Jamie Hamilton

Jamie Hamilton: Well, like many listeners to this podcast and people who are familiar with Training Ground Guru, I’m a football coach.

I wasn’t always a football coach, I actually came into it a little bit later in life. But yeah, my story is probably familiar to a lot of people: start volunteering at the local club, go through various environments of youth football or senior football, semi-professional football, professional football.

Most recently I was in the Slovenian Premier League for a very short period due to some uncontrollable aspects of the financial side of football which sometimes happens.

Also, in tandem with that development of the practical side of coaching, I’ve always been very interested in the theoretical – tactical theory, coaching theory, where they intersect and how they actually translate into what we do on the field.

I’ve written a lot about various aspects of football and sometimes a little bit broader, tying in more cultural or aesthetic ideas like art, music, film, into how I see the game.

Over the past few years I’ve been concentrating on a concept which I have called relationism. It contains ideas that of course are not mine, it’s not something I invented. I coined the term and this has had a significant impact on the coaching domain and the discourse around it and the tactical theory that feeds into it.

I think many coaches, if not all, will be familiar with the concept of positional play.

I give it a little shorthand of positionism. Guardiola’s impact on the global game – 2008 through to 2011 at Barcelona, that that final against Manchester United at Wembley – some of the play of that team was other-worldly.

They were arguably the greatest club side of all time. That had a huge impact on me and I became very interested in the ideas surrounding it. At the same time you have this kind of explosion of online content, 2009, 2010.

Social media platforms are becoming very active, smartphones are in people’s pockets. So the spread of information is very different to how it had been before. And that was certainly amplified in terms of the coaching discourse. Platforms like Twitter became a real hub for this new form of analysis.

And through those things and my own practical observations, I became very interested in positional play. I tried to coach my own versions of positional play and with some degree of success.

I was always interested in controlling or having teams control the ball and control possession and be calm with the ball. I always liked that approach to football. And it seemed to me that the way to do that was to follow some – if not all – of these rules.

Where players have to be in certain moments, how the pitch should be occupied, some of the patterns of play that develop from that, some of the concepts that are involved. I became very engrossed in that methodology and philosophy.

At the heart of positionalism and Guardiola’s philosophy is ball possession; controlling the ball and controlling the play.

I think what’s more interesting is it’s a particular type of possession and a particular way in which that possession is facilitated and enabled. In Guardiola’s case, and in the school of positional play, or Juego de posision, the Spanish name, it has roots going back through Holland and even further if you want to trace it.

The very general concept is that players occupy certain sectors of the field. In Guardiola’s own words, the players don’t move, the ball moves to the players. Now that’s of course an exaggeration, but it’s very telling that Guardiola himself would phrase it in such a way.

We can see that very clearly in the possession structures that have become so ubiquitous with possession football.

That positioning, that rational occupation of space, allows combinations and relationships to develop within that structure. 

This positional game is emerging somewhat in response to positional defending. We would call that zonal defending. So the Sacchi revolution of the late 80s, early 90s, filtering through the global game. But of course defending in zonal structures means that you leave space between the lines.

And positional play is very concerned with positioning attacking players between those lines in pockets, becoming free men, using the team as almost a network of pinning players to stretch out the opponent, open the spaces between those lines, put players in there, and then find those free men with passes through the lines.

Guardiola – and many coaches that follow this school of thought – are quite explicit when they talk about chaos being a kind of negative thing.

This is a very important distinction to understand from this more positional mindset or philosophical attitude: that chaos, uncertainty, radical volatility, are inherently negative.

So we want to try and have less of that and more of the order that we have familiarity with. And that can help us and the players too, to know where they are, to orient themselves and then to execute certain actions within those understandings very quickly and efficiently.

If things become too static and too ordered, we get a very stagnant landscape, which doesn’t really help the emergence of new things.

As a person, I have more of a tendency towards the more chaotic side. There was always that tension within me that while I was coaching this more ordered positional method, it felt a little bit off. Something wasn’t quite right.

But I reconciled that within myself by just accepting that if I wanted the team to play possession, controlling football, to make many passes, I just had to do that, because I wasn’t aware of any other possibility.

