How Football Actually Works Now

Here's the thing: if you've been watching soccer for the last fifteen years, you've basically been watching one guy's homework assignment get copied across the entire planet. Pep Guardiola's positional play — juego de posición if you want to sound fancy — became the default operating system for how professional teams think about the game. Everyone from your local youth academy to Champions League contenders started talking about "finding the free man," "creating numerical superiority," and dividing the pitch into zones like it was a military operation.

It worked spectacularly. Manchester City won basically everything. Barcelona under Guardiola was genuinely the most beautiful soccer many of us had ever seen. The system made sense on paper and produced results on the pitch.

While everyone in Europe was busy perfecting their triangles and occupying zones with metronomic precision, something completely different was brewing in Brazil. Something that looked, to trained European eyes, like absolute chaos. And it turns out that chaos might be the next evolution of the beautiful game.

What Positionism Actually Means (Beyond the Buzzwords)

Think about positional play like this: it's essentially architectural. The coach designs a structure, assigns everyone a room in that structure, and the players execute patterns based on where they're supposed to be. The pitch gets divided into zones. There are rules — never more than three teammates on any horizontal line, never more than two on any vertical plane. The whole thing is designed to create passing triangles, generate superiority in specific areas, and systematically dismantle the opposition's shape.

It's chess with humans. And there's genuine beauty in watching a well-drilled positional team pick apart a defense. The ball zips around in predetermined patterns, as a plane in odds96 aviator. Spaces open up because someone's moved from Zone A to Zone B at exactly the right moment. Everything feels inevitable, controlled, almost mathematical.

The criticism, though — and this is where things get philosophically interesting — is that positional play can become robotic. Players become servants of a system rather than creative problem-solvers. Remember that story about Thierry Henry getting subbed out at Barcelona for drifting from the left wing to link up with Messi on the right? He was making a creative decision, finding a relationship with his teammate that could unlock the defense. And he got yanked for it because he left his assigned zone.

That tension — between systemic perfection and individual expression — is basically the whole debate in a nutshell.

Enter Relationism: When the Inmates Run the Asylum

You probably haven't heard of Fernando Diniz. Most people outside Brazil haven't. But this unassuming coach at Fluminense has been quietly doing something that makes tactical analysts lose their minds. His teams look wrong according to everything positional play tells us about good soccer.

Players cluster together in seemingly random areas. Someone will wander from their position into completely uncharted territory. The shape shifts constantly, sometimes leaving enormous gaps that any Guardiola-trained analyst would circle in red pen and label "vulnerability." It looks like street football somehow snuck into professional competition.

But here's what Diniz understood: those clusters of players create something else entirely. They create relationships. When five players are within touching distance, suddenly the options multiply exponentially. Quick one-twos (tabelas, as they call them in Brazil), diagonal runs (escadinhas — little staircases), constant movement that emerges from the players themselves rather than being dictated from the touchline.

Jamie Hamilton, a Scottish coach who coined the term "relationism" back in 2022, puts it perfectly: in positionism, relationships emerge from positions. In relationism, positions emerge from relationships. That's not just wordplay — it's a fundamentally different way of understanding what soccer is supposed to be.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Player Freedom

Here's what makes this debate genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of coaches: relationism requires trust. Not the "I trust you to execute my plan" kind of trust, but the "I trust you to figure out what to do" kind.

In positional play, the coach does the thinking. The players execute. That's not an insult — it's the explicit philosophy. Guardiola himself has said that formations are just numbers; what matters is the coverage of the field in relation to the ball. But he decides what that coverage should look like. The genius is on the sideline.

Relationism flips that. The players become the tacticians in real-time. They read each other's body language, pick up on subtle cues, make decisions based on relationships they've developed through training and chemistry. The coach creates the conditions for this to happen, but they can't control it. They have to let go.

And letting go is terrifying when your job is on the line. This is why relationism hasn't swept through European football even though coaches are fascinated by it. One bad counter-attack, one moment where the structure collapses because everyone was clustered on one side of the pitch, and suddenly you're answering questions about why your team "looked disorganized."

The Xabi Alonso Question: Can You Have Both?

Here's where things get really exciting. Xabi Alonso at Bayer Leverkusen showed us something during their unbeaten Bundesliga season that suggests the future might not be either/or.

His teams have clear positional structure — especially in defense and the build-up phases. You can see the influence of his time under Guardiola at Bayern Munich. But watch what happens in the final third. The rigid zones loosen. Players start combining in tight spaces, finding each other through quick combinations that feel almost improvised. The wingbacks — Grimaldo and Frimpong — operate with freedom that would make a strict positionist nervous.

What Alonso seems to understand is that both paradigms have something to offer. Structure provides security. You know where your teammates are. You have rest defense built in. But creativity — genuine, surprising, beautiful creativity — often comes from those moments when players trust their relationships more than their assigned positions.

Real Madrid under Ancelotti and Zidane had this too. There was never the same architectural precision as Guardiola's teams, but there was something else: players who knew each other, who could find each other in traffic, who made decisions based on years of developing chemistry rather than zones on a whiteboard.

The Part Nobody Wants to Admit

Here's the uncomfortable reality: relationism is harder to teach and even harder to implement at the highest levels. Not because the philosophy is wrong, but because modern football has almost no patience for the development time it requires.

When you only have a few days with players between tournaments, you can't develop the intuitive understanding that makes relationism work. It's easier to give them zones and patterns — at least then everyone knows where they're supposed to be.

Youth academies are even worse. The pressure to produce "organized" players who can slot into any system creates an environment where position-first thinking gets drilled in from age 8. Kids learn where to stand before they learn how to read their teammates.

And yet, when you watch the goals that actually make people fall in love with soccer — Jack Wilshere's famous team goal against Norwich, or Neymar finally linking up with Rodrygo and Paquetá against Croatia in the 2022 World Cup — those moments are almost always relational. Players converging, combining, creating something that couldn't have been drawn on a tactics board beforehand.

Where This Actually Leaves Us

The tactical nerds want to declare a winner. Positionism vs. relationism: pick a side. But that's not really how evolution works in sports. What's actually happening is more like cross-pollination.

The smartest coaches are taking the structural security of positional play and selectively loosening the reins where creativity matters most. They're recognizing that the best players — the ones who can really hurt you — need some freedom to express themselves. They're building relationships into their tactical planning rather than treating them as something that just happens.

Is positional play "solved"? That question floated around tactical circles a couple years ago, and honestly, no — nothing in soccer ever gets fully solved. But teams have gotten better at defending against it. The predictability that makes positional play so effective for circulation and control also makes it legible to opponents. They know what's coming.

Relationism offers unpredictability. But it demands a level of individual quality and collective understanding that's genuinely rare at the highest level.

The future probably looks like Xabi Alonso's Leverkusen: positional skeletons with relational muscles. Structure where you need it, freedom where it matters. The trick is knowing when to hold the shape and when to let the players dance.