Creating numerical superiority is a constant target in football. Whether a team is in or out of possession, having at least one more player than the opponent in one area of the pitch is priceless. For obvious reasons, it is much easier to attack or defend with two men against one. With 11 players in each team though, there is a theoretical perfect match up between both teams, each player being marked by another. Fortunately, it is not that straight forward in reality.
In this article we will focus on the possession phase, and how a team can have a numerical advantage in possession by simply pinning the opponent’s defenders.
Natural numerical superiority
When out of possession, a team’s defense has two main tasks: controlling the space in its back, the depth, and marking the opponent’s attackers to either prevent them from receiving the ball or from attacking the space. For that, the defense has one advantage on the attacking players with the offside rule. However, the defending team will generally want more comfort at the back, and it is therefore almost always agreed that there should be a spare man in the back line to cover his teammates and the depth without having to worry about another player to mark. There is also the keeper, who is forced to stay in his goal. In theory then, the defending team will always have at least three players at the back against a striker. If this is a numerical superiority for the defending team in this area of the pitch, it inevitably translates into a numerical inferiority in another one. The team in possession therefore has a natural numerical superiority elsewhere.
The concept of ‘pinning’
In common language, to spin something or someone is synonym of fixing, attaching or holding among other words. It is partly applicable to the concept of pinning in football, as what we are trying to achieve is to force players to stay in a particular position, therefore to pin them somewhere on the pitch. To capture the full meaning behind this concept though, we will refer to the game of chess.
Without getting into too much details, a chess game is an opposition between two players, in which each player has 16 pieces he can move across the chessboard. Each piece moves differently according to fix rules. Depending on the movements a piece is allowed, it will have a value. For example, a pawn is very restricted in its movements whereas the queen is allowed almost any movement possible. Hence we say that the pawn is the least valuable piece and the queen the most valuable. Ultimately, each team’s aim is to attack the other team’s king and mate it. The pin in chess is a situation created when the opponent cannot move a piece without exposing another more valuable piece.
To translate that into a football game, each team is trying to reach out the other team’s goal to score a point. Within the teams, players have different roles, instructions, abilities,… They therefore occupy different areas of the pitch and are more or less a threat for the opposition. Messi for example would be the queen of Barcelona, the most dangerous player. The other team’s objective is therefore to stop him from being on the ball too much and restraining him access to its own goal. So when Messi is in a forward position and his team is in possession of the ball, the other team’s defenders are likely to be pinned by him because they will not want to move away from him and exposing their goal to him. In reality, this doesn’t just apply to Messi, and any attacking player is likely to be a threat to the other team, therefore being able to pin at least one defender when in an advanced position. When we say that a defender is pinned, it means that he can’t leave the zone he is currently in without exposing his team. He is therefore not able to press forward on the pitch. As mentioned earlier, since it is common practice to always have at least a spare man at the back when defending, we can consider that one attacking player can pin at least two players. With the keeper, that makes three players out of eleven to look after one man, leaving 8 others pressing against 10 men. The team in possession has then already created a numerical superiority by having a player positioned in an advanced area.
Finding the right balance
We just discussed how with one striker we can create a 10v8 situation in our favor when our team is in possession. We’ll now look at how we can create greater overloads?
Let’s take the example of a build up situation from a goal kick. Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the basic positioning of the centre backs, centre midfield and full back when playing from the back on a goal kick: the split CBs, high fullbacks and deeper centre midfield(s) are now we’ll known. However, people might focus mostly on the positioning of the deeper players because it is called playing from ‘the back’, when in reality it is important to look at the top of the structure first to understand the mechanism and how a team can build up from the back.
Numerical superiority is key as mentioned. Another essential principle is creating spacio-temporal advantages. Unsurprisingly, a player is more likely to make accurate passes or successful dribbling when he has more time on the ball to think about his next action than when he is pressed by an opponent. Back to our example, if a team wants to build from the back on a goal kick, is having one striker and be in a 10v8 situation in its own half a favourable situation? In the Premier League, most pitches are 105 metres by 68 metres. In the build up phase, that means both teams will be playing in 52.5 metres by 68 metres, a half of the pitch. That’s 21 players in this reduced area. In simple words, that’s a lot! It’s then difficult to find space, and therefore time, for the team in possession when the other team has a smaller area to defend. To make space, pinning is then a very useful tactic.
To make things easier when we are in possession, we’ll try to reduce the number of players we will have to play against. However, if we want to force some defenders to stay as far as possible from the ball, we’ll have to sacrifice some of our own players to pin these defenders. Another thing to bear in mind is that if we pin 2 defenders and the keeper with one striker, another striker will not pin two more defenders. As we said, teams typically want to have one spare man at the back, so a team will usually have three defenders against two strikers, four against three,… So the more strikers we use to pin the defenders, the least benefit we actually get. It’s about finding the right balance then.
There is no right or wrong answer here. The number of players a team wants to keep high on the pitch will depend of many factors. One of them will be the technical ability of the other players in the team. If for example one of your center back isn’t really comfortable on the ball and one of your center midfield is not particularly good at long passes, you might want to have one of your most technical player to drop deeper to help in the build up. Another factor will be the height and the intensity with which the other team presses you. If the opponent is set to defend deep and press in its last third only, you might want to keep only up to two strikers to pin the defense since they will likely hold their positions anyway, so you don’t really need to force them back. Besides, you want to keep players in the middle of the pitch to overload the opposition’s midfield and break through their lines. Below is an example of a possible positioning against a low block. Instead of overloading the front line with three or four advanced players, we would rather overload the midfield and the wide areas to move the block. However, we could use a central attacking midfielder to pin the opposition’s center midfielders.
Inversely, against a team pressing high we will look at preventing more players to join the pressing, hence keeping more players in advanced positions. In the below situation, the opposition is pressing high, blocking short passing options. We would then position four attacking players, forcing five players to stay at the back, creating a 7v5.
Conclusion
Pinning the opposition’s defense has two main upsides for the team in possession. It creates numerical superiority and spacio-temporal advantages to progress through the pitch. Besides, it allows the team in possession to attack with several players in high positions, presenting a greater threat to the defending team. However, teams need to be flexible and adjust their positioning depending on their own ability and their opponent’s mentality.
To conclude, here is a clip of Ajax building from the back against Real Madrid. It’s interesting to see how Ajax are creating space during the course of the play, starting with two players up front, Neres and Ziyech, before Tadic and Van de Beek move forward to form a front four and open space in the middle of the pitch.
