Positionism vs Relationism

In my wider reading and podcast listening over recent months, I've become aware of a discussion among the football tactics nerd community about two opposing concepts: positionism and relationism. I think it could become quite important as we see the next phase of development in the systems of football, and it's an interesting lens to look through when examining the top sides of today. For instance, you can look at the difference between Ten Hag and Conte in terms of their relative places on the spectrum between these two poles. I'll try to pass on some of the elements I've learned from following this topic.

First of all, what do the terms mean?

Positionism is a philosophy of football that emphasises understanding and manipulation of space on the pitch as the key way to generate an advantage over the opposing team. A positionist side will play based on strict rules governing the distribution of players across different zones of the pitch, distances between players, relative positions of players, etc. Pep Guardiola is a key proponent of this approach, and his stunning success at Barcelona helped rapidly popularise positional coaching principles throughout the sport internationally.

Relationism, by contrast, emphasises the fundamental importance of interactions between players, therefore focuses on developing chemistry, encouraging creative ad hoc problem solving. It embraces the chaos of a match, where positionism tends to want to minimise it. It places the onus on players to be the problem solvers and in-the-moment tacticians, where in positionism the coach does the thinking and the players perform pre-defined roles. Relationism in its purest form is basically street football, and rarely seen in the European professional leagues. But Fernando Diniz's Fluminense side in Brazil gives a great example of this chaos: players go wandering, clusters of team-mates emerge on one side of the pitch, leaving huge spaces unoccupied, lots of improvised skills. This video gives a little flavour of it: https://twitter.com/stirling_j/status/1621585085748183040

Out there in the wilds of tactical geekery, there's a bit of a backlash brewing against the currently dominant philosophy of positionism. Some people are complaining about the homogenisation of the sport as more and more teams adopt the same positionist basics. In a wonder interview (https://theathletic.com/3981374/2022/12/08/juanma-lillo-world-cup/) Juanma Lillo (Guardiola's one-time positionist pioneer) declares that football is 'finished' due to the ubiquity of a system that takes away the skill and creativity of players from the centre of the game:

"It really is wonderful because we, the managers, have too much influence. It’s unbearable. We have our own ideas and we say that we espouse them to help people to understand the game. Bu11shit! It should be for the players to understand the game as they understand it. And everything is globalised now. At club level, if you go to a training session in Norway and one in South Africa, they’ll be the same. ‘Look inside to find spaces outside’, ‘pass here, pass there’. The good dribblers are over, my friend."

Some commentators link this to a wider socio-economic trend: as capitalism looks to maximise productivity through simplification of processes to easily replicable templates (see industrial automation, the way franchise chains supplant independent businesses, etc.), so football is creating models that eliminate the inefficiency of localised variables. There can also be a cultural dimension: football is a form of cultural expression, and how we play football in a particular place often reflects the way people tend to express themselves more generally. For instance, in South America arguments rage about whether national sides should/shouldn't play in a 'European' way: Tite's Seleção in the World Cup adhered to rigorous positional principles in its pursuit of success, and in the process was accused of abandoning the identity of Brazilian football.

In reality, everything exists on a spectrum, and there are very few purely positionist or relationist sides. Guardiola is relatively positionist (but perhaps not as much as Sarri). Ancelotti's Real and Scaloni's Argentina allow more positional freedom and ad hoc creativity, but not to the extent of Diniz's Fluminense. Their success perhaps serves as a challenge to the pre-eminence of positionism, which leads me to the final idea: that perhaps the next phase of football development might focus on finding ways to get the best of both worlds. How to create chaos that disrupts the other team's defensive systems, while retaining the structure to defend against a side that knows how to exploit space? How to get the right balance of order (automation) and chaos (ad hoc creativity)? I'm certain a lot of the best coaches are already incorporating these ideas into their training.