It seemed that there was only one way forward if possession football was going to be achieved. I was interested in coaching theory, tactical theory. So areas like ecological dynamics, constraints-based coaching, the work of people like Mark O’Sullivan and Keith Davids, that always seemed to me to have a tension with this more ordered positional play.

And as I was coaching the positional style, I found myself having to be very restrictive with the players and saying, ‘Hey, no, you have to be there. You can’t just go in there. If you’re the left winger, I want you on the left in this situation. If you go in, the other guy has to go out.’

It wasn’t until I saw the football of Brazilian coach Fernando Diniz and his Fluminense team in the summer 2022 that I realised high-possession stats, lots of passes, lots of control of the ball, could be achieved in a very different way.

That was the light bulb moment.

Over the last decade or so, since Guardiola’s rise, it’s become really the dominant paradigm in global football.

What we’ve seen is a real homogenisation among not only top-level coaches, like in the English Premier League, but many youth coaches, Academy coaches will be familiar with these kinds of principles – the ideas of occupying half spaces, inverting full-backs and all these kinds of things.

Not that there’s anything evil about all that, but it has become the dominant paradigm. And when a concept or an ideology becomes so widespread and dominant, it becomes difficult to see alternatives.

Unfortunately, that seems to be what’s happened in a large number of cases. Not that that’s Guardiola’s fault in any way. He’s essentially a football genius who is arguably the most influential and certainly one of the most successful coaches of all time.

The problem seems to be the blind following of Guardiola’s methods in ways that are not as good as his. It’s almost like people think they can copy paste, and be Pep Guardiola, just by reading some tactical guidelines and downloading some positional play exercises.

Of course Guardiola was important to that Barcelona team, but those players are generational and having them together caused insane things to emerge.

But what seems to have happened is that people have just taken the coaching side of that team and said, ‘Well, if I want to play like Barcelona, I just have to do what Guardiola did.’

Well, no, to play like Barcelona, you’re going to need some pretty good players to help out with that structure. That Barcelona team seems to be something of a perfect storm, some kind of generational moment, which you can’t really replicate in terms of Guardiola’s trajectory.

Bayern was interesting. He didn’t play the same way and realised pretty quickly that he  didn’t have the same players. And Guardiola, of course, adapts. He’s well known as an adaptable coach.

But he adapts within a positional paradigm, within the positional structures. So yeah, his Bayern team would be different – maybe more overloads in the centre – but still a positional game.

Even at Barcelona, Zlatan (Ibrahimovic) certainly didn’t appreciate being told where to stand by Guardiola. (Franck) Ribery, at Bayern Munich, took much the same attitude – he said I don’t really need someone to tell me how to play football.

Early on at Manchester City, he had players – Sane, Jesus, Sterling, Silva – a lot of very interesting attacking combinations there, but still positional structures. Butin the last five, six years maybe, I think there’s been a real shift.

I think the Treble winning team was pretty conservative – a lot of defenders, very structured play, Haaland and the ability to go more direct. As we’ve gone on, this tendency towards control and certainty and order seems to have intensified.

Until we get to the point where I find today in the Premier League, although the players are fantastic and there are talented coaches, I do find much of the play somewhat formulaic, especially in the attacking phase. And less inspiring than could be possible or achievable with those players.

This taps into a very interesting and relevant topic at the moment – about coaches having some kind of pre-designed formation or at least system.

So they arrive at a team or an age group in an Academy and their first thought is, ‘Okay, which player is going to go in which slot?’ What if you don’t have players who are particularly suited to this arrangement on the pitch and these qualities and roles that are required?

Of course, if you’re Guardiola, you buy the ones that can. Okay, that’s top-level football. Do I think that’s a really good way for people to think about football coaching? Not necessarily, because it really casts players as commodities that are just traded and sold until you get the right ones that fit the slot of your system.

More appealing to me – and a central tenet of relational football – is for the coach to arrive in whichever context they are and evaluate.

