How Important Is Possession?

Tactics change all the time in football, and especially during major international tournaments like a World Cup, European Cup or Copa America; club championships like the UEFA Champions League also heighten tactical advances as the stakes become greater.

One recent trend that has been witnessed has been the disappearance of the '#10', the creative attacking maestro who plays in a free role. Because of the demands placed in the middle of the field, most teams tend to deploy more two-way players in those roles, using more free creative players out on the flanks, where there is more space.

Jose Mourinho's game plan and implementation in their defeat of Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League semifinals could prove to be one of our next tactical advances, and as Jonathan Wilson of the Guardian asks, "How Important is Possession?"

When a rigid W-M seemed dominant, fluid 4-2-4 rose up to overcome it. As catenaccio threatened to strangle the game, along came Total Football. As Johan Cruyff was accusing 3-5-2 as being "the death of football" because it killed the winger, single-striker systems emerged to reintroduce them. Football constantly evolves, and watching Internazionale frustrate Barcelona two weeks ago, it was hard not to wonder whether tactical historians of the future will look back on that game as a turning point as significant as, say, Hungary's 6-3 win over England in 1953, Celtic's 2-1 win over Inter in the 1967 European Cup final or Italy's 3-2 victory over Brazil at the 1982 World Cup.

It rather depends, of course, on what happens next as to whether this is confirmation of a trend or a blip, but what Inter's victory has done is to challenge the assumption that the "best" way to play is to maintain possession and pass a side to death – as Barça have, as Spain do and as, in a slightly less aesthetically pleasing way, Brazil do.

José Mourinho's claim that his side deliberately gave the ball away so as not to lose focus may have been exaggeration for the sake of bravado but, whether purposeful or not, to prosper having had so little of the ball seems almost the definition of anti-football. (Earlier this season, a frustrated Arsène Wenger asked how his side were supposed to play properly when other teams persisted in playing anti-football against him, and raised the thought of the former Estudiantes coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, an evangelist for "anti-fútbol", storming into a press conference in La Plata demanding to know how his side were supposed to spoil and break the game up when the opposition persisted in playing "fútbol" against them, passing and dribbling, having shots and generally disrupting his team's game plan.) At the very least, Inter's success must make football ask whether possession is really all that important.

General application

Perhaps, though, this was a special case. Inter proved themselves a team with great tactical discipline – as they had in holding Fiorentina when down to nine men earlier in the season – and they were playing a side who pose a special set of problems in a game in which they knew narrow defeat would be enough.

Opta statistics, produced in conjunction with Castrol, show that over the past two seasons in the Premier League in only around a third of games did one side have 60% of possession or more, and when they did they won 52% of the time, and lost 25%. If a side had 70% possession or over (which happened in 4.7% of games), they won 67% of the time and lost 17%. Only once in the past two seasons did one side have over 80 per cent possession – Liverpool, in their 3-2 win at Bolton last August.

In the closer games, having 50-59.9% possession meant a side won 43% of the time and lost 31%. So there is a clear correlation between dominating possession and winning matches. Intuitively, we know that there are sides who are successful at counter-attacking, which logically means accepting a lower percentage of possession.

What Inter showed last week, is that there are specific cases in which a radical disregard for possession can succeed. At Milan, Arrigo Sacchi got fed up of players moaning about his obsession with team shape, and so proved its worth with a simple drill. "I convinced [Ruud] Gullit and [Marco] Van Basten by telling them that five organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones," he said. "And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, [Mauro] Tassotti, [Paolo] Maldini, [Alesandro] Costacurta and [Franco] Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, [Frank] Rijkaard, [Pietro Paolo] Virdis, [Alberigo] Evani, [Carlo] Ancelotti, [Angelo] Colombo, [Roberto] Donadoni, [Christian] Lantignotti and [Graziano] Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once."

There are times when possession matters less than organisation.