The father of Italian football journalism and champion of catenaccio Gianni Brera was
reported to have said that the perfect game of football would end 0-0.
With this in mind, marking can be just as attractive and interesting as attacking play.
There are two main types of marking, man and zonal, but each has variants,
both systemically and situationally.
Man marking was the dominant style between the 1920s and the 1950s, but teams persisted
with team-orientated man coverage in open play until the 1990s and beyond, especially in Germany.
The system originated with the classic W-M formation, because two teams
employing W-M essentially covered each other by default.
Each player was responsible for tracking their man, being close enough to
close and tackle immediately, and not losing them.
The advantages are clear: it’s straightforward to pick someone and stay close to them wherever they go.
As was generally the case, attacking changes adapted to break down this style of defence,
most overtly in this case, players such as the 9 dropping back into space, as Nandor
Hidegkuti did against England in 1953.
Already the classic deficiency of man marking is
exposed: if a player moves away from their position, the marker tasked with that player
must follow or leave – that either creates space if they track, or a free player if they do not.
A way around this is flexible man marking – man marking still applies, but if there
is lots of lateral or vertical movement by an attacker,
the defender hands them over to another defender.
This is easiest in teams playing with a sweeping, central defender.
The outer centre backs take an opposition striker, but if he
runs laterally, he is ‘handed over’ to the sweeper,
meaning it’s harder to overload or drag defenders out of position.
The logical extension of this, especially now that pressing is fashionable among sides,
is space-orientated man marking.
Each defensive player is responsible for a zone of the pitch
and if an opponent enters that zone, they are man marked.
This is mostly decreed now by pitch area.
While midfielders might mark each other, a team’s strikers could employ space-
orientated man marking if the opposition centre backs push up into the midfield; if they don’t, the strikers sit off.
In this form of man marking you can see the similarities to situational pressing.
The last, and most used form of man marking now (except at set-piece) is when a player
is deployed to counter a specific threat, usually
the opposition’s most creative player.
While the rest of team might employ zonal marking,
one ‘destroyer’ tracks the opponent’s most
creative player and tries to negate their influence on the game.
Any player can do this, and sometimes a team’s shape is changed by the
position of their destroyer: the use of Maroune Fellaini in the 10 position, for example,
shifts the 10’s normal role as a creator to a destroyer,
as Fellaini shuts down the opposition deep-lying playmaker rather than creating himself.
The first development towards zonal marking occurred in the 1950s in Brazil, especially
under Zez é Moreira at Fluminense, where a 4-2-4 formation allowed one of
the two centre backs to push forward or stay back if a full back pushed forward.
This was ​ only possible because the team has started
marking zonally rather than by man, and so the centre back was sometimes spare.
As football’s understanding of space increased in its sophistication, players started to
see the pitch in terms of zones and orientate themselves accordingly.
Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan side were encouraged to think of the ball, the opposition,
open space, and their teammates, as the four reference points that would decide their own position.
Zonal marking was a natural adjunct to this, and also, as it advanced,
became more useful because of how it lends itself more naturally to a pressing game.
Zonal marking tends to occur by position or by man.
Position-orientated zonal marking sees teams shift as a block laterally and vertically
to control the space on the pitch.
It can be used to press, but it’s more about squeezing the space and preventing options.
Man-orientated zonal marking is not dissimilar to space-orientated zonal marking – the
man with the ball is the reference point, and
the defending team adjusts themselves to maintain a certain distance from that man as a whole,
again shifting as a unit as with position- orientated zonal marking.
Zonal marking is now more the norm in open play, while man marking still exists largely at set-pieces.