Who do I have? Who are these people? Who are these players? What are their qualities? And how can I as a coach help, grow or develop a system? It’s still a system, but a system that maximises or allows these players to show the best of themselves.

If you have two strikers who play really well together in training, why wouldn’t you play a system with two strikers? The more you think about this, the more crazy it seems that you would actually not do this.

Gary Curneen was in Brazil recently. He was talking to one of the development co-ordinators, at Fluminense and there were anecdotes coming from that Academy that we don’t have a 4-3-3 all the way through the Academy.

We don’t have some kind of standardised game-model curriculum that everyone must follow to maximise familiarity. We don’t do that. What we do is look at the players and we can play completely different formations and different systems in each age group. But that is a result of the players and how they fit together.

It’s almost like you’re making furniture and it’s for mass consumption and you have to make a table for Ikea. You have a blueprint of what that table is and you’re just going to follow that design and whatever materials it is you’re using.

You’re going to make that same thing every single time. Whereas a more artisanal or creative approach to table making would be to look at the materials you have and say, ‘What is this wood and what kind of table could this be?’

And you could say it about food. What ingredients do I have? I don’t just want to follow recipes and produce fast food standardised burgers. I want to look at the ingredients, the qualities specific to this area, this season, and make them.

Matias Manna, someone I admire a lot, one of the assistant coaches of the Argentina national team, put it very well and clearly when he said the art of coaching is the arrangement of players.

I really like that. It’s very simple and I think it touches on what we’ve been talking about.

If you’re Pedro Porro – a very good outside full-back who delivers fantastic crosses – being asked to go and play as a half-space interior is a very different game. Especially at the highest level imaginable. It seems counterintuitive to try and force players into these slots that have their own rules.

It also has a huge impact on how you assess a player’s quality, because then it might be, ‘This player can’t go inside this full-back, he’s not good, he’s not right for me.’

Columbia, a national team who I really enjoy watching, have been fantastic over the last few years. Nestor Lorenzo, their Head Coach, has two full-backs (Johan) Mojico and (Daniel) Munoz.

They are outside guy. They’re physical, powerful full-backs and they go on the outside and go hard and put balls in the box. It’s effective. They’re not drifting into the middle to receive on the back foot and make these half-space actions like Florian Wirtz.

Players are different, so let’s appreciate their differences and find ways that those differences can be amplified, rather than having the same patterns we’re so desperate for our teams to replicate.

In the positional game, it’s important to understand the kind of freedom that the players are allowed. 

Enzo Maresca was asked directly about this in a very recent interview with Sky Sports. The question was about the tension between positional play and freedom of players. And Maresca addressed it, he said, ‘No, there is no tension. For me, this is complete misinterpretation because I give the players freedom through positioning them in pockets of space between the lines.’

For Maresca and in the positional paradigm, the concept of freedom is to do with a player receiving the ball without pressure and with time to receive it. So by the right winger pinning the opposite full-back, by other pinnings happening, by other positional dynamics, Cole Palmer is afforded a pocket of space which, if he’s doing what he should do in this paradigm, he moves into.

So he is now between four different players who are all pinned by other ones. So he is free. So from Maresca, this system has given Palmer freedom and now Palmer can receive the ball and he has more time and space to express himself.

That’s a very different concept of freedom from a coach like Carlo Ancelotti, who, when he’s asked about how he’s going to arrange his forward line, he says, ‘Sometimes Rodrigo’s on the right, but then I see him on the left of the pitch and I think, what’s he doing over there?’

Rodrigo or Vinicius or whoever are allowed to move anywhere, usually towards the ball, because they’re footballers and they want to play with the ball. And what you end up is with these kind of overload situations and they make one-twos and flicks and close combination tricks which I like a lot.

Let’s have a coaching landscape where we can appreciate different understandings of these terms and we can play against each other and see what happens.

I know which definition or concept I prefer. I prefer it to be more player-led, more intuitive, more of the player making that decision whether to go to the ball, whether to stay.

The key to success (of positionism) is the efficiency with which the actions are executed. The speed and quality. It’s quite predictable when you play against Maresca’s Chelsea – you know pretty much what formation they’re going to use what they’re going to do – but it’s still very hard to stop, because the players are very good at doing these things.

