Guardiola’s Laboratory

Pep Guardiola’s undertaking, on arriving at Bayern Munich, was probably determined by a mixture of the Board’s remit, his own ambitions and some circumstantial factors. It is reasonably safe to believe that it encompassed taking the team to a new level – comfortably ahead of the chasing pack – winning a minimum number of major trophies, rotating a large talented squad, incorporating two new major signings and casting an eye over the junior talent, while adapting to late arriving players who were either injured or on extended leave after the Confederations Cup. And if that were not challenging enough, it significant aspects of it needed to be fairly ready for the start of the season, some five or six weeks after he took charge as coach.

Pep Guardiola (© M.I.S.)

What can a coach do when taking on a club which has just won a treble? Many clubs find it difficult to maintain top levels of success, and their continuing in the same style of play can be a very dangerous practice, because it becomes identifiable, predictable and beatable. Sometimes a club’s decline after a very successful season or two is described as stagnation; no improvements were made and the team were unable to repeat the successes. That can happen, but it is not a very accurate description for Bayern’s position entering the 2013-2014 season.

Bayern’s problem, rather, will be that they are the most studied team in Europe this season. Some teams will study Bayern merely because they want to copy and improve their own game, but other top teams will be looking for an approach which successfully opposes Bayern’s tactics. Although Bayern has a stronger squad, winning the Champions League with the same tactics would be much more difficult this season than last season. Last season’s tactics are no longer a guaranteed winning formula, and some measure of improvement and change is virtually necessary, in order to continue to be successful.

There are two things that can be done to a successful team to achieve further successes. Firstly, like the case of a competitive car which is to be improved without dismantling or reengineering it significantly, the coach can add a “turbocharger”. Secondly, the coach can take a very safe route to improvement by making the previously successful system a clear Plan B, and then developing an improved system which morphs into and out of the old system very easily when required. There are numerous indicators that Guardiola has embraced these two things in his quest for improvement.

A close observation of Bayern’s preseason is fascinating. It is one of the closest things to a football laboratory that has been seen at a major club in recent years. (Of course, the whole laboratory concept discussed in this article was not as formally conducted by Guardiola as the article implies, but the analogy is a valid one.) Almost certainly, the work did not commence on the day Guardiola took charge; Guardiola had done a lot of background research long before that. Since the day he signed the agreement with Bayern, his time was spent not only in studying German intensively, but also in studying Jupp Heynckes’ tactics and the Bayern players, through watching match after match. When he arrived in Munich at the end of June, he had a comprehensive understanding of those tactics and of what each player was doing in the team. There was very little to be achieved in going to forthcoming friendlies to do reruns of those things. It was time to introduce the extras that he had designed to build on top of Heynckes’ Bayern tactics – the “turbocharger” – and time to experiment and discover what more the players could do.

Some of the main elements of success which Heynckes had cemented together were (1) a high level of possession, (2) immense variation in attack, (3) a fluid, intelligent midfield and (4) a disciplined defence. Guardiola planned improvements for all four of these elements, and his preseason experiments were aimed at introducing and testing these improvements. Each is worth a fuller analysis…

Possession
The most difficult of these improvements was always likely to be possession, because Bayern already had one of the highest levels of possession in European club football. The difficulty is somewhat like the 80:20 rule, where 80% of the benefit is reckoned to come from 20% of the effort, but raising the benefit another 5-10% requires a massive, disproportionate effort. To raise Bayern’s possession level, which was commonly in the 60%-70% range, by another 5-10% was going to require several factors and intense commitment.

Guardiola’s main factors for increasing that possession were a formation with more midfielders, an emphasis on ball control, an emphasis on passing-success rates and an increase in the pace of the possession with one-touch or two-touch passing, coupled with more movement of the players off the ball. This was not slow, patient-build-up tiki-taka, but turbocharged possession. The players struggled most in the early friendlies with achieving pace and maintaining passing accuracy; all too often the passing accuracy suffered. By the time the last of the preseason friendlies arrived, things were much better, and the possession speed and passing accuracy against Manchester City in the first 30 mins of the Audi Cup final were phenomenal – until the effects of the previous day’s game and the training began to show in the form of tired legs. And therein lies a danger: turbocharged possession is fine if it exhausts and confuses the opponents, but not good if the pace exhausts the Bayern players. Hence, Guardiola, while not totally discouraging runners, is likely to encourage players to make the ball do the work – in other words, fast movement of the ball rather than increased sprinting.

Variation in Attack
The variety in Bayern’s attack last season was demonstrated by the large numbers of players who scored goals and who provided assists for goals. It would seem unlikely that that could be improved. Guardiola, however, had ideas.

