The strange exile of tiki-taka

Even Pep Guardiola doesn’t want to be associated with tiki-taka any more. “I loathe all that passing for the sake of it, all that tiki-taka,” he said to Martí Perarnau in Pep Confidential, published in October. “It’s so much rubbish and has no purpose. You have to pass the ball with a clear intention, with the aim of making it into the opposition’s goal. It’s not about passing for the sake of it.

“Don’t believe what people say. Barça didn’t do tiki-taka! It’s completely made up! Don’t believe a word of it! In all team sports, the secret is to overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defence to cope. You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’ve done all that, we attack and score from the other side.

“That’s why you have to pass the ball, but only if you’re doing it with a clear intention. It’s only to overload the opponent, to draw them in and then to hit them with the sucker punch. That’s what our game needs to be. Nothing to do with tiki-taka.”

The problem is one of terminology more than anything else. The term tiki-taka was seemingly coined by Javier Clemente as a term of abuse for what he saw as the needless pretty-pretty passing of Barcelona when set against the more robust virtues of his Athletic Bilbao, and it’s that sense that Guardiola is rejecting. But if we don’t use the term for the way that Barcelona played under him, there is still the need for a word to describe his philosophy of extreme possession and extreme pressing that he has since taken to Bayern Munich.

After Bayern’s defeat to a counterattacking Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final in April (following Barcelona’s defeat to a counterattacking Bayern the season before) there were critics queuing up to pronounce tiki-taka dead. Those calls were echoed after Spain’s group-stage exit in the World Cup as though, when a side grows old, its philosophy falls into senescence alongside it.

Yet Guardiola, whatever he wants to call it, is still playing that style at Bayern, remodelled and revised for he is always evolving, always pushing the limits of what is possible, always redeploying his players to take the greatest possible tactical advantage. That’s what makes him so fascinating as a coach, what lays him open to the charge of overcomplicating the game, and what has brought him four league titles, two Champions Leagues, three domestic cups and three Club World Cups in five years. With Bayern light years clear in the Bundesliga, that will inevitably become five league titles in May, which is a strange kind of death.

Counters and counter-counters

The evidence of those semi-finals in May, though, suggested that the age of radical possession football as the absolute dominant form has passed. The examples of Inter against Barcelona in 2010 and Chelsea against both Barcelona and Bayern in 2012 has encouraged sides in the practice of radical non-possession. Reactive football, they showed, could – with organisation, discipline application and a little luck – overcome proactivity. Real Madrid’s performance in the semi-final this year, like Bayern’s last year were not so defensive as Inter’s and Chelsea’s but they were born of the same belief that an opponent could be allowed the ball and still held at arm’s length.

That suggests the value of counterattacking football, and yet counterattacking is also central to the press-and-possess style that we’re not allowed to call tiki-taka any more. Uefa’s statistics on this are revealing. Counterattacks accounted for 23% of all goals from open play in the Champions League last season, but that was down from 27% in 2012-13, itself down from 40% in 2005-06. Counterattacks are becoming less valuable as an attacking tool, largely because of the rise of gegenpressing – that is, pressing deliberately aimed at countering the counter.

According to Albert Capellas, now the assistant manager of Brondby but once part of Guardiola’s backroom staff at Barcelona, at Barça the player who lost possession would seek immediately to regain it, backed up by two or three others a few yards back. The reasoning was not just that attacks are best stopped before they have begun, but that an opponent is vulnerable in that first moment after regaining possession: he might be off-balance, he would probably have just undergone a sharp expenditure of energy and his focus would have been transferred away from the pitch to the ball, meaning he was likely, for a brief time, to be unaware of his passing options.

Guardiola has carried that to Bayern, but the theory is well-established in the Bundesliga, where Borussia Dortmund were for a long time the pioneers and where gegenpressing is practised to a higher level probably than anywhere else in the world (there’s no coincidence the word is German). The art really lies in positioning: players must play close enough together to be able to press as a unit, but far enough apart that their passing moves when in possession don’t become congested. Players must also know when to stop pressing, when to fall back and return to a reactive defensive structure.

The new galacticos

After thesis (radical possession) and antithesis (radical non-possession) comes synthesis. Both Barcelona and Real Madrid have adopted less extreme positions this season, Barça’s investment in celebrity forwards inevitably making their play more orthodox. Madrid, meanwhile, while not revolutionary in a tactical sense under Carlo Ancelotti, are the model of a modern super-club, packed with stars, hard-working and intelligent in their pressing and bristling with muscle and energy in forward areas. They have the wherewithal to beat teams in numerous different ways. Guardiola, in that sense, represents theory, forever inventing new shapes and formulae in his quest for the absolute, while Ancelotti is the pragmatist, taking great players and making them win games.

• Part one of the tactical review of the year: back threes and diamond midfields