Now defences are getting more attuned to how to defend it with man-to-man marking though. Physical levels are going higher and higher too. So this way of playing is running into a bit of a problem, because its inherent predictability is being countered. Then where does it go?

It can’t go faster than the human limit of being fast, because these are human beings. It’s not like a factory where you can you replace them with machines if they’re not fast enough or good enough.

In a football team there’s a human biological limit to how fast and how efficient you can be.

Once you hit that limit, which I would say we’re approaching, where do you go? For me, that’s where these more relational understandings of the emergent environment will come into play.

I think there’s truth to it. It’s not that we don’t see great talents. I mean we’ve got Lamine Yamal and Pedri in Barcelona, who are fantastic.

But the nature of the actions and the nature of the behaviours I think is somewhat different. Take Grealish for example. He would be your quintessential maverick.

Grealish is that kind of Gascoigne-esque English footballer: socks around the ankles, barrelling his way through tackles and drifting past players with dribbles and all the rest of it. That’s what made Jack Grealish. That’s what made him worth £100m.

At Manchester City it’s different, we know that. Grealish is being told, ‘Go. Stay there. Unless this happens, then you move in there.’

It’s far more constrained positionally, spatially, where you can be at certain moments of the game. You must be far from the ball a lot of the time, because you’re pinning and you’re allowing these pockets.

You would see them more receiving in the pocket, turning, making these very efficient, clean executions of pre-understood actions. It’s a different way of understanding the game of football. And the more that coaches coach like that, the more the actions of these players will be constrained.

Positional play is also very concerned with the body of the players, the posture of the players, almost to a balletic level, where a player’s posture is being coached as they receive the ball and turn the hips. This is a very important thing to understand.

Then he went to a playing system, a playing environment, that was very different. He’s said this explicitly. Dean Smith and now David Moyes say to Jack Grealish, ‘Do what you want, go where you want in possession. Go and get the ball.’

And he says, ‘I like that because that allows me to interpret the game how I want.’

I’m very interested right now in guys like Eberechi Eze at Arsenal, Rayan Cherki at Manchester City, because I think there is a realisation that some of this more static and pre-planned positional games are becoming negated by very aggressive man-to-man pressing systems.

So is this maverick role going to creep back in? Are we going to see guys like Cherki and Eze afforded more autonomy to make spontaneous creative actions? I hope so.

This is a really important question. In my experience of coaching and working with other coaches, that is the question that comes up all the time.

‘All very nice, Jamie. This sounds great. We all want to have this flurry of combinations and players expressing themselves. What are we going to do when we lose the ball though? Because these teams we play against now kill you. They will destroy you on these counter-attacks, in six, seven seconds.

What we’re talking about really is rest defence, which is this concept of what the rest of the team is doing while the attacking players are making their attacks.

There’s maybe five attacking players engaged in trying to break the back line, but at the same time five on duty to guard a counter-attack.

You can look at rest defence from another perspective. Something that maybe Red Bull were interested in – and still are to a large degree – that when you play more relational football, where players are more free to move around, you will get these clusters of players on the side of the pitch.

That’s become something of a trademark of a more relational style: players gathered together, making short combinations. And of course that will lead to spaces being open, but it also gives you a higher density of players in the immediate proximity of the ball when it’s lost.

So counter-pressing then becomes a very important strategy to mitigate against counter-attack.

There’s this feeling that sometimes I get that coaches who have a positional mindset think that if they don’t prescribe the positions, the players are just going to do really stupid things and move into crazy positions.

And it’s like, well, they’re actually very good footballer. If you don’t describe where they have to be, it’s not like they’re suddenly just going to abandon everything they’ve learned about the game and start running all over the place.

If you’re a defensive midfielder or the opposite full-back, you’re still going to be aware of what’s happening. It’s not like the players completely forget about this kind of duty just because they play in a relational style.

It’s also not as if positional teams have never been caught on the counter-attack – it happens every week. I see the concern and I think it’s probably one of the areas that can be developed most in terms of creative coaching and developing new new concepts.

