Luke Bornn: Why Toulouse don’t have a set style of play

“There are certainly pros to recruiting to a specific style – you can really get that great alignment – but there are two big flaws,” the American told the TGG Podcast.

“Firstly, you’re constraining your possible squad. Imagine you’re playing a very particular style and say, ‘I need players of very particular archetypes that fit within that style.’

“You’re drastically reducing the set of players that you’re interested in. And that means if, for whatever reason, those players are really expensive relative to their contributions, you are getting really poor value.

“Given that you have a fixed budget, you’re actually going to get lower-quality players than if you got players that are outside of that tactical system. For a given budget, you might be in a situation where you have to decide, ‘Would I rather have worse players that fit the system perfectly, or better players that are slight mismatch?’

“We might play a very ball-possession, on-the-ground style, but if all of a sudden we have an opportunity to acquire an incredible target man at great value, then we might want to alter our style a little bit. And we make sure that we have a coach that has that tactical flexibility. 

“If you go back to my experience years and years ago, in the NBA, there was a time when, with three-point shooters like Steph Curry, there wasn’t the talent there. So those positions became extremely expensive.

“In terms of return on investment, you were often better saying, ‘Okay, let’s just have a mediocre shooter, and let’s put other players around them.’ Sometimes it’s better to improve on your strengths than try and tackle those weaknesses. It’s really a function of, ‘What’s the return on that investment?’

“The second reason this is problematic – and you see this over and over again at the big clubs – is where they recruit to a given manager’s style and then they get rid of the manager and bring in a new manager with a different style. 

“That manager wants to change things drastically. This is not the coach’s fault, right? It’s the club’s fault for bringing in managers, on repeat, with different styles and different types of players. Then you end up with these huge budgets. That’s obviously a recipe for failure.”

Bornn said Toulouse’s approach was to say, “‘Hey, we’re going to work to build a squad that is balanced, but not specifically focused on a particular style.’

“So instead of saying, ‘Hey, here’s my rigid tactics, and we need to get the specific exact players for this tactical system,’ it’s saying, ‘Here’s a bucket of player and it’s then up to the coach to decide what’s the best tactical system to execute on that.’”

Bornn also argued that there was merit in “zigging while others are zagging” and going against the herd. 

“Certainly, if you look right now, everyone has sort of copied the the Pep and Klopp style,” he said. “Football’s become a little hard to watch.

“And so the teams that really deviate from that – what comes to mind is the Barnsley team from a couple of years ago, that played the craziest long ball style I think I’ve ever seen, and had a lot of success with it – and that [can be] valuable. Zagging when others are zagging is valuable, but only in so much as when you’re going in a different direction, you’re not doing it in ways that are less efficient.”

Bornn pointed out that promoted teams, in particular, had struggled when trying to ape the possession-based style of play. 

“One of the reasons why clubs that get promoted can struggle [is] because they often have a squad that’s built to dominate in the lower league,” he said. “Then they go up, and all of a sudden those attacking players that had the ball constantly in their lower league now never touch the ball.”