by Ruud Gullit
Second half
How the first half went often determines how the second forty-five minutes start. If you’re ahead, you won’t want to launch into an immediate attack—you’ll be better off taking a wary stance. Substitutions and tactical adjustments may change the complexion of the game.
A team is a mechanism and if one element doesn’t function—because a player has a cold, for example, or is out of shape or is thinking about something else—then that puts a spoke in its wheel. Take the right measure and you may solve the problem; then the whole game changes after halftime.
Form is something intangible—it may have disappeared in the first half only to reappear suddenly in the second. Or vice versa.
No player wants to play badly, but sometimes it just isn’t working. If you feel out of form you can deal with it by just doing your job and playing more simply. Sometimes players try to force their way back into form by trying difficult runs, only they often achieve the opposite effect since the chances of succeeding are zero. In fact they make it even worse for themselves.
That players aren’t robots—despite being judged as such—is often evident in the different way they play in the first and second halves.
Soccer cultures
Every top club in Europe has as many as four or more different nationalities in the same team. England is perhaps the ultimate example: Arsenal were the first to field a team without a single Brit. Yet despite the internationalization of club soccer, traditional national soccer cultures have continued to flourish.
England and big money
The champions of Europe between 1975 and 1985 were English clubs such as Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Everton, Arsenal, Ipswich Town, West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur. They won the big European prizes (European Cup, European Cup Winners Cup and UEFA Cup).
Throughout those years, the players of these successful English clubs were very often locals, as was the case on the Continent: players from the actual city or the region. English clubs had the advantage of being able to draw on soccer talent from Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland. But foreign imports like the Argentinians Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricky Villa at Tottenham Hotspur and the Dutchmen Frans Thijssen and Arnold Mühren at Ipswich Town were rare.
After 1985, the Italians, Spaniards, Germans and Dutch took over the reins in European club soccer. In an attempt to regain their lost hegemony, England began to attract more foreign players in the 1990s to play in the Premier League. People like Eric Cantona, David Ginola, Faustino Asprilla, Peter Schmeichel, Jürgen Klinsmann and the Swede Anders Limpar—the first to make the move—soon realized that they had to work hard to keep up with the pace of the British game, despite their surfeit of skills. Technically they were far superior and so the English fans looked on them as superhuman. Later, the Netherlands provided players like Dennis Bergkamp, Glenn Helder and Marc Overmars. And I came to Chelsea in 1995.
The flood of foreign players is now irreversible, especially since the Premier League quickly made a sensational leap forward in finance and marketing. But the advent of foreign players has affected the emergence of native English talent. There has been less space for young English players, who have been largely unable to bridge the gulf dividing them from their foreign counterparts.
There was also no limit to the number of foreign players per team, selection or club. The main consideration was to maintain the global status of the Premier League as the best and most sensational competition in the world, and especially to be able to sign increasingly lucrative contracts. It was a vicious circle, with the end still nowhere in sight. Meanwhile the twenty Premier League clubs get to share around £1.4 billion. The whole world watches Premier League games every week.
As the level of club soccer has risen and the money involved has increased, huge sums have been invested: gradually you see talented youngsters break through and get a fair chance at clubs like Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and even Manchester United, although at United they splash out hundreds of millions in the transfer market.
In the end, the pressure to win games weighs heaviest of all in the Premier League. Especially for managers. Their future depends on where the club stands in the league and not on how much talent it has nurtured, as it seems to be in the Netherlands, to judge from the team selections in the Dutch top division. In fact English youngsters are regularly lent out for a brief spell at clubs on the Continent.
I hope that the English national side will in the end benefit from the improved training academies. Gradually, a new, young squad is competing with Europe’s top players—although when I ask people outside England about the rising stars ready to follow Steven Gerrard, John Terry and Frank Lampard, then, apart from Wayne Rooney, it often remains surprisingly quiet.
Obviously, the huge ambitions of clubs such as Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool with all their foreign acquisitions stifle the development of homegrown players. More disturbing is the signing of mid-range foreign players who contribute nothing to the Premier League and are little better than most English players. There should always be room for exceptions, not for mediocrity.
Unfortunately, that is the impact money has on club directors. Each Premier League club receives over €100 million in its bank account each year, and no one dares save the cash. They buy players just for the sake of it, and put them up for transfer a year later with the same ease.
For top English clubs, income from Europe, even from the Champions League, is an attractive extra and no more than that, compared to the enormous, structural income from domestic and foreign broadcasting rights and sponsorship contracts. Moreover, clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City have megawealthy owners who can afford occasional spending sprees of a few hundred million euros and fill up the gaping holes in their budgets with a smile.
Yet it is curious that despite their astonishing wealth, English clubs do not attract the world’s best players. Lionel Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar don’t play in the Premier League. In fact if Barcelona or Real Madrid want, they can easily entice top players from England, as they did with Luis Suárez from Liverpool and Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur.
