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The Premier League season is fully underway, and there’s already one specific tactic that’s proving pretty popular. TNNews Sports went through the games of all the big six teams in the English Premier League this weekend, and we found an example of this tactic the teams are using, and this is what it is. Arsenal was playing against Everton. They were in a build-up, and Declan Rice, the centre midfielder, dropped in between the two centre backs to receive the ball.
The same thing happened in Chelsea’s game, where Moises Caicedo dropped between the two centre backs to receive the ball. The city game against Villa, there was Elliot Anderson between the two centre backs receiving the ball. And Liverpool against Brighton in the 83rd minute happened again. Trey Nyoni received the ball between the two centre backs. Manchester United are kind of interesting because recently what they’ve been doing is actually setting up the same kind of structure.
Their situational back three (Maguire, Heaven and Yoro), but rather than having a central midfielder in this position, what they’ve actually done is used an asymmetric fullback. So Leny Yoro was used as the right back, just shifting inside when Diogo Dalot went further forward.
However, we’ve still found an example of them doing this: centre midfielder dropping in between the two centre backs, where Andrey Santos is doing it, and Leny Yoro and Dalot both pushed a little bit further forward.
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Spurs are another interesting example because we’ve got Matheus Fernandes sort of between the two centre backs receiving the ball. The reason why he doesn’t do it too much is actually because Spurs like to use their goalkeeper in the same position.
So Kinsky between the two centre backs in that position. So we’re seeing every big six team having scenarios in the game where their centre midfielder is dropping between the two centre backs to receive the ball.
Why Are Big Six Teams Doing This Now When They Weren’t Five Years Ago?
Well, this might feel new, but it actually is a very old concept from a tactical point of view. In fact, it’s got a name. It’s called La Salida Lavalpiana. ‘La Salida’ is Spanish for ‘the exit’. Lavolpiana is actually the name of a man made into an adjective, I guess.
This guy is an Argentinian coach. He was actually a goalkeeper for Argentina in the 1978 World Cup. He was on the bench during that tournament. But very quickly after that, he goes into coaching, particularly in Mexico, has a really storied career, started in the early 80s, and he’s still coaching into the late 2010s. And at the midpoint of his career, he is most famously known for coaching the Mexico national team. He actually took them to the World Cup in 2006.
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But LaVolpe’s big thing is buildup. He wants his teams to be able to build up in a sustainable way and move the ball down the field. And so he develops this approach to buildup that we are calling La Salida LaVolpiana. Actually, we’ll shorten it. It’s quite long. Let’s just call it LaVolpiana buildup.
How the Lavolpiana Buildup Works: Creating an Overload Against a Front Two?
LaVolpe coached in the ’80s and ’90s; when he was thinking about buildup, he was coming up against the same problem over and over again. And that is that most teams were defending or playing in a 4-4-2 shape. And what he realised is that if you’re going to build out of the back with a back four against a 4-4-2 shape, inevitably what will happen is the opponent will latch on man to man and it’ll actually be very difficult for you to make that exit, that salida as they call it in Spanish.
Now his big innovation really was just to say, Well, if we add an extra player to that first line of buildup, then what we’re actually doing is we are creating an overload. And this does a couple of things. Firstly, we’ve got that overload. So if the opponents do try and press you man to man, then in theory you should be able to access the spare player on the far side; that centre back can then step into space and start causing problems.
The other thing is that you can free up your fullbacks to get further forward. And again, this adds to the sorts of tensions that you can start creating higher up the pitch. So the winger now is caught in this problem. If your centre back is stepping into space, does the winger come towards you?
In which case you’ve created a free player in the next line so you can just bounce it through. And so what you are doing essentially by adding that extra player to the first line of buildup is that you’re creating the overload, which you can then use to create a series of free players down the field which can help you progress the ball.
The Overload Matters More Than the Shape
Yeah, we do think that most people associate the LaVolpiana buildup with the centimetre fielder dropping in between the two centre backs and then the fullbacks pushing forward.
And that certainly is what it is. But it’s worth saying that LaVolpe actually used a back three, for example, in his Mexico team, and the buildup ideas are still there despite the fact they’re not arriving in that shape out of a different structure. So the main idea here, I think, is just creating that overload against a front two when they’re pressing out and using that to create positional advantage further up the field.
How a Little-Known Mexican Coach’s Idea Reached European Football?
We think that there are two things in history that happened that allow this to occur. The first one is that Pep Guardiola gets to the end of his playing career and actually plays for a few games in Mexico under Juan Manuel Lillo, who becomes his assistant coach at Manchester City. So obviously Guardiola was over there in the 2005 and 2006 seasons; that’s the period when LaVolpe was coaching the Mexico team.
So by dinner, being in Mexico, he will have come across LaVolpe’s ideas, not least because a lot of the teams might have been using them in the Mexican league as well at the time. The second thing that happened is that, actually, at the end of that season, Guardiola retired from playing football and takes a job with El País, the Spanish newspaper, as a columnist at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. He actually went to that World Cup and wrote a series of columns from a tactical perspective, and one of those columns was all about LaVolpe.