And then onto what we’re seeing now – a lot of long throws and set pieces dominant. It’s a small sample size at the start of this Premier League but I think the trends have been there for a little while longer than that.

Guardiola and Arne Slot have talked about the rise in man-to-man marking. What happens if the defensive structure doesn’t have lines? What happens if you don’t defend in a structure but rather defend man to man?

Then you can’t put a free man between lines. So the manner in which you try to move the ball forward and control it and get players turned with an ability to pass forward becomes completely different because there is no free man.

Then Maresca’s freedom is a lot harder to find, because a player will not allow themselves to be pinned. They’ll just follow Palmer and stand next to him. So that freedom becomes harder to find.

Newcastle are a team that seem to defend very zonally and leave huge gaps between the lines. So it’s not like it’s completely homogenous across the league. But more and more teams, Bournemouth for example, are implementing these man-to-man systems in pressing. How do you then get a player facing forward with a good situation?

It seems to me there’s a little bit of a lack of ideas there. ‘Okay, if they’re just going to man mark us, kick it long into the space. If they want to go man v man on the top line, let’s just boot the ball down the pitch and get a striker like Erling Haaland or Viktor Gyokeres or Benjamin Sesko or Liam Delap running onto it.

The reason we’re seeing these classic nines come back is precisely because of this. Okay, that’s a little bit crass, but essentially we are seeing it. Stretch them out and hit the big man. He’ll run onto it or lay it off to guys arriving in that space to make the second ball.

And if we’re going to struggle to get free players on the ball in good attacking situations, then what about attacking situations we can plan for and choreograph during the week?

Bernardo Cueva of course,is one of the top guys. When you speak to Bernardo, which I’ve been fortunate enough to do, there’s a lot going on with throw-ins that are very interesting and might not be what people think. So I don’t want to be a guy that’s trying to criticise set piece or throw-in coaches.

What is interesting is that we are going this way. And the reasons why. It’s for control, right? You can set up your rest defence. It’s almost like NFL. You make your play and you choreograph it.

As coaches, you have control over what is happening to varying degrees.

Harry Kane, at Bayern Munich, is a very interesting example of saying, ‘Okay, if you’re going to man mark us, is your centre back going to follow the centre forward if he comes back to his own box?’

Is he really going to do that? He might, (Gian Piero) Gasperini’s guys might do it, but against Borussia Dortmund the other night, we saw Kane Cruyff turning on the edge of his own box to beat a player. Here was a very creative attacking player showing great skills in a 1 v 1 situation.

If you’re going to follow us, will you follow eight players? If you do, your defence is going to look very interesting. If you don’t, we’re going to outplay you with a combination.

But I think there’s a bit of a blockage. It’s like almost coaches thin, ‘Well, can we do that?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, you can, you can do anything within the rules of football.’

There’s nothing in the rules of football about positions of the players except the goalkeeper. That’s the only positional constraint and that’s what makes it so interesting.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we seeing maybe solutions come from other leagues (than the Premier League). I mentioned Kane at Bayern Munich or Mjällby, who have just won the Swedish Premier League.

They’re a very small club who are implementing some relational principles. 

With the Premier League, there’s so much money at stake. It’s not a great environment for innovation because it becomes conservative.

If something interesting emerges in another league, the Premier League, once they’re sure enough that it might work, it can come to the Premier League.

When was the last innovation that happened in the Premier League? Maybe I’m missing something. No English manager has ever won the English Premier League. That’s a crazy stat.

And it’s not that there aren’t of course many talented English managers but something is going on. I think it’s to do with the finances and some of the attitudes that are governing the organisation of the league that do not make it a tactically interesting league.

To find the most innovative films you’re not going to watch Hollywood blockbusters. It’s more of a tried and tested formula. Again it’s to do with the money involved and I think there’s a little bit of the tactical analysis side of the Premier League which bigs it up to be a bit more interesting than it actually is.

The coaches are highly talented and it’s high-level football and it wins. The players are so good. And the environments are so dedicated to making these systems work.

