carlo Ancelotti has won double the number of Champions League titles than his master. Zinedine Zidane did one better than Sacchi and won three Champions Leagues in a row in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The Inter Milan team of Brehme, Klinsmann, and Matthaus won the Scudetto in 1989, and Diego Maradona’s Napoli won it in 1990. The made argument by Sacchi aficionados (or AC Milan fans) is usually made is that Sacchi’s Milan were simply competing with some of the greatest teams of their era. Serie A was the super-league of its age. It had the highest concentration of talent in the world, only to be matched comparatively with the modern Premier League of today.
(Milan’s Dutch trio were outwitted to the League in 1989 by the German trio)
But I think there is something much deeper, much more essential, or as Sacchi would say, much more structural about why Sacchi was not able to become a serial winner.
Sacchi was a grand strategist but merely an above-average tactician. He was an idealist. Idealists often fail to understand when to adapt their strategy in the same of tactics. Jose Mourinho put it more bluntly:
‘In football, there are many poets, but poets don’t win many titles’.
Sacchi’s greatest strength as a manager was seeing the wood from the trees. But he often struggled to adapt to in-game changes of the opposition, and his 4-4-2 at times became predictable and rigid. Such was the physical demands he placed upon his players that they often burned out due to the high physical demands required to press the ball, at all times, for ninety minutes. Mentally too, Sacchi’s perfectionism became an intellectual burden to his players. It was an enormously stressful experience to play under such intense tactical demands.
Students of philosophy and history will be aware of Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, based on the ancient Greek poet Archilochus’ fable. Berlin wrote that:
‘The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing… For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.
Berlin, Oxford’s finest philosopher of the twentieth century, uses this typology to codify a range of canonical writers and thinkers. In Berlin’s eyes Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce were foxes. On the other hand, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Dante, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust were hedgehogs. Tolstoy was in between.
I think you can see where this is going…
The genius of Sacchi was not found in his ability to master a range of footballing tactical discourses and choose to use them at his behest. As described earlier, he was driven by an almost transcendental ideal of what football originally was. An attacking game played as a collective unit. A game that was exciting, that got a young boy destined to be a shoemaker in a small Italian town off his seat and devote his life to the pursuit of this vision. Sacchi’s ‘central vision’ was space. Football was about space, not the ball. His tactics stemmed from this obsession with this one idea. This obsession led him to completely rethink the basic premise of how football was played itself.
This was a characteristic found in a few coaches who we regard as elite. To extend (or perhaps bastardise) Berlin’s typology, Chapman, Michels, Herrera, Menotti, Cruyff, Bielsa and Rangnick are hedgehogs. Yet, Ramsay, Revie, Clough, Shankly, Ferguson, Capello, Hitzfeldt, Mourinho, Klopp and Ancelotti were foxes. Guardiola is somewhere in between.
To win serially you must be a fox, to change the game you have to be a hedgehog.
So focused was Sacchi on his grand vision of football, that he often overlooked the minutiae. And so successful were his principles that teams quickly adopted them, often to even more deadly effect. This was demonstrated none other than at AC Milan itself. Sacchi resigned in 1992, burnt out, vowing never to return to football again (he did, and took Italy to the 1994 World Cup final, losing on penalties). He was replaced by his assistant, and predecessor as head coach, Fabio Capello. Capello was a new proselyte of the Sacchi school and maintained the positional play principles instituted by his former boss. However, what he did within that framework was different, more conservative, and some would say more Italian. Certainly, less crazy.
Capello employed pressing but was less obsessed with pressing for the majority of the game. He used Sacchi’s principle of defending space by forcing his players to retreat into deeper blocks and soak up pressure. He did not want his players to take as many risks in possession as his predecessor. He was not obsessed about scoring the perfect goal, a la Riykaard versus Benfica in 1990. He wanted his teams to attack, but to use the width of the pitch more in the build-up, rather than an obsession with quick touches and verticality.
The issue with Sacchi’s obsession with crisp, choreographed rotations was that if one player got their positioning wrong, the whole movement broke down. If one player was 5m out of position in their rest defence, the whole team would crumble against a counterattack. If Ancelotti or Rijkaard could not execute their technical under intense man-to-man marking, there was often no spare man at the back ‘libero’ to step in and dictate play instead. Capello, the watchful assistant was aware of these inefficiencies. Not that he ever dared question his master.
