On October 19, 2013, a dapper young Pep Guardiola — he still wore a suit to work back then — marched down the sideline at the Allianz Arena to shake hands with the visiting coach.
Guardiola was still practically a visitor to the place himself, freshly arrived in Germany after a historic run at Barcelona and a year-long sabbatical to recharge and think about football. He had come to Munich that summer with an audacious plan to reshape the best team in the world, a Bayern side that had just won the treble under Jupp Heynckes.
The rapid attacks and aggressive man-marking that the Bavarians loved were on the way out, to be replaced by a careful build-up, zonal defending and a compact structure that would choke off the Bundesliga's end-to-end action and give Bayern complete control.
In some ways, Guardiola's project was a return to principles former Ajax manager Louis van Gaal had brought to Bayern a few years before, mixed with others that Johan Cruyff had imported from the same Dutch club to Barcelona, where he coached Guardiola.
The basic idea was that by paying close attention to space, movement and the geometry of the game, a team could pass circles around opponents long enough to move as a unit into the attacking half and set up a structure that would snuff out counter-attacks at the source. They would keep the ball close to the other team's goal and far away from theirs.
This idea had a name: 'juego de posicion', or positional play.
Guardiola revolutionised the roles of players such as Philipp Lahm at Bayern Munich (Photo: Pressefoto Ulmerullstein bild via Getty Images)
It would take years for Guardiola to transform Bayern into a positional side, a process lovingly documented in Marti Perarnau's Pep Confidential, one of the great football books. As soon as he had finished, Guardiola moved on to Manchester City and did it all over again in a new country.
But even though some of the principles are the same, Guardiola's City don't play quite the same way as his Bayern side, who didn't play like his Barcelona team. Positional play isn't just a system but a way of thinking about football, and the Catalan coach's ideas have evolved along with his players and circumstances.
This is the story of how his teams have evolved in four particular areas: the defensive midfielders, full-backs, wingers and strikers.
The man Guardiola went to greet that autumn day almost a decade ago was an up-and-coming German coach named Thomas Tuchel. It was the first of 10 times their teams have met.
We'll trace Guardiola's evolution through three particular games: that Bundesliga fixture with Tuchel's Mainz in 2013, a DFB-Pokal cup final against Tuchel's Borussia Dortmund in 2016, and the Champions League final between Guardiola's City and Tuchel's Chelsea in 2021.
Tuchel hasn't always approached Guardiola the same way, but his tactics in those three games were broadly similar, offering a nice backdrop to trace the latter's ever-evolving thinking about positional play.
Tonight (Tuesday), Guardiola's City will face Tuchel's Bayern at the Etihad Stadium in the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final, and we'll find out where that evolution has led.
One and a half pivots
A defensive midfielder himself, Guardiola used to claim he hated playing next to a partner. The double pivot cramped his style.
“It reduced his space on the field,” according to Perarnau, “kept him from directing the team's play like he wanted, limited how he positioned himself, and, above all, broke his fundamental principle as a player: calculating the next pass before receiving the ball.”
Two defensive midfielders in front of two centre-backs make for awkward right angles in the build-up, while a single pivot will — in theory, anyway — receive short diagonal passes on the half-turn, with a view to playing forward.
Operating alone in the riskiest spot on the pitch isn't easy. It takes anticipation, good body shape, close control, tight turns, flawless passing and, above all, the ability to read the game and make quick decisions to guide your team through the opponent's press.
When he started coaching, with the Barcelona B team, Guardiola found all of those qualities in a young academy product named Sergio Busquets. At Bayern, whose midfielders were used to a 4-2-3-1, he converted full-back Philipp Lahm to be his single pivot. City now have Rodri.
Guardiola adores players like these for their comfort working alone at the base of midfield, freeing an extra midfielder to play between the lines and creating natural passing triangles at the back. For all the theory around it, though, he's never been strict about the single pivot in practice.
Even at Barcelona, where the 4-3-3 was treated as dogma, Xavi would routinely receive the ball in the space next to Busquets. Against Tuchel's Mainz, whose striker tried to cut off access to Lahm, it was Bastian Schweinsteiger who dropped into those pockets, setting off a midfield rotation.
Rather than lining up with a defensive midfield pair, which constricts space and freedom of movement, Bayern created one with their movement. Dynamic double pivots have been a hallmark of Guardiola's style for years.
But space is dictated by the side you are facing, which means a free player on the second line won't always need to slot in next to the defensive midfielder. Against Tuchel's Dortmund, who pressed with two forwards instead of Mainz's one, Bayern rotated into wide channels and worked the ball outside-in.
Building up against Tuchel's Chelsea, whose press sealed off the middle in a narrow 5-2-3, City built up in a 3-4-3 diamond — the same shape in which Guardiola learned to play the pivot for Cruyff's Barcelona.