A lone striker, no matter how successful, is a semi-predictable element in a team. Referred to as the target man, he is the target for many crosses, through balls, and so forth, but that also means that the opponents’ defence can partly predict and seriously limit that major channel of attack. Really, as strikers go, a team might be better off with none or two of them, rather than with a lone striker. In the case of no strikers, the opponents’ defence doesn’t know what to defend or who to watch, so they must watch everything, making the task of defending very difficult. Even the defenders’ legs don’t tire, their concentration probably will. In the case of two strikers, especially if they are good in the air and getting good service, the aerial threat becomes a divisive challenge for the opponents’ defence. The modern game, however, has shown that playing with two strikers against a team with only one (or none) surrenders the control of midfield and is unlikely to win games at the highest level. That’s the theory. These alternatives are rarely better than the lone striker in practice, but Guardiola seems intent on trying and perfecting them.

Mario Mandzukic, in several of the games he played in, looked unlike an orthodox lone striker (although it must be said that that was partly true for different reasons last season as well). In the preseason friendlies, he has spent a lot of time on the wings, and in tucking back into the midfield. Not a lot more of the false nine has been seen yet, but Mario Goetze is expected to feature in that role, where the front man tucks into the midfield and may or may not pop up as the striker, just to keep the opponents’ defence guessing.

Guardiola is extremely unlikely to ever start a game with two strikers in a 4-4-2 formation, but when chasing a game, with little to lose in the last 10 minutes, he may introduce another striker to maximise the threat. The most memorable instance of this was the introduction of Dante in the Supercup final. That surprised many people, but really it should be far from surprising. Someone was needed as a further aerial threat against a solid Borussia Dortmund central defence, and Dante met those requirements. The main surprise is possibly that Daniel van Buyten, who started his career as a striker and may represent an even greater threat in the opponents’ box, wasn’t used instead.

Intelligent Midfield
Heynckes had a lot of strategy packed into his central midfield that may, to some, have looked quite bland, but actually was oozing so much intelligence that few people understood the extent of what was going on. Bastian Scheweinsteiger and Javi Martinez interleaved with the central defenders to play like four central defenders at times. Each rotated with Kroos during matches to provide fresh attacking variants. They were players who could command a game, setting the tempo and distributing the ball for a many-sided Bayern attack. Guardiola is now trying to add more.

The two main things he’s introducing are the morphing of formations, when switching from attack to defence, and the added fluidity of players’ constantly running into space to receive passes and to drag opponents out of position. While Guardiola is usually playing a 4-1-4-1 which morphs easily into 4-2-3-1, the man who has described formations as being like telephone numbers seems to be wanting to make the formation unrecognisable, in order to take away a further degree of identification and predictability, leaving opponents uncertain about what countermeasures to employ. Sometimes the fluidity appears extreme, leaving observers wondering whether this is organisation or disorganisation. For the midfielders who control and dictate the game, and who provide that central hub for most of the action, keeping control of a team practising this level of fluidity is certainly a more demanding task than it was in Heynckes’ team. It isn’t too difficult in attack, because there are extra midfielders in the area and, hence, almost always someone nearby to pass to if under pressure, but in defence, when Bayern have lost possession, it is a challenge to quickly determine who is out of position, what cover is needed and who should challenge for the ball. Overall, though, the improvements are expected to justify the effort, and Guardiola seems satisfied that his midfielders can rise to the occasion.

Disciplined Defence
Last season Bayern had a record-breaking defence. Again, it would seem unlikely that that could be improved, but Guardiola had more ideas. The ideas were probably born out of necessity; Guardiola’s commitment to attack and choice of a 4-1-4-1 formation increase the risk of exposure to counterattacks, and he almost certainly would not like the negativity of having vastly inferior goals-conceded statistics to those of Heynckes, even if Bayern do keep winning.

The most interesting introductions are the very high defensive line and Martinez in central defence. These two things need to be considered as interrelated, largely in the sense that Martinez might not have been preferred over the other central defenders if the defence had kept the line they were accustomed to keep last season. On the pitch, Martinez will be playing in roughly the same area as a central defender in a high defensive line this season, as he did as a defensive midfielder last season. The roles are now quite blurred. Martinez will patrol the same area and do the same defensive midfielder-type things, and will be nearly as close to Schweinsteiger as last season, but with regard to the other players around him in defence, he is nominally a central defender. This leads to all sorts of other interesting side effects – both advantages and disadvantages – but in many ways Bayern hasn’t entirely lost Martinez as a defensive midfielder by playing him as a central defender. The change is less than it initially seems. The larger effect is on the three other defenders. Not enough has been seen to make any clear statements as yet, but they will need to coordinate their game to accommodate Martinez and the rescaled defence.