Mature players from Bayern Munich aren’t attracted by England either. Like Bastian Schweinsteiger, they cross the Channel only after they have passed their prime. Bayern Munich is the smartest club of all. They buy their players from other clubs in the Bundesliga and win the championship almost every year, and so too their Champions League place. They have to be in the European competition to balance their books.
While Bayern Munich can plan to capture the German title four years out of every five, the competition for the English league title is wide open every year. That is a major difference with the other leading competitions in Europe. While Bayern are almost always champions in Germany, in Italy it is Juventus, in France it is Paris Saint-Germain, in Spain it is FC Barcelona or Real Madrid, and in the Netherlands it is PSV or Ajax.
Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United may have shared the spoils in the last ten years, but in 2016 the title went to Leicester City, with Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur close behind. That makes the Premier League all the more attractive to soccer fans around the world. If you switch to the Premier League, there are plenty of clubs to watch; if you switch to the Primera División—probably the best competition in the world—you’ll probably only stick around for FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Other clubs simply don’t come into the running. In England, broadcasting rights are distributed among the clubs in the top division, while Barcelona and Real manage their own television rights. That earns them many times more than any of the other clubs in the Primera División, which has completely distorted the Spanish competition. Only Atlético Madrid have any hope of keeping up with that illustrious duo. Italy has a similar problem.
To make the competition more attractive it might be advisable to sell the broa
dcasting rights as a package. In the end, there is nothing exciting about the French competition. Paris Saint-Germain win the French league each year by around twenty points.
Meanwhile, transfer prices for English players are rising exponentially following an adjustment to the rules. Each club must have at least eight homegrown players in the first selection of twenty-five: players from home or abroad who have been registered with the union in England or Wales for at least thirty-six months before the calendar year in which they turned twenty-one. Not many of these can keep up with the pace of the Premier League. That scarcity feeds the rising prices. Once an English club has its minimum of eight homegrown players, it can start to look abroad for new opportunities.
On the Continent, top-level players are available for a lot less money. For an eighteen-year-old English player you may pay millions of pounds, whereas the Algerian Riyad Mahrez, who plays for Leicester City, cost the club a mere £500,000 when he came from Le Havre in France. After he emerged as one of the Premier League’s successes of the year, his example has inevitably prompted managers and directors of Premier League clubs to attract even more foreign players, which means that ever more young players in their own academies find it hard to win a place and miss the boat.
Jamie Vardy is the exception. His story defies rational explanation and he is one in a million: purchased for peanuts from one of the lower divisions, he developed in a couple of years into an absolute sensation at Leicester City.
National soccer cultures
In different countries people grow up with different soccer cultures that tie in closely with the mentality of their country and the sort of soccer which suits that mentality.
It is not easy to succeed in Europe playing the English style of soccer, since English clubs like to play an open, attacking game. For teams with a strong defense and a sharp, fast striker they present an opportunity which is easily exploited. English clubs like to make a game of it, while their European opponents lie in wait for a chance to snatch victory.
In the Netherlands, fans want soccer full of initiative, crafted, attacking and attractive. Sometimes that is even more important than winning. Their system is 4-3-3.
In England, fans want to see a contest with physical contact and the ball kicked forward, where it makes the most difference. There is no way forward faster than a long ball. The style of play is based on a 4-4-2 system, although with the advent of foreign coaches many clubs have adopted a 4-2-3-1 formation.
In Italy it’s all about winning from a defensive position. Three points are more important than tactics and style. It’s not about entertainment. Their systems are: 5-3-2, 4-4-2 or 4-4-1-1.
In Spain, they prefer elegant, attacking soccer with technical combinations and plenty of positional changes. Winning in this way is the objective. And the system best suited to it is 4-3-3.
But variety is the spice of life. And so too in soccer: as a player, if you are transferred to a club in another country you get a chance to discover that country’s philosophy and traditions and the particular way in which soccer is played there. Soon you get to realize that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
In the Netherlands, winning has to be accompanied by attractive soccer, otherwise there’s no end to the complaining. Attractive soccer and looking for positive solutions are key.
In Italy they don’t care how you win, whether you play attractive or negative soccer. It’s the result that counts, because winning is paramount—that’s dogma. Aesthetics are extra, all depending on whether the other team leaves room for attractive soccer. Many clubs from other European countries have trouble dealing with Italian teams. Italy’s national side is also tough to beat since Italians are not worried about playing well, just about winning.
In 2006, a World Cup year, a defender, Fabio Cannavaro, was acclaimed European Footballer of the Year and World Footballer of the Year. It’s unusual for a defender to gain both accolades. It tells you something about the Italian culture. It is purely about survival: first defend, then attack. Not always entertaining, but certainly effective. Italians base their game on a solid foundation, grounded in defense.
