Can we put the artistry back in football, asks Rudraneil Sengupta
Data has taken over, at the cost of individual flair. While evolution is inevitable, can the game find a balance between the two?
When was the last time you saw a football player charge at defenders, doing double, triple or quadruple step-overs, a sight that was once a defining image of the game?
There was so much of this in the eras of Cristiano Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho (with added samba hip movements, in his case).
The charge was guaranteed to bring a stadium alive and send a thrill through those watching on TV. It is pretty much extinct in the new age of “structured” football.
The fade of the step-over is just one sign of a bigger change, Spanish footballer-turned-manager Cesc Fabregas has said.
In a recent interview with BBC, the English legend Gary Lineker asked him if “dribbling is becoming a lost art”, and Fabregas didn’t hesitate. “For me, yes,” he said.
“The training methodology has changed completely. Coaches tell you exactly how they want you to play, when you have to do something, how you have to do it, where you have to do it. The kind of freedom I had, no player can have now,” Fabregas added. “Things are so studied, so pre-done in the training sessions…”
It is ironic that the shift Fabregas describes was brought about largely by the man under whom he played for nearly a decade: former Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger.
It was Wenger who began the data revolution in football, in the 1990s. Data now rules the game. It underpins every aspect of the “studied” and “pre-done” methodology.
It took a while, but we saw it coming.
For many years after Wenger first introduced the concept of using data collection and analysis to help make tactical decisions, the approach remained restricted to the top clubs. Only they could afford the technology required, and it took the singular analytical skills of their visionary managers to extract useful information from the troves of data.
Now, such technology has been democratised. It is more freely available, and is in use by clubs and teams at all levels, and certainly by all clubs in the top tier of any major European league.
The incredible long-term success of managers such as Pep Guardiola has meant that their strategies and methodology have also been available for dissection and analysis, for more than a decade. The result is that the strategies have become formulae, and the formulae have become common knowledge.
Of course, evolutions in the game were inevitable. And as evolutions go, this isn’t a bad one. Structure brings efficiency; efficiency yields better results.
But where is the room, in any of that, for art?
As Kingsley Coman, the France and Bayern Munich player, put it in a recent interview: “We need to be way more efficient… but then you can’t give joy. So you have way less players like Ronaldinho, Neymar or Jay-Jay (Okocha) now.”
Coman goes on to make an insightful point about how a more-efficient defence, based on data and video analysis on how to close down space for an attacking player, has meant the trimming of individual flair.
“The way defenders play now, they have seen the videos, so you have less chances of a one-v-one. You will always have a second defender coming quickly if one defender is in a one-v-one, so I have no time to do three stepovers. I can do one and then I have to move.”
Dribbling, one of Coman’s core skills, is a high-risk endeavour overall, and so is discouraged.
Still, artists find a way to express themselves. Dribbling doesn’t have to be lots of different movements strung together. A great dribble can be about selling one deception thoroughly: the perfect shoulder feint, the sharp dummy turn and change of direction. Like a good magic trick, it needs one move, executed with impeccable timing.
This is what a new generation of artistic footballers — players such as Raphinha, Lamine Yamal and Jamal Musiala — are doing. It is admittedly minimalist, but at least it’s there.
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)
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