Sweepers were a defining characteristic of many successful teams from the 1960s
to the 1980s and beyond. Rugged, positionally astute defenders who patrolled the spaces between
their flanking centre back colleagues and the goalkeeper, intercepting, and marshalling or
hacking down anyone who got through. The greatest sweepers had, of course, an attacking role too,
bringing the ball out and acting as a playmaking defender capable of stepping into midfield.
The greatest, players like Franz Beckenbauer, often also played in midfield.
But the more prosaic sweeper was the more commonly found.
Tough players like Danny Blind and Jorge Luis Brown could play, but in a defence-first era,
functionality and positionally excellence out-weighed clever passing or ball carrying.
Nonetheless, even with a recent revival of the back three systems that saw sweepers
deployed at the centre of three central defenders, the old-fashioned sweeper has
died off. But why?
The answers point to a series of tactical and other innovations in football.
Sweepers inherently enlarge the defending area of the pitch. By hanging back, off the two centre
backs with man-marking duties, the sweeper added a layer of security but in doing so,
deepened the defensive position of the side. The compression of space became a key defensive
concept, articulated by the proponents of Total Football and brought to its zenith by pressing
managers like Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp. A sweeper generally acts against this, either
hampering it or just being rendered irrelevant by a high defensive line and pressing system.
Sweepers could, of course, fulfil more than a defensive function. As a spare man, they could
receive possession. The technically capable ones brought the ball out, but even the more rugged,
defensively minded operatives could still clear the ball from a relatively unpressured position.
This has been largely superseded by player development or tactical innovations.
Many top-level centre backs are now more skilled on the ball. Centre backs pairings
often feature one player dropping off quickly in possession to offer a pass;
it’s not consistent sweeping, but similar.
Other centre backs, like Harry Maguire or Antonio Rudiger, excel at bringing the ball out. Because
back three build-up has changed, it’s now often the wide centre backs who progress the ball, too,
with the wing backs pushing high to act as wingers and the centre backs offering width
in the channels. This reached its zenith with Sheffield United’s overlapping centre backs,
but Atalanta and Inter are good examples too.
Deep midfielders dropping back, the so-called La Volpe exit,
also means there is a line of ball progression forwards that doesn’t
require a third centre back. And, perhaps most importantly, goalkeeping has changed.
Many of the functions of a sweeper are now performed by keepers.
They can push into a defensive line to offer a passing option,
sit off to receive but with the skill to do more than hoof it long, and the best,
like Ederson or Alisson, are comfortable enough in possession to resist a press with their control
and quick feet. Crucially, they also sweep but by pushing up, not dropping off. This dovetails
with the general need to compress space for possession and pressing teams; it’s an active form
of front-foot defence, not the dropping off and ceding territory that many sweeping systems used.
Some teams do still like a deep, low block, though,
dropping off and staying tight. And some of these use a back three but without a sweeper.
This is partly because of offside lines and, with the advent of VAR, the increased importance
of pushing the line forwards relative to the opposition, even if the line is deep. It’s also
because compact blocks often use the sort of 442 spacing first popularised by Arrigo Sacchi, where
horizontal and vertical compactness is achieved by players being in lines that are close together.
Sweepers don’t fit that system, but they can also cause disruptions to these lines.
And some three-at-the-back sides also innovatively shift to defend in more of a 442 block.
Sheffield United under Chris Wilder would often pendulum across,
so that one wing back dropped in while the other pushed up to the midfield line,
with a wide centre back filling in the full back slot. This created a
442 shape that became a 352 in attack; Julian Nagelsmann’s Hoffenheim used this approach too.
Another key facet is that, perhaps La Liga aside,
most top-level sides no longer field a traditional front two. This immediately
means that a sweeper is redundant, especially against a conventional number 9
playing ahead of a 10, or flanked by wingers or inside forwards ahead of a midfield three.
The spare defender is of more use in front of the defence, not behind it, especially
with the changes in goalkeeping. This is why some aggressive three-man defences use their central
defender to push up and attack the space in front of the line, not drop off to sweep behind it;
a good example of this was Cristian Romero at Atalanta last season.
Teams now often attempt to achieve numerical superiority wide or in the half spaces, too,
making a sweeper, who generally plays centrally, out of position to help combat this.
This is why Marcelo Bielsa combines his aggressive man-marking system
with a free man; they are not positionally a sweeper, but whichever man is free and
not marking one-on-one is able to patrol the space that is left, wherever that space may be.
It’s worth noting too, that a few outliers like Bielsa aside,
most top coaches use zonal marking in their defensive third;
man-orientation is usually reserved for pressing systems higher up the pitch.
This means that even if a back three faces a front two, it’s unlikely that the defenders will
consistently go one-on-one leaving a spare who sweeps. Attackers and defenders are both now too
versatile and mobile to be tied into this sort of system, unless it’s part of an overall approach.
The sweeper’s time has probably been and gone as a specific role and that’s why its
demise is interesting. It charts a variety of ways in which football has developed:
the technical and athletic attributes of defenders and sweepers; changes in build-up; the increasing
sophistication of both attacking and defensive systems; and changes in the laws of the game or
their application. Most interesting, we can still see flashes of the sweeper in modern football but,
as with most other positions, it’s now about situationally specific examples of a role
spread among players, rather than one position, doing one thing.