FC Barcelona: Possession isn’t everything

Yet here we are, Rodgers at Liverpool amongst talk of ‘the project’ and ‘passing the ball along the ground’ as if 10 yard passes were discovered in 2011; Guardiola at Bayern Munich, themselves having reached the top of the mountain and now looking to do it all over again but this time like Barca; and all over the premiership teams delude themselves into thinking their poor results don’t matter because they had the lion’s share of possession.

Pep Guardiola has taken the passing game to Bayern Munich

What began as an interesting counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of pace, width, and dynamism is in danger of becoming staid routine, as teams press vigorously high up the pitch only to recede with the ball safely when it is in their own possession. Matches begin to get bogged down in formality and lack of creation instead of the usual to-and-froing of British 0-0s.

And always that percentage stat, flashed on screen as an indicator for who is actually ‘winning’, when it would be far more useful to see how many headers Stoke are contesting, how many runs Chelsea are making, or how many forward passes Arsenal are playing.

There’s a danger here, somewhere. In the Premiership particularly, where crowd noise rises and falls with every dangerous cross, crunching tackle, and goalmouth scramble – it will be hard to support your team when they actively try to avoid all of the above.

The conflation of possession with effectiveness may prove to be a downturn for the sport. Just as fast courts made tennis matches repetitive exercises in serving aces, two opponents whose primary concern is not losing the ball may make for the dullest football since Catenaccio was the Italian default.

Even when it works, there is something inhumane and cruel about possession football. Like bullies tossing the spotty kid’s satchel around the classroom, or an animal toying with his dead prey as an entree. It is four-parts personality to one-part purpose.

Commentators may talk of ‘tiring’ them out, but the fatigue is mental – to play keep-ball is to humiliate the opposition into submission. Likewise you must succumb to darkness yourself, as the indulgent joy of trying to go on a mazy run between defenders, or loft a 50 yard ball into a striker’s path, is not allowed – it’s too risky, and the price of possession is individual expression.

Incidentally, it was possibly Mourinho’s greatest trick to recognise all of this, and instead of haplessly chasing the satchel, decided to take his beats whilst being as annoying as possible. His record against Barca isn’t stellar, but he stole from them the things they now craved – respect, subjugation, and ultimately, a league title.

Possession football may struggle to take over completely, no matter how irresistible it may be to managers. It is an art that requires its own tools, and there just aren’t enough to go around. Look into the depths of lower-league football (which always betray a country’s innate footballing taste) and see how ill-suited most players are.

Serie B is littered with uncompromising defenders and old-fashioned strikers, Ligue 2 is a patchy mix of temperamental individual talents struggling to congeal, and our own League 1 is home to as many single-minded athletic Lampard-alikes as a country could ask for.

The only country which produces many of the kind of diminutive, close-control orientated, communal-minded characters that tiki-taka needs is Spain (and perhaps Chile, though they have taken a different path in recent years). While the rest of the world may get a Mata, Silva, or Cazorla here and there, La Liga has the personnel, and the style, sewn up.

Our modern, over-reaching distaste for the long-ball – no matter if it’s a meticulously-placed intended pass or a perfectly whipped cross from deep – may have trapped us into this corner of triangular passes.

Our constant search for any extremist method by which we can slightly increase our stake in this ultra-competitive era of football means we’ve assimilated the philosophy of possession football swiftly and deeply.

In a bizarre irony, the more we see our teams struggle to play it, the more it may seem like the holy grail of footballing answers, but in our dedicated narrow-mindedness, we may lose more than we gain.