And we’ve got a couple of quotes from that article. Guardiola talked about how LaVolpe demanded something different from his players. He demanded that they play out from the back, which is nothing more than the players and the ball advancing together simultaneously. If only one of the players does it, there’s no reward. It’s not valid.
They have to do it together. So he’s already thinking about this idea that we’ve been talking about, of creating overloads, moving the ball down the field and creating these positional advantages through the whole pitch. He also talked a little bit about the way that LaVolpe coaches. And so he said that when he was in Mexico, he was told that LaVolpe was an interventionist and behaviourist coach; that is, a stickler for making sure the details are correct. So in training, he would force his defenders to progress the ball for 30 minutes at a time over and over again.
And we’ve got a couple of quotes from that article. Guadiola talked about how LaVolpe demanded something different from his players. He demanded that they play out from the back, which is nothing more than the players and the ball advancing together simultaneously. If only one of the players does it, there’s no reward. It’s not valid.
They have to do it together. So he’s already thinking about this idea that we’ve been talking about, of creating overloads, moving the ball down the field and creating these positional advantages through the whole pitch. He also talked a little bit about the way that LaVolpe coaches.
And so he said that when he was in Mexico, he was told that LaVolpe was an interventionist and behaviourist coach; that is, a stickler for making sure the details are correct. So in training, he would force his defenders to progress the ball for 30 minutes at a time over and over again.
And as he went on to say, if any mistake is made, if they don’t pass the goalkeeper at the right time, if they don’t stretch the pitch in the correct way, then he stops the exercise and tells them exactly what they’ve done wrong, shouts at them, and then they go through it all over again, which we think is very reminiscent of the coach that Guardiola became later on. So it’s pretty clear that Lavolpe was a really important inspiration for Guardiola. And so it should come as no surprise that if we fast-forward by two years and have a look at the Barcelona of Pep Guardiola, we can see LaVolpiana buildup being used.
Sergio Busquets drops in between the lines of the centre backs to receive the ball. So very clear that that influence came in through Pep Guardiola, amongst others.
Why Lavolpiana Went Out of Fashion?
Well, to answer that, we have to go back to Pep Guardiola again, I think. But it is worth starting off by saying the reason why LaVolpe developed this buildup was because he was coming against a lot of four-for-two presses with two players in the front line. And we actually started seeing less of those as the 2010s came around.
The emergence of the number 10 dropping a little bit deeper means that we actually often only have one player in that front line and two centre backs are already in overload there, so you don’t need one. But there are other tactical reasons why it started going out of fashion. And again, that is all linked back to Pep Guardiola. Now, after Guardiola left Barcelona, he went to Bayern Munich and started developing his approach quite considerably. The big thing for Guardiola is he wants to generate a territorial advantage.
What that means is not just possessing the ball, having high possession and being able to use buildup to generate those conditions, but being able to force the opponents back into their own penalty box and keep them camped out there. The way that he does that is by really pressuring their backline.
And so you have your wingers pushing high and wide, you have your centre forward pushing the centre backs back, and then you have your eights really getting high up the pitch, dragging the opposition midfielders deeper as well. Now, what this is doing is necessarily emptying out the middle of the field. And this becomes an issue for two reasons.
One is that if you are possessing the ball high up the pitch and the opposition win the ball back, they’re going to have no problem whatsoever actually counterattacking here. So you need to have some kind of coverage in the middle, but also your fullbacks essentially are out of the equation here.
You want to actually connect them with the rest of the team to help you possess the ball in the deeper areas as well. So what we start seeing then is these fullbacks coming inside, which is what Guardiola was famous for across the 2010s in particular.
So rather than needing us to drop out the centre midfielders, we’re actually seeing that movement going in the other way. The fullbacks are coming inside to help out. Now, if you do come up against a team that has got a front two and they’re pressing, this is a really easy solution because all you need to do is keep one of your fullbacks deeper, and then you’ve got that overload in the first line. So you can still do Laval Piana ideas from there. But very much the direction of the way the game is being played is to try and get players further forward rather than having your centre midfielders dropping out of the middle. You want to try and find ways of getting them into the middle of the pitch.
Why Lavolpiana Is Back in Fashion and How Top Clubs Use It Today?
It’s worth saying that the major condition has returned, which is teams are pressing out of a four-four-two structure in some way. And so we’re seeing two front presses all the time. So one reason why we’re starting to see that back three form is in response to that.
But it’s worth saying that you can still get that back three and have, for example, inverting fullbacks that overload the centre, but I think the wider conditions have changed. So one of the things we talk about all the time is how nowadays opponents aren’t very happy allowing teams to possess the ball in the first line of their buildup.
They want to press quite aggressively and stop them from having that comfortable possession. And that changes the conditions of what we’re trying to achieve. So rather than possessing the ball around the back line, you have to try and maintain possession as long as possible and then play it through these aggressive presses.
And that changes where the spaces open now. And that’s why we’re starting to see La Volpiana return because the La Volpiana buildup really allows you to achieve some of the things that we’re trying to achieve in the modern game.
