Thiago Motta, coach of Paris Saint-Germain’s U19s squad, recently made news when it was
reported that he had stated that a 2-7-2 formation was the future of football. In translation,
his comments in an interview given to Gazetta dello Sport read something like this:
“My idea is to play offensively. A short team that controls the game, high pressure
and a lot of movement with and without the ball.”
By short, Motta presumably means vertically compact.
He goes on: “I want the player that has the ball to always have three or four solutions
and two teammates close by to help. The difficulty in football is, often to do things simply
but to control the base, pass and get free.”
And, the quotation that had every scrabbling for a whiteboard and pen:
“The goalkeeper counts as one of the midfield seven. For me, the attacker is the first defender
and the goalkeeper is the first attacker. The goalkeeper starts the play, with his feet
and the attackers are the first to put pressure to recover the ball.”
Now, the line about attackers as defenders and goalkeepers as attackers is pure Johan
Cruyff, but the thing that sticks out here is that ‘the goalkeeper counts as one of
the midfield seven’.
If we read this as the suggestion that the goalkeeper would push up into the midfield
area vertically, then the formation would look like this.
This would, indeed, increase the passing options for players in the midfield area and a key
concept of positional play is achieving numerical superiority between the opponent’s lines
of defence, the midfield and defensive lines especially.
However, as is clear from Motta’s words elsewhere in the interview, this formation,
the 2-7-2, is a horizontal reading of the line-up, not a vertical one. In fact, what
Motta means is that right to left, or vice versa, there are two wide players, seven in
the central areas, and two wide on the other side.
In this regard, the goalkeeper is, indeed, in the midfield seven, if one takes that to
mean the seven in the middle areas of the pitch horizontally.
Motta’s PSG U19s do not play with a wildly advanced goalkeeper. While both main ‘keepers,
Garissone Innocent and Will-Cesaire Matimbou, are comfortable with the ball at their feet
and play good passes, neither advances hugely beyond their area. Watching PSG U19s in the
UEFA Youth League, it’s clear that Motta likes his side to play a possession-based
style in a 4-3-3, which does translate to a 2-7-2 horizontally, with the two central
midfielders regularly coming deep to get the ball and the defensive midfielder dropping
in between or just ahead of the centre backs.
The full backs push out to give width and the central midfielders and wide attackers
swap in and out to give a second line of attacking width in the wide areas, which allows PSG
U19s to maintain central superiority and generate passing triangles with players in the wide
and half spaces to progress the attack, before moving it centrally again for the final thrust
at goal. In other words, Motta seems to have learned a lot from watching Pep Guardiola’s
teams.
But, why specifically point to the goalkeeper as part of the middle seven at all then? Generally,
advanced goalkeepers, or sweeper-keepers, such as Manuel Neuer, Marc-Andre ter Stegen,
Hugo Lloris, or Ederson, largely patrol beyond the penalty area in order to push the defensive
line higher. It’s aggressive, or attacking, in the sense that the opposition’s space
is compressed, and the keeper can also launch attacks with passes from a more advanced position
than solely in their penalty box.
Increasingly, too, high presses require goalkeepers to be a suitable passing option. Short goal
kicks, such as those favoured by Ederson at Manchester City or Jordan Pickford at Everton,
both good distributors of the ball, are designed to lure an opposition press and then bypass
it with fluid interchange of passes. Two centre backs will drop very wide and deep, while
the third centre back or the defensive midfielder will drop to the top of the box. This encourages
an opposition press, while also allowing those players to move the ball between them or to
advanced full backs, who are often left free as the press engages.
Given that one of the tenets of positional play is to move the opponent, not the ball,
this use of the keeper to create a superiority and suck in the press makes sense. It’s
why in the Bundesliga 2, Hamburg’s keeper, Julian Pollersbeck, does regularly come out
of his box and take up a position level with or just behind the two centre backs – the
position where one might expect to see a dropping defensive midfielder instead. This allows
Hamburg to push that additional man up instead and, with the full backs tucking in, creates
a shape that allows for either short passes to retain the ball or long, angled passes
out wide to attack the space.
This is especially useful – and here it’s worth considering the 2-7-2 again – if one
of a team’s aims is to drag the opposition to one side or another. With the quality of
full backs and wingers that Guardiola had at Bayern, it was a regular feature of their
play. Effectively, the aim was to move the 2 and 7 towards one side, so that the other
2 were left in lots of space and, as that space was then attacked as play was switched,
the 7 could flood the centre and suddenly generate huge superiorities between the opposition’s
defensive lines as they struggled to sort out their shape.
For this, a goalkeeper who can be used to switch the focus of the attack from a deeper
or even slightly more advanced position makes a lot of sense. An accurate kicker like Ederson
or Pickford can, if the opposition is dragged over to one side, suddenly launch a pass that
finds the two spare men in space and cause havoc in the opposition’s organisation.
When considered this way, then, what Thiago Motta has said makes sense. He’s not thinking
about the ‘keeper playing ahead of the defenders – that’s the sort of mistranslation that
just makes for quick and easy clickbait. What he is doing, though, is considering the goalkeeper
as a central player, literally and figuratively, in build-up, in generating superiority in
areas of the pitch that bring on a press and allows his team to attack. In other words,
using his goalkeeper according to the principles of positional play. It’s less fun than the
headlines suggested, but it’s a lot more sensible.