The increased utilisation of Rafhina is interesting too. While it may be merely part of Guardiola’s rotation plan to give the player some starts, it may also indicate the possibility that the coach sees more potential in him. Rafinha was always reasonably good going forward and has good ball control, but his occasional defensive errors let him down. A likely explanation is that Guardiola regards him as the third fullback after Philipp Lahm and David Alaba, and finds Diego Contento too lightweight for his system. If Alaba is ever injured, Lahm may fill in on that side and Rafhina would fill in as right back.

The experiments in defence don’t end there. Guardiola has introduced zonal-marking for set pieces as well. Zonal-marking is better than man-marking in theory, but rarely in practice. The key advantage is that, while man-marking is reactive, zonal-marking is proactive; when the ball comes across, the defender in that zone attacks it, without waiting to see which opponent is going for it. That minimal timing advantage is often just enough to clear the ball or, at least, to prevent a scoring opportunity. In reality, this is probably more than an experiment. It is almost certainly here to stay, and it will be interesting to see how Guardiola gets the players to perfect it.

A lot could be added about pressing, but space and time do not permit that on this occasion.

Results of Experiments and Future of Laboratory
Guardiola didn’t always have the best of luck in his experiments. External and unexpected factors hampered things. It must have been a surprise that Franck Ribery was so un-Lionel Messi-like in a central role, or that, in spite of outstanding possession in some early games, Bayern’s attack struggled to put the ball in the back of the net, or that Bayern’s defence would gift Dortmund two goals in the only game which half mattered. That Dortmund game may have seemed like a temptation to just drop back to last season’s 4-2-3-1 in an effort to win the game, but such a move would have undermined players’ confidence in his tactics at a key time, and would have forfeited the best test of all for the sake of a minor trophy. In the end, though, Guardiola’s mentoring and the players’ will to learn are appearing to pay off. Things are far from perfect, but the players look more natural in playing his tactics, the pace of possession has improved, the attackers are scoring and the results are good. A little more tightening of the defence is the main thing still needing improvement.

Guardiola has been constantly monitoring his various experiments and assessing the results. The results will fall loosely into various categories, perhaps along the lines:
- Those that, surprisingly or not, did not work (possibly Ribery in a central role is the most surprising failed experiment)
- Those that have shown enough potential but need more work (possibly Guardiola views Martinez in central defence as such)
- Those that have been a major success (possibly Arjen Robben’s adaptation to turbocharged possession is an example in this case)
- Those that couldn’t be properly tested as yet (Goetze, owing to his injury, is a fairly clear example of an untested experiment)

Some refer to Guardiola making mistakes and learning from his mistakes. That’s a rather inaccurate comment on his work. Any series of experiments is expected to have successes and failures, and Guardiola knew that as well as anyone. Describing it as Guardiola learning from his results is much more accurate.

New Season
The competitive season is not the time for experimentation, as Guardiola himself stated shortly after his arrival at Bayern. The end of the preseason does not spell the absolute end of Guardiola’s experiments, but they will be comparatively few and far between from now onwards. Further experimentation is essential, in order to incorporate Goetze into the team, so it is likely that there will be some gradual second-half introductions of him, and the odd unusual new idea may be introduced late on in matches which are already won, but not much more than that. The laboratory is more or less closed.

Another subtle point to consider is that, even some experiment was successful, the idea may not be used very often by Guardiola in competitive games. Lahm in midfield, for example, was successful but is not likely to be repeated very often in bigger games. At this stage, it is not easy to tell which experiments Guardiola regards as successes, potential successes, and so forth, but it is almost impossible to know how often he’ll use many of them.

It has been a wonderful footballing education in recent weeks, watching Guardiola in his laboratory, where he has been trying to take modern tactics to the next stage with Bayern. It will be a very interesting season for the more observant football fans to see his implementation of these things and how he fine-tunes them. Bayern will not appear very different. Lahm, the captain, and Robben, who would be expected to be one of the first to complain, have spoken out favourably and dismissed the notion that these are big changes. Most of the players will be in much the same position, doing a lot of what they did last season. Heynckes’ 4-2-3-1 baseline will be underpinning most of the new tactics. The game may be a lot faster, with more variation, and it may be a lot more fluid, but that’s about it. Although it has required a big effort in the preseason, it is a relatively small change on the field.

If by the end of 2013 Bayern have mastered the collection of new tactics which Guardiola calls “my system”, and are well placed in both the Bundesliga and Champions League, the system will have had time to bed in and deliver effectively, and the chances will be good that Bayern will dominate European football and win a few trophies this season.

(Badger is a fan of Bayern München and a member of BayernZone forum)


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