Let’s have a look at what it looks like on a football pitch to make it a little bit more concrete for us. In the game between Manchester City and Aston Villa. Elliot Anderson came between the two city centre backs. Now remember how we were talking before about inverting fullbacks, what Guardiola was trying to do is overload the centre of the pitch to be able to build through the middle. It’s worth saying now that many teams are trying to overload in the centre.
Aston Villa did the same thing. They had four players in the middle of the pitch. So what we’re starting to see teams do now is try to find ways of opening out space in the middle. And they do that in a couple of ways. They do it by pushing the opposition’s back line deeper and pulling the opposition’s pressing line further forward.
In this instance, we’ve got the wide wingers for City. So they spread out the opposition backline. Haaland, the centre forward, occupying the two centre backs and pushing them back. But with the two wide players being the wingers, the big question is, what are we going to do with our fullbacks when they push forward?
And actually what we can see here is that the two fullbacks, Gvardiol and Khusanov, are actually performing the role that you would expect the number eights to play in a Guardiola system, getting into the scene between the centre back and the fullback and really trying to force that opposition line backwards.
But while we’ve got the fullbacks pushing the opposition back line deeper, we have the Manchester City midfielders performing the opposite action. So we’ve already got Elliot Anderson dropped out, so he’s emptied out the middle. We’ve now got Enzo Fernández dropping into that first line of buildup as well. And so we now get this tension where the Aston Villa defensive structure is being pulled apart. We’ve got Khusanov looking for that space in between the lines. We’ve got Gvardiol looking for that space between the lines.
We’ve got Haaland looking for the space in behind, but at the same time now we have Cherki, the number 10, dropping out. So we have those opposite movements to create this space in between the lines. And once you get into this scenario, not only do you have an overload here, but you can also see there are plenty of city players here. So you’re going to be able to withstand an aggressive press, but you also have the ability to find the space in between the lines and then access the front line here.
And that’s exactly what City does. So Elliot Anderson plays the ball to Ryan Cherki, and he’s got all of that space to run into, and the city players have all of the space in behind the back line to attack.
And so not only do you get the centimetre fielder dropping out, pulling the opponents’ press forward, and creating space in the middle, but your fullback can then push up onto the front line, force that line deep, and you’re opening up that space in between the lines, which has become the way that a lot of teams play now: try and build up deep, hit the space, and then go from there.
How Lavolpiana Helps Beat an Aggressive High Press.
When you are facing aggressive high press, one of the best things you can do is try and remove as many opponent players from that high press as possible. That’s going to make it easier for you to possess it in the back line. And a typical example of that actually happened in a recent game between Man United and Spurs.
Now in this situation, we’ve got the Laval Piano buildup, but with Kinsky, the goalkeeper, as we mentioned, Roberto Dezerbi likes to have him sitting between the two centre backs to create that three against two. And Manchester United want to press aggressively. So rather than just allowing the front two to press against the three, they’re going to join Amad into that press so that Senesi doesn’t have space and time on the ball. Now by doing that, he’s actually creating a free player in Destiny: Udogie.
So Kinsky is going to try and find Udogie with the through ball. Now, the reason why Amad is happy jumping up is because, in theory, Leny Yoro, who’s playing deeper, should be able to arrive at Udogie comfortably enough to be able to challenge for the ball.
So Kinski is going to try and find Udogie with the through ball. Now, the reason why Amad is happy jumping up is because, in theory, Lenny Yoro, who’s playing deeper, should be able to arrive at Udogie comfortably enough to be able to challenge for the ball.
Actually, he might probably be a little bit far away, but Kinsky plays the ball in, and then what we have is a jewel between Yoro and Udogi in the air. But the problem is that now Savio is able to find that space in behind the jumping fullback, and all Udogie has to do is just pass the ball into that channel, and then Spurs are going to end up with a really nice scenario where they’re attacking. And they will be in the final third with comfortable possession. All it’s taken is two passes there, one from the goalkeeper and one from Udogie, and they’ve ended up in this scenario.
Now in this instance, that’s an example of a high press trying to go aggressive against your backline. But what’s worth noting is that from this point onwards, we start seeing Manchester United being much less aggressive in their press, which gives Spurs a lot more time in their back line to build up. So essentially what’s happened here is you can say, Well, they’re now making sure the fullback isn’t free. Sure, but that means that Spurs have much more control in the first line of their buildup.
So the ability of creating these back threes situationally with wide centre backs means that you can actually control the opposition press a lot better. They have to take the gamble. Do we jump up with our wide player onto the centre back and potentially leave the fullback free or create the free winger as we saw in the sequence before? Or are we going to be more conservative and just allow them the ability to possess the ball deeper in the field? So we’re starting to see those ideas creep in as well.
So I just wanted to end on this one because I think it’s a really nice example of how tactical evolution always happens in a messy way. It’s never clean. It would be nice for us to be able to say, ‘Everyone’s doing this now, and they were doing that before.’ It’s never the way. There are always bits of the old ideas and bits of the new ideas, and the really great coaches are the ones who can find ways of bringing them both together and getting the advantages of them both.
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