The Tactics Board: How the 4-3-3 works

Formations are to football what genres are to film and television — handy for classification, but rarely the full story. 

You wouldn’t lump Peppa Pig and South Park together just because they’re both animated, just as you wouldn’t confuse a Guardiola team with a Mourinho one, even if both sometimes start with a similar shape.

But formations — when paired with knowledge of a team’s playstyle — help explain how players share space and responsibility across the pitch. And no formation carries a stronger stylistic association than the 4-3-3 — indelibly linked with ‘Total Football‘, the fluid, short-passing approach that defined Dutch football in the 1970s.

Recounting the origin story of any formation is a fraught journey through history. It’s practically impossible to pinpoint who first used a particular tactical setup. More important than lineage is influence: where has the formation made its greatest impact?

Game-by-game formation data has existed since the 2010s, but this relatively modern resource provides a revealing window into 4-3-3 setups. Below are the most frequent users of 4-3-3 since 2011-12 across the top divisions in England, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Germany, with the lingering impact of Total Football evident. Eleven of the top 20 teams come from the Eredivisie, a statistic made even more striking by the fact that six of them have spent at least one of those seasons outside the top flight, where matches are not included in the totals below.

That Dutch dominance is largely down to the club leading the way here: Ajax. In 1965, Rinus Michels took over as head coach, sparking the Total Football revolution that propelled Dutch football to the centre of the footballing universe.

Central to his 4-3-3 was the legendary maverick forward Johan Cruyff, winner of three Ballons d’Or. Cruyff was notoriously outspoken throughout his life, and rather than passively accepting Michel’s instructions, he helped shape and refine Ajax’s system.

In his autobiography My Turn, Cruyff lays out the principles behind his 4-3-3 formation. He explains that it creates “five lines” in possession: the back four, a single holding midfielder, two ‘No 8’ central midfielders, two wingers, and “one striker playing from deep or up front”. When those lines function properly, he wrote, “it will create triangles on the pitch.”

Cruyff believed this structure not only multiplied passing options but also encouraged the right kind of diagonal passes. He detested horizontal ones — they slowed play, killed progression, and when misplaced, left sides exposed to the counter. “If it goes wrong,” he warned, “you lose two players.”

Cruyff’s football was characterized by players rotating between positions in the 4-3-3, a novel idea that wreaked havoc among opponents, who struggled to track these. But this freedom operated within strict limits. Cruyff cared little about who occupied each position, but he was obsessive about his team maintaining its overall framework.

This meticulous structure underpinned another key tenet of Ajax’s system: intense pressing. They were among the first sides to popularise a ball-playing sweeper-keeper and a high defensive line. Together, those principles allowed Ajax to pin opponents in their own half and quickly win the ball back when they lost it.

“This creates a pitch of 45 metres in length and 60 metres wide, with a gap of about nine metres between the lines. Why are these distances so important? Because every gap can be covered more easily and more efficiently, and there will always be enough players behind the ball.”

If those precise distances weren’t maintained, the team would lose compactness out of possession and leave themselves open to the counter. This positional 4-3-3 approach brought Ajax three successive European Cups and continues to underpin their entire philosophy, while it also spread to their domestic rivals.

Returning to the earlier 4-3-3 chart, Barcelona are the only non-Dutch club in the top five. Michels left Ajax for Barcelona in 1971, taking his methods with him. Cruyff followed — first as a player two years later, then as a manager in 1988, where he later delivered the club’s first European Cup in 1992.

Among that team was a young Pep Guardiola, whose coaching philosophy would be steeped in Cruyff’s principles. While Guardiola has since innovated and developed his own approach, his early coaching career at Barcelona was firmly rooted in the positional 4-3-3. “Johan Cruyff painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since merely restore or improve it,” Guardiola once said.

Speaking on Monday Night Football, Thierry Henry — one of Guardiola’s star players — described his manager’s hierarchy of “play, possession, position”. He recalled a match in which he ignored the third of those principles, drifting to the opposite flank in search of chances. Personally, it paid off: Henry scored, but Guardiola would not tolerate such a disregard for the collective shape, substituting him at half-time as punishment.

While Guardiola and Cruyff’s 4-3-3s are the most revered iterations, managers of diverging outlooks have used the formation to accentuate different qualities of their team. For his long-time rival Jose Mourinho, the 4-3-3 during his first spell at Chelsea was a means of numerically dominating midfield — overpowering opponents with a physically imposing trio typically drawn from Claude Makelele, Michael Essien, Mikel John Obi, and Frank Lampard. That side relied less on intense counter-pressing, instead dropping the wingers into an almost 4-5-1 shape to stay compact.

But a later Premier League title-winning manager, Jurgen Klopp, built his 4-3-3 almost entirely around counter-pressing, using three advanced forwards to suffocate opponents high up the pitch. His swashbuckling “heavy-metal” football was built on the high-intensity pressing he had honed at Mainz and Borussia Dortmund before bringing it to Merseyside. “No playmaker in the world can be as good as a good counter-pressing,” Klopp once told Sky Sports.

His successor, Arne Slot, adjusted the shape to a 4-2-3-1, despite being schooled in the Dutch 4-3-3 traditions. The shift reflects how Dutch football has become more tactically diverse, moving away from what Cruyff called “the house style”. As shown in the graphic below, the 4-3-3 accounted for just 29 per cent of formations used in the Eredivisie last season, down from a peak of 79 per cent in 2013-14.

The 4-2-3-1 was nominally what Slot had used in his previous role at Feyenoord, but he rejected that pigeonholing when asked at his first Liverpool press conference how he would adapt to a 4-3-3. “I was hoping that if people looked at my team, they would not say it is 4-2-3-1 or it is 4-3-3 or whatever formation you want to call it. I was hoping they would say there is a lot of freedom when they have the ball to take it in different positions.” Slot then said, if pushed, he would have categorised his style as closer to 4-3-3.

During his time at Feyenoord, Slot’s teams lined up in a 4-2-3-1 around 60 per cent of the time, and a 4-3-3 the remaining 40, but this speaks to the blurring of lines between these formations. The strictly positional game championed by Guardiola no longer reigns supreme, with modern sides now morphing constantly between shapes.

Among sides that use the 4-3-3 most often, the next most common formation is typically the 4-2-3-1 and vice versa. The proximity of these formations — often just the repositioning of a single central midfielder — makes them harder to distinguish, especially in today’s faster, more transitional game.

Cruyff was steadfast in the formation’s primacy. “Anyone with the guts to use 4-3-3 in the right way will be rewarded in the end as long as the right players are chosen for the system,” he wrote in My Turn. On a surface reading, the 4-3-3 appears to be football’s most successful formula: since 2011-12, teams using it have won 42.8 per cent of their matches — the highest share among the ten most common formations.

But that success owes more to the calibre of teams deploying it — Barcelona, Liverpool, Manchester City — than to any intrinsic winning power in the shape itself. In that spirit, Paris Saint-Germain romped to Champions League glory using a 4-3-3, though their pass maps from last season show a shape far removed from its traditional conception, with full-back Achraf Hakimi often acting as a fourth midfielder.

But like Cruyff’s sides of old, PSG dazzled with the same slick combination play and dizzying rotations that define the 4-3-3’s essence. It may no longer sit along neat, easily defined fault lines, but the 4-3-3 is still the underlying framework for some of football’s most breathtaking, expressive play.