The pragmatic adjustments to Sacchi’s extreme methods paid dividends. Capello won the Scudetto four times in a row from 1992 to 1996, alongside the 1994 Champions League Final 4/0 against Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona. The Champions League final was a particularly special achievement, Milan started without a suspended Van Basten, and an injured Baresi and Costacurta. Due to UEFA’s three foreigners’ rule, Jean Pierre-Papin, Brian Laudrup, and Florin Raducioiu had to be omitted from the squad. . Capello was pragmatic, he moved central defender, Marcel Desailly into central midfield. He felt he could physically bully Pep Guardiola (then Johan Cruyff’s tempo setter in holding midfielder). He did just that. Milan was Champions of Europe once again. Cruyff, humiliated, quit coaching for good less than two years later
(Capello and the titanic Marcel Desailly, a player I am not sure Sacchi would have gambled on)
To the simple eye, this vindicated pragmatism over idealism. Maybe it did. Or maybe Cruyff simply should have played Michael Laudrup? (That was how Capello saw it).
This may all be true, but it distracts us from what I think the deeper point is. If anything, the dominance of Milan under Capello was the greatest vindication of Sacchi’s principles. Even more so than his own victories. In spite of tactical and systemic changes, Capello never broke from Sacchi’s basic principles. Not that he could have if we wanted to – they were so integrated into the core of his team (Maldini, Baresi, Costacurta, Ancelotti, Donadoni, Albertini, Tassoti, Gullit and Van Basten were all still there in 1994, Riykaard left for Ajax a year earlier). Milan is still set up in a 4-4-2 (still radical at the time) and more importantly set up to control space, not the ball or the opponent. With a healthy dose of pragmatism, Capello tweaked Sacchi’s innovation and built a serial winning machine.
But in spite of the titles, no one looks back at Capello’s Milan with anywhere near the glint in the eye as they do with Sacchis’s. They had lost their ethereal beauty. Maybe Sacchi was onto something.
IV: Legacy
The true testament to Arrigo Sacchi’s greatness was the near-universal adoption of his principles in the twenty-first century, something that is evident to this day among our top coaches. Positional play or spatial football is not a series of tactics or even a system. It is a methodological principle, if not the methodological principle of elite European football.
Take the top three coaches of the last fifteen years – Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp.
Guardiola took Sacchi’s positional method and sought to revive Cruyff’s ideals of total football that many thought were dead and buried after the 1994 Champions League final. Like Capello, he adopted Sacchi’s basic positional framework. He did this in two ways – by dividing his pitch up into even more refined geometrically organised zones (18 in total) and using possession as a defensive tool.
(Pep Guardiola’s pitch)
Rather than Sacchi’s tactical obsession with verticality in the build-up play, Guardiola emphasised patient distribution of the ball through all three phases of the pitch. This worked because of the highly technical and intelligent calibre of player he preferred, who knew exactly when to change the rhythm of the game from lateral distribution to vertical distribution. He also had a certain Lionel Messi, perhaps the best player ‘in between the lines’ in history. (Sacchi argued that while Gullit wanted to play this role, he did not have sufficient talent to connect the lines. This is perhaps why Sacchi favoured an extreme vertical approach in offensive transition).
Guardiola has never played with a 4-4-2. He opted to use 4-3-3 in his Barcelona team, which evolved into a 4-2-3-1 at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. Under the auspices of his sporting director, Matthias Sammer, at Bayern Munich, Guardiola was forced to learn the more pragmatic, tactical side of the game. Now a hallmark of his teams is their extreme tactical adaptability, delicately tweaking his shape and patterns of play to combat the pressing structure of every opponent. Nevertheless, the fundamental principles of Sacchi’s football – positional play, compactness, pressing and understanding the dynamic relationship between attacking and defensive phases are absolutely on show.
Heuristically, Jose Mourinho’s style of play is often presented as the polar opposite of Guardiola’s. Philosophically, perhaps it is. Mourinho is known for supposedly a more defensive, reactive, duel-based football. Teams win games by physically overpowering their opponents and using simple patterns of play designed to get the ball from A to B as quickly as possible. Mourinho did not care how his teams won, just if they won. So, they say…
This crude caricature does Mourinho a great disservice. Of course, his football is not as free-flowing as Guardiola’s, and he does indeed not like to take risks in front of the ball. His teams never really pressed, bar a few instances in his Real Madrid team (even so, they only pressed in twenty-minute phases, never throughout the game). It was certainly not the tiki-taka philosophy of Cruyff and Guardiola. But this is all aesthetics. It is the underlying principle we are interested in.
But on a closer look, many of Mourinho’s basic principles align with Guardiola’s and thereby Sacchi’s. From FC Porto to the present day, Mourinho has never diverged from the principles of spatial football. Mourinho, in his short-lived career as a SKY TV pundit, could not stop talking about defensive compactness. He insisted, much to the bemusem*nt of Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher and Graham Souness, that the distinction between ‘high block’, ‘mid-block’ and ‘low block’ is adiaphorous. What was important for him was not how high the block was, but how compact the block was. This was textbook, Sacchi.