In the soccer cultures of Italy, Spain and Germany, teams focus on not losing, basing their strategy on a well-organized defense. Not conceding goals means never losing, getting a draw at the very least. Clubs often post an international player up front who can make the difference, such as Antoine Griezmann at Atlético Madrid, Gonzalo Higuaín at Juventus and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at Borussia Dortmund, who demolished a hapless Tottenham Hotspur, then second in the Premier League in the 2015/16 Europa League round of 16.
Germans invariably have the right mentality, the strength and the stamina to play 120 minutes without breaking a sweat. Since 2000, they have concentrated increasingly on developing technical players.
Spaniards are technically proficient, elegant players, who put technique first and a winning mentality second. Add their speed and efficiency and you can put Primera División players in any competition in the world and they’ll never be out of their depth.
In England, competing is more important than looking good, the Dutch ideal. English fans like to see a contest; the English find the Dutch preference for aesthetic soccer boring. Many also consider the Dutch 4-3-3 system a cowardly tactic, because then you have only the one striker, while English teams play with two strikers in their 4-4-2 formation.
These generalizations do not always apply in every situation, depending on the team’s intention: what is a team planning to do with its one, two or three forwards, what position do they take when they are in possession and where do they stand when they lose the ball? It’s not the system but the game plan that counts.
Spain
To play attractive soccer and to win: that is the ideal to which clubs strive in Spain above all, especially clubs like FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. If the combination of these two ingredients falls short, the result can be deadly for a manager at the Santiago Bernabéu.
As it was for Rafael Benítez, who decided in 2015 that he wanted Real to make more use of defensive players like the midfielder Casemiro: players who played with discipline. A wave of protest against his defensive strategy followed and forced Benítez to switch his approach and to play his best players when Real Madrid met Barcelona at home: he fielded all his stars. They were annihilated, 4–0. He had proved his point, but was compelled to resign soon after.
Real Madrid and FC Barcelona treat their managers to the world’s finest players, or they pour money into their coffers to enable them to acquire top players of their own choosing. A huge advantage for Barcelona and Real Madrid is that there isn’t a player who wouldn’t give anything to be able to play for either of these clubs.
Germany
Among Germany’s top teams and the German national side, continuing success has raised the benchmark ever higher. Especially for clubs like Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and the German Mannschaft: the national squad. They are used to winning; it has become a habit. Their formula is 100 percent commitment and never give up.
Naturally, if you always win you can play attractive soccer. Yet until recently this was never a priority for German players, especially not in major international tournaments. Germany would often wobble at the start of a European Championship or a World Cup, only to improve as the tournament progressed and then eventually to win.
But since the technical revolution of 2000, all that has changed—as in the last World Cup in Brazil in 2014, when Germany started with a sublime victory over Portugal, beating them 4–0. Today’s Germany doesn’t fit in the historical mold, and we all remember the sensational 7–1 triumph in the semifinal at Belo Horizonte against the host nation.
Germany’s soccer has become increasingly attractive as the selectors have been able to draw on an ever wider variety of cultural backgrounds, through second- and third-generation immigrant workers from Turkey and Africa. The Ger
man football association also began to play a role around 2000, by encouraging clubs to focus more on technique in general and technically talented players in particular.
France
With their multicultural background, Les Bleus enjoyed tremendous success in the 1990s. The team that became world champions at home in 1998 contained a remarkable number of African influences, including Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram and Marcel Desailly. Unusually perhaps, not one of these French internationals played for a French club. Most had matured in Italy, Spain and England and brought the level of excellence of those competitions to the national squad.
The French midfield, with Zidane as playmaker, Didier Deschamps for balance and Emmanuel Petit for pace, were a perfect combination. Christian Karembeu would often move in among them; he was a key attacking midfielder at Real Madrid. In defense they had Laurent Blanc and Marcel Desailly in the center. The left back, Bixente Lizarazu, had amazing energy, playing the entire left flank.
Teams this good come in waves. Before Zidane’s French team conquered the world, France had won nothing in ten years. Prior to that dearth, in the mid-1980s, the French had an even more balanced midfield, with Michel Platini, Alain Giresse, Jean Tigana and Luis Fernández.
Both teams played a combination of 4-3-3 and 4-4-2. In 1998, Zidane played as a forward, roaming free on the left; in 1986, at the European Championship in France, Platini played in a free role in midfield, an old-fashioned playmaker, the number 10 which is so rare these days; now all eleven players have an assigned position when the team loses possession.
Zidane and Platini would both move back in formation, to take up their tactical position rather than to retake the ball. It gave them the possibility to peak at the moment it mattered. Their technical prowess gave the team an extra impetus. That, along with the tremendous quality of the players surrounding the two superstars, made those two French teams a joy to watch: for aficionados, fans and spectators. And they won too.