Perhaps the best teams of the future could be the ones where the players are thinking on their feet, they’re reacting in the moment, adapting during the game.

That’s going to scare coaches, probably, if the players are the ones making the decisions in the moment. It scares some coaches I think.

There needs to be some kind of shift in the way people are thinking about tactics themselves. Someone who’s been on your podcast, Rene Maric, gave us the line that tactics don’t exist.

Well, Maric is now Assistant to Vincent Kompany at Bayern Munich. So what does Maric mean by that? Maybe he is talking about players being able to intuit immediate emergent game information.

And if some of that information tells you you’re being man-marked as a striker and you have very good ball skills and are a creative player, well maybe say, ‘Okay, if you are you going to follow me, let’s start moving around.’

I go back to Fluminense. I saw it in 2022. Ganso is one of my favourite players. He used to play with Neymar back when they were young at Santos. He had an interesting career and was a really creative Brazilian, a classic number 10 playmaker.

And on occasion when Fluminense would be up against the high pressing of Jorge Sampaoli’s Flamengo, Ganso would just drop right back and stand next to the goalkeeper on the six yard line. The goalkeeper would roll it with his studs and Ganso would essentially start walking out with the ball.

People say, ‘What’s your build-up structure?’ Well, that guy IS the build-up structure, because he’s really good. From these kinds of principles, interesting patterns and combinations and relationships can start to happen and players can develop a different understanding of the potential of going through opponents, of outplaying opponents, rather than trying to find positional solutions to problems that are much less positional.

As I said, defences are not so zonal anymore, so they don’t give you these spaces between the lines all the time. So why would you try and force a positional solution into a problem that isn’t positional?

Let’s try to find these relational aspects, relational with the environment, relational between players, to tie some of these things together and allow the capacities of players like Kane.

What a fantastic system that allows Kane to do this. Has Harry Kane ever played better than that? Maybe I’ve not watched every Harry Kane game, but that surely has to be up there.

In defensive play, we are very comfortable with the distinction between zonal defending and non-zonal defending.

Non zonal defending we usually call man marking. Almost every football coach, every football fan, recognises that distinction.

Guardiola has described the positional attack as a zonal attack. Players are assigned to sectors of the pitch and you organise structurally. Actually, a lot of the influence came from handball.

So what is a non-zonal attack? For me, that’s what I saw when I watched Fluminense or when I watch Argentina, when I watch Ancelotti’s Real Madrid or any number of classic teams, both contemporary and through history.

The players are achieving organisation, playing well together and winning games in a non-zonal way.

Jozsef Bozsik, one of the biggest influences on my work, a Brazilian tactical theorist, refers to this style as Jogo Funcional – the functional game as opposed to the positional game.

Functionality has a different meaning in English, so the word I prefer is relational football. So relationism is a non-zonal attacking organisation.

Fernando Diniz’s Fluminense eventually got to the World Club Cup Final, some people might remember, and were comfortably beaten in the end by Guardiola’s Manchester City, but the disparity between those teams is crazy in terms of resources.

You can enjoy some very fun passages of play from Fuminense as they outplay the Manchester City press in that game.

If you want to look for other examples of this, look at Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, look at Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal.

I’ve gone through a lot of football coach education. I have the UEFA Licence, I went through all these courses, and when do we ever talk about football history? When do we ever challenge coaches to learn and really go deep on football history?

If you’re a film director, you’re probably going to know about the history of films, but in football we have a real big blind spot and we think it’s inferior stuff that is just overly simplistic and we’ve moved beyond it now.

If you go back and watch the Hungary that destroyed England at Wembley in 1953 you’ll find some very interesting things. Watch the total football of Johan Cruyff. Don’t just read a book about it. Watch the games. You’ll see some very interesting things.

Watch Colombia of 1990 or even now. Watch Malmo for the last couple of years under Henrik Rydström, two-time Swedish champions. Watch Racing Santander, who are currently top of the Spanish Second Division. I’ve mentioned Myallby, who already won the Swedish Premier League there, the Argentina national team, Columbus Crew under Wilfried Nancy.