Mourinho too divided his pitch up into zones, more similar to Sacchi’s than to Guardiola’s model. These zones formed crucial reference points both in and out of possession. For all the duels his players loved to win, Mourinho has never set up a man-to-man against-the-ball system. His players were assigned zones to control off the ball when an opponent stepped into the zone that initiated the duel. Mourinho won more titles than Sacchi because he was far more adaptable. Indeed, this is where he really made his name. Mourinho was able to instantly stop structural flaws in an opponent within five minutes of a game. His reading of the game and ability to make intuitive decisions in light of evolving situations made his teams nearly unbeatable domestically.
The most explicit exponent of Sacchi’s ideas is Jürgen Klopp. He has made this clear in numerous interviews. But the story of Klopp’s exposure to both positional play and pressing football derives from a lesser-known, but perhaps equally important coaching personality, the late Wolfgang Frank. Frank was a journeyman German coach who managed teams such as Rot-Weiß Essen, Mainz and MSV Duisburg. He never coached in the Bundesliga. But he did coach a certain Jürgen Klopp in the late 1990s at Mainz. Frank was inspired by Sacchi and was bemused that the German national team had still not evolved to playing with a back 4, without a libero. This was perhaps due to the towering influence of Franz Beckenbaur. How could one do away with his position? Lothar Mattheus and Matthias Sammer were perfect successors in the libero role when called upon.
Ever the radical, Frank decided to import these principles to Mainz. This required a whole new exhibition of discipline from the players that they had never needed before. Frank didn’t care, if Gullit, Riykaard, and Van Basten could stand in the wind and rain for three hours a day, with their coach adjusting their movement and positioning by the centre metre, there is no reason why German second division players were above that treatment either, Frank argued.
Klopp took those ideas and the high-pressing, and ‘heavy metal football’ became the trademark of his style. Klopp’s football is often misunderstood as something solely based on will and energy. While there is plenty of that, there are plenty of brains to go with the brawn. Klopp implements a rigorous zonal system in all phases of the game. His pressing routines are highly choreographed.
Klopp emphasised the attacking and direct elements of Sacchi’s game model. But most importantly he retained the basic spatial framework. Notice how Klopp’s pitch is structured slightly differently from Guardiola’s. This is due to his heavy emphasis on pressing and counter-pressing. Smaller boxes are created in the middle areas of the pitch, the danger areas where Klopp believes it is the most important to recover the ball.
What becomes clear is that positional play can be understood as a language of football. Within that language, coaches are free to write their own stories.
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It is not just in elite football the spectre of Sacchi has loomed large.
Yesterday, Danny Röhl’s Sheffield Wednesday team hosted Wayne Rooney’s Plymouth at Hillsborough in their opening game of the Championship season. Wednesday trounced Plymouth 4:0. It really should have been 7 or 8 (xG would tell us 4.85). It was a coaching masterclass from Röhl, with a squad consisting of free agents and League 1 players. They pressed aggressively from the front, remained compact both against the ball, found the ‘spare man’ in every phase, and manipulated the ball to control space, choreographed counter movements were executed to unbalance the opposition back line, and against a deeper block constructed a watertight rest defence to limit counter attacks. There was a clear game concept on show in all four phases of the game, rare at this level. Bannan was the conductor of these rotations. He was the player who determined the temporalisation of Wednesday’s play, playing both as a 10 and a 6 depending on the game state, gliding up and down the central channel. The sum of Wednesday’s parts was greater than their whole. All eleven of their players in all four game phases were interconnected dropping and running behind in near perfect unison. They generated thirty chances to Plymouth’s two.
Plymouth were poor but they were made to look poor. It was clear they had a game plan too. Before the game, Rooney described Röhl’s approach via the rather patronising heuristic of ‘Red Bull football’. He said he felt the team had prepared for weeks to stop it. They wanted to defend space not men, soak up Wednesday’s attacks and quickly break on the counter, using the pace of Whittaker, Cissoko, and Tijani to strike when their opponent’s possession game broke down. Sit deep in a 4/4/2 to control space. Defend as a unit, with the holding midfielder dropping deep to prevent 1 vs 1 situations for the centre-halves. Rather than marking to man to man and being dragged into no-mans-land by the intricate rotations of Wednesday, the Plymouth players were instructed to regard their teammates, rather than their opponent or the ball as their first reference point when playing against the ball. A dejected Rooney was adamant in his post-match interview that it was basic execution errors rather than systemic errors that cost his team on the day. I am inclined to agree with him.
One of the world’s greatest players had just seen his team destroyed by a career coach who never rose higher than the German amateur divisions, quitting football at age twenty.
But what does a Championship game in 2024 between two teams expected by most pundits to finish in a relegation battle have to do with Arrigo Sacchi, the AC Milan team of Baresi, Maldini, Guillit, Van Basten and Riykaard and their iconic 4/0 demolition of Steaua Bucharest in the 1989 European Cup final?
Everything.
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