Zlatan Ibrahimovic was always an individualist that coaches found difficult to manage. So when Barcelona announced his arrival, there was a bit of a surprise among the fans in the football fraternity. After all, how can a square peg fit in a round hole?
It doesn’t. Pep Guardiola knew that. So he tried to transform the square peg into a round one. It seemed to work, Ibra was scoring, but the Swede didn’t like it, not in the least bit. As he wrote in his autobiography, he was scoring but the fun of playing was totally sucked out by the Spanish manager.
But, it didn’t matter; he was scoring.
However, one day, Lionel Messi decided that he no longer wanted to play on the right and try his luck in the center. Now Lionel Messi was, and perhaps still is, the apple of Guardiola’s eye—and so he agreed, a decision which gave birth to the greatest false 9 in the history of the game.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic might be upset at Guardiola’s decision even now, but one little move became the source of giant waves that washed over the world of football.
Messi’s rise as false 9
Lionel Messi made his name playing on the right as an inside-forward. One could go to youtube and check out the goals he scored when he was younger. Receiving the ball deep on the right, he dribbled in and shot while cutting inside, and the ball almost always found its way into the top corners.
He was devastating before, but he became a God now.
Counting the seasons from Ibrahimovic’s departure to Luis Suarez’s arrival, Messi scored 227 in 211 games; most of them coming from a false 9 position. David Villa was signed to replace Ibrahimovic, but he was never really a replacement in the like-for-like sense.
In his 3 years at Barcelona, Villa featured on the left-wing in a lot of games. This helped the Argentine a great deal because Villa’s cunning movements dragged many a defenders out and gave Lionel Messi the space he needed.
However, his best season came when he was the only true scorer in the starting XI. David Villa injured his tibia in the Club World Championship by the end of 2011. With him out injured and only Pedro Rodriguez making sparse runs towards the goal, Leo scored a record 73 goals that season.
The word ‘sparse’ has a subtle meaning here. David Villa attacked the goal a lot more than Pedro Rodriguez did. Sometimes, with the former Valencia man making so many inward runs, it clustered the space for Lionel Messi rather than free up—something which hindered him more than we could usually interpret.
With Pedro, however, it rarely happened if not never
The Chelsea winger is not among the most talented players in the world, but what made him so dangerous—and still is his strongest asset—is his ability to know when exactly to make a run. While the striker’s instinct took over Villa and he made runs to score, even when there wasn’t much of a chance, the Canary Islander only made run when he was absolutely sure that there was enough space to be exploited.
A look at the goals compilation video of Pedro Rodriguez would instantly reveal this. When defenders were occupied with the nuisance Messi and co. were creating, Pedro, who had a great ability to go ‘invisible’, made a diagonal run from the wings out of nowhere.
Since Barca’s players’ creativity level was visionary, they almost always spotted him and fed him the ball.
The reason for this long digression from the topic is to underline the fact that Pedro always made sure Messi had the space to perform at his brilliant best. Barca might not have won the Champions League or La Liga that season, but it was Messi’s best ever in terms of goals.
Others’ imitation which failed eventually
Messi’s success gave rise to the trend of other managers playing with a false 9. For a while, it actually worked. Cesc Fabregas was perhaps the best exponent of the position after the Argentine, but he too faded away after a bright start.
There were more. Mario Gotze was tried as the false 9 by Pep Guardiola. Even the likes of Kevin Nolan and Angel di Maria (at United) were tried there at one point, but were nowhere as nearly effective as the Argentine.
What is False 9 and why the others failed
In the most laymen of terms, a false 9 is a forward given the free-role one would normally give to a playmaker. A false 9 is allowed to go to the wings and play like an inside-forward/winger or drop deep and act like a playmaker. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? But if only it was as easy as it sounds like, there wouldn’t have been so many failures in that role.
There are many requirements to play as a false 9. First and foremost, a player must be good at judging where to be and when to be as well as having lethal finishing abilities. Obviously, as the one pseudo frontman, if you can’t score, there is no point playing there. It is for this reason that players with incredible ball-control and mobility, like Angel di Maria, failed there when tried.
Creativity is another criterion. When dropping deep, the false 9 becomes a playmaker and is responsible to feed the inside-forward cutting in. Cesc Fabregas had both creativity and the ability to score, that’s why he lasted longer the others.
However, what Fabregas didn’t have—which became the reason for his downfall—was speed and methodical ball-control while dribbling. When Lionel Messi runs with the ball, it is as though the ball is stuck to his feet.
He can get out from any number of sticky situations through any number of defenders—and this is why he was just as equally effective when he shunted wide. Cesc Fabregas dropped deep to become the extra playmaker, but he rarely zoomed towards the wings and when he did, he almost always lost out the battle for possession as he isn’t nearly as good at Messi—who is?—when it comes to dribbling out of trouble.
So, in short, to be a false 9, a player needs to be a good dribbler, visionary passer, and efficient scorer—and only Lionel Messi is the only player in the world who has all these qualities combined in him.
Lionel Messi back on the right; the fall of false 9
With the signing of Luis Suarez, Lionel Messi was shifted back to the right, a move which instantly brought a treble of trophies at the club—and, as one can deduce, that is the best for Barcelona. However with Messi’s transfer to the wing, the fall of false 9 was completed.
Since the Messi revelation, many players were tried in a similar role and after a period of time, all of them failed—apart from Lionel Messi himself. He kept scoring and assisting for fun and it is by far his best position—and the reason for that is his superior dribbling, passing and finishing skills.
However, the intricacies of accommodating and making a system work with a false 9 outweigh the advantages. The fact that Barca won 2 trebles playing a pure striker in their system is a testament to the aforementioned fact.