People are so caught up with the crash, bang, wallop of the daily routine of the English Premier League. Football exists in other places and as coaches it’s very useful to go back and investigate across time and across space geographically, not be biassed towards just watching one type of football.

There’s technical improvement within a certain framework, within a certain framing. Have we seen increase of wingers making one-two combinations to go inside defenders? Or an increase in maverick central dribblers? Possibly not.

Mousa Dembele, the Spurs midfielder, was one of my favourite players to watch because he would pick the ball up in the centre of the pitch and just dribble past guys. You see a little bit of that now with players like Frenkie De Jong, who will hold the ball a little longer, take more touches, but not often.

Juanma Lillo, Guardiola’s ex-assistant, made the famous quote about the homogenisation of football. He called it dos taquismo – two touchism.

Receive, pass. Receive, pass. Receive, pass.

For sure, defenders, midfielders, are much better across the board at doing this kind of stuff – keeping possession. But this is also enabled by the fact they know where their team-mates are going to be.

They’re like, ‘Okay, if I receive here, he’s going to be outside. I’m going to just do my thing, open the body, play, and I can become expert in the technical execution of that action.’

But the raising of that floor has also had a counter-act, where it’s maybe dropped the ceiling of the more maverick, intuitive, spontaneous, technical actions which I would like to see more of. And that’s my taste.

I think we can have attacking football that sees a lot more spontaneous close proximity, deceptive trickery, combination dribbling play integrated into it. That would be good for everyone in my opinion.

There’s a photograph which I love from a few years ago now – Messi and Suarez sitting watching their kids play football. They were relaxed, sitting in deck chairs. Who knows more about football, Lionel Messi or, no disrespect, me or any coach?

For me, Lionel Messi knows more about football than any coach. So if he’s okay with just sitting there and letting these kids have fun and play, I think that’s not a bad example to follow. 

I’m a coach. Of course, we’re always having discussions coaching players. Of course you can say things during games. It’s not that you can’t say things, but maybe we should be encouraging, maybe we should be trying to give positive feedback.

The main thing is surely at these younger ages that the kids enjoy football and that they leave training happy and they want to come back the next time and they feel good. Surely these are the most important things.

Do you need to control everything during the game? Not really. I understand, as a coach, to give instructions. But are the kids even understanding a lot of these instructions a lot of the time?

I’m not trying to be some kind of preachy guy, because I’m not really interested in that, but some of the overcoaching is not always useful.

And we have to be careful about how we describe coaches. There are some fantastic youth coaches all over the world that are creating brilliant environments for young players to express themselves, to experiment, to feel confident in taking risks and playing the game in the way that they feel it.

But I think there is definitely a style of coaching that can be dictatorial, that can be too authoritarian. Top down. This comes from this deeper, more philosophical point about having set ideas in your mind about what you’re looking for when you go to coach.

Isn’t it nice to be surprised? I quote Maric again – he talks about at Bayern, the coaches are most satisfied when the players do something that the coaches didn’t expect in training.

They know they’re on the right track when that is happening. So let’s enjoy the surprise like we do with film, books, stories; in life. Let’s enjoy a little bit of mystery and surprise and not be so concerned and anxious and nervous when things deviate from the path that we have in our head.

This comes back again to what we talked about, chaos and order. Everything doesn’t have to be so ordered. We can let it go.

Let go of this assumption or this map you have in your head. Let it go. At first you feel fear and then it becomes the thing that makes the team, that makes you great.

It’s like this ability to let go I think is very important for coaches. And you can see it during games, you can see it during training. It’s not that you shouldn’t plan, it’s not this black and white thing. But what is the manner in which you are planning? Are you building systems?

The main aim is to achieve effective, functional, useful, spontaneous combinations and plays. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to approach system design? Rather than going into a meeting with an Under-11 team or player and you already know, ‘This is what I want you to do today.’

If I was to make a little bit of criticism of the general curriculum, of coach education, tactical discussion, coaching theory, it’s that there isn’t enough awareness about the possibilities that are outside of the current ways that we think.