The Spanish national team won the World Cup in 2010 and the European Championship in 2008
and 2012 playing a style of football that is known as tiki-taka.
The style was also popularised and brought to its highest version at club level by Pep
Guardiola’s Barcelona side from 2008 to 2012, which brought him and the club three
La Liga titles and two Champions Leagues.
Tiki-taka in its simplest form is a style based on retaining and circulating possession
of the ball. Described by Sid Lowe in The Guardian as “the nonsensical phrase that
has come to mean short passing, patience and possession above all else”, tiki-taka has
been seen both as a positive and negative: at its best, it generates stunning movement,
fluidity, and incisive attacking football of great skill; at its worst, it can be sterile
and tedious.
Indeed, the origins of the phrase may have those negative connotations – Javier Clemente,
an extremely pragmatic Spanish coach of Athletic Club, apparently coined the term as a criticism.
But it was Andrés Montes, a Spanish commentator, who brought the Basque term to a wider audience
during the Spain vs Tunisia game in 2006, saying “Estamos tocando tiki-taka tiki-taka”,
“we are playing with light, quick steps.”
The origins of the Spanish and Barcelona obsession with possession can be traced to the influence
of Johan Cruyff, whose philosophy of Total Football prized possession of the ball and
use of space above all else. Cruyff, and fellow Dutch managers Louis van Gaal and Frank Rijkaard,
brought this appreciation of possession and space with them when they coached at the Catalan
club, marrying it to a styilistic focus inherent, but latent, in the club’s technical DNA.
Their influence on Pep Guardiola and a generation of players from the club’s famous La Masia
development complex meant that Barcelona was primed to play the style. A coterie of superbly
talented, but diminutive creative players also forced Barcelona’s hand, to a degree:
they couldn’t compete purely with physicality, but intelligent, technical players like Xavi,
Andres Iniestia, Pedro, and Lionel Messi flourished under tiki-taka.
Guardiola, the deep-lying playmaker turned tactician, said that “In the world of football
there is only one secret: I’ve got the ball or I haven’t”. This mantra of keeping
and taking care of possession was articulated by two of his best players, Xavi and Iniesta.
Xavi: “I get the ball, I pass the ball. I get the ball, I pass the ball.”
Iniesta: “Receive, pass, offer. Receive, pass, offer.”
Barcelona and Spain tended to set up in the 4-3-3, the formation that seemed best suited
for the style and for rotation of the ball by creating overloads.
Because tiki-taka was more than possession for its own sake, it needed to generate chances.
So tiki-taka incorporated three other factors that were crucial to its success: pressing,
the false nine, and positional play.
Pressing was an obvious addition: any team which prizes possession will work extremely
hard to regain the ball after its lost. Again, there was a direct continuity here from the
ideals of Cruyff, who wanted to make the pitch as small as possible in defence, while Marcelo
Bielsa’s influence on Guardiola is also apparent. By choking the opposition, especially
when they have just won the ball back – they are at their most vulnerable immediately having
regained possession – pressing is the best way to regain possession and begin another
attacking sequence.
The false nine was not a new idea and we’ve covered it in another video, but having a
striker who dropped off into the space between the defensive and midfield lines caused problems
for markers: follow the player and you create a gap in the centre of defence or midfield,
leave the player and there is an unmarked attacker able to receive and pass, or receive
and run or shoot. This was a natural addition to the emphasis on movement inherent in tiki-taka.
As was positional play. Positional play is, put simply, the idea that the pitch is divided
into zones and that no more than two players should occupy the same line vertically and
no more than three the same line horizontally. Guardiola did this by painting lines on a
training pitch to show players what the zones were.
The purpose is to encourage players to find zones where they are free to receive and pass,
and that players should achieve a degree of almost automation in terms of finding spaces
and then moving as the ball moves around the pitch. This injects the fluidity and creation
of space that stops tiki-taka simply being an exercise in possession football, as players
are constantly on the move, rotating, changing, and finding space, but with a shared understanding
of what the purpose of this is, and how each player relates to the others.
This is the key aspect of Iniesta’s quotation offering – putting yourself in a position
to receive the ball by moving – is the thing that stops tiki-taka simply being a passing
exercise.
As Jonathan Wilson puts it, “the focus was on the creation and exploitation of space,
generated by movement off the ball and by technique good enough that defenders could
be lured towards a forward before a pass would be released.” Possession was the means,
not the end.
While tiki-taka is most associated with Barcelona and Spain, not least because they shared so
many players, its reach went further. Guardiola has brought aspects of the style to Bayern
and Manchester City, while in the Premier League saw Brendan Rodger’s Swansea and
Liverpool sides, as well as Owen Coyle and Ian Holloway at Bolton and Blackpool. And
the influence of tiki-taka can now be seen in goalkeepers and defenders having to be
far more comfortable in possession and needing to pass the ball well.
Tiki-taka at its best was almost unplayable, before other tactics evolved – lightening
quick interchanges between technically gifted players employing almost rehearsed attacking
moves but with the added brilliance of game-changers like Messi and Iniesta. It brought about major
tactical changes in top level football, too, as coaches scrambled to figure out ways to
beat it. And it also sparked a wider interest in possession and pass completion numbers
– OptaJoe’s popularity on Twitter is in large part to a series of tweets about Barcelona’s
passing and possession stats dwarfing the opposition’s – which is one of the reasons
that stats are now more widely understood by fans and pundits.
Tiki-taka had its roots in Total Football but as an evolution of that style it changed
the game just as much and has had lasting effects on the way football is played and
understood.