In all three games of our study, Guardiola's side looked on paper like they would line up with a single pivot in front of two centre-backs, but the idealised geometry of a starting formation didn't mean much. “You'll never see players in those positions,” Guardiola's mentor, Juanma Lillo, once said, “not even when they first come out on the pitch.”
The single pivot has never been some hard-and-fast rule. It signals room for flexibility, a team that moves into space instead of occupying it. Sometimes Guardiola will drop another midfielder into the second line, but lately, he's preferred to get creative with another position: his full-backs.
Full-backs (fully) back
It sounds almost quaint now, at least for a positional side, but back when Guardiola started coaching it was normal for full-backs to bomb forward out wide on the overlap.
When the winger playing ahead of them got the ball and dribbled inside towards goal, the full-back would sprint around him up the sideline, forcing the opposition's wide defender to choose whether to track the run and leave the winger free or stay squared up and risk a pass that put the overlapping full-back in behind.
You could see it in Guardiola's first season in Munich, when Bayern still had two attacking full-backs occasionally overlapping their inverted wingers.
As an attacking tactic, overlaps work. The downside to them is that players are constantly sprinting up and down the sideline and getting caught out in transition — exactly what positional play is supposed to avoid.
Almost from the start, Guardiola has explored other ways to use his full-backs.
The easiest replacement for overlaps is full-back underlaps, which start from the positional principle that wingers and wide defenders shouldn't play in the same channel. Instead of squeezing around the outside of the winger, the full-back will start in the half-space and run onto the wing from the inside out.
Underlaps not only start from a better structure than overlaps, they also create a different set of arguably more difficult problems for the opposing defence. By the end of Guardiola's three years at Bayern, in that cup final against Dortmund, his team preferred underlaps almost exclusively.
But underlaps suffer from the same basic problem as overlaps, which is that the full-backs keep finding themselves stranded all the way up the pitch when their team lose the ball. Shouldn't defenders be, you know, defending?
A slightly safer alternative is to keep a full-back posted in the half-space as an auxiliary attacking midfielder, where Oleksandr Zinchenko played for City in the Champions League final against Chelsea. Rafinha and David Alaba were already doing something similar for Bayern against Mainz in 2013.
It's a good spot from which to put balls into the box, and even though a winger can still slip behind him on the counter, a full-back who stays put instead of underlapping is at least in position to counter-press in the middle.
If the corner of the opposition box is still a little too far from home, the full-back can tuck inside on the second line instead, alongside the defensive midfielder. Guardiola was dreaming about this version of the inside full-back role before he even got to Germany a decade ago.
“The tactical evolution I'd envisaged at that time with Barca,” he told Perarnau of a scheme he hadn't actually tried yet, “consisted of using the left-back to step forward and play as a second pivot.” Players including Lahm at Bayern and Joao Cancelo at City would make Guardiola's inside full-back rotations famous, lining up as defenders and then slipping into midfield to scramble pressing schemes.
The last, most conservative place a full-back can play is in the back line as an 'elbow back', or makeshift third centre-back.
Guardiola's teams have always formed situational back threes to outnumber the opponents in the build-up or rest defence, but his preferred way to get there has evolved from dropping a defensive midfielder between the centre-backs, the way Busquets or Lahm often did, to swinging a hybrid defender in from the side, such as City's Kyle Walker. That simpler shift keeps the centre-back pair together and the pivot's unique skill set in midfield where it belongs.
This season's version of City have the most cautious full-backs — if they can even be called that anymore — of Guardiola's coaching career. One of the two typically operates as a second pivot, the other as an elbow back, neither advancing much beyond the second line. It's not uncommon for both to be natural centre-backs, playing out of position, for maximum security.
As far as Guardiola is concerned, it looks like the days of high-flying full-backs getting up the wings are done, killed off by one too many sloppy defensive transitions. Now his backs stay back and the wings are left to the wingers.
Wingers on the wings
Width has always been fundamental to positional play. In his book on tactics history, Zonal Marking: The Making Of Modern European Football, The Athletic's Michael Cox describes how Van Gaal's wingers at Ajax were “almost decoys”, holding width to create space in the middle.
“You weren't expected to get into the box and shoot — you had to stay wide, feel the chalk of the touchline under your boots,” remembered Dennis Bergkamp, possibly the only human with a soft enough touch to detect chalk. “Your job was to stretch their defence, get past your man at speed and cross the ball.”
That scheme got complicated a little bit by the rise of inverted wingers. At Bayern, Guardiola inherited two of the best in Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben — dangerous attackers who liked to cut inside onto their stronger foot and shoot instead of dribbling up the sideline to deliver a wide cross.
With wingers like that, it didn't necessarily make sense to pin them to the corners of the pitch like thumbtacks holding the team in place. They wanted to be close to the goal. “At Barca, (Lionel) Messi did the destroying down the middle of the pitch,” Guardiola told Perarnau. “At Bayern, it will be Ribery and Robben — but from the wings.”
That day against Tuchel's Mainz in 2013, he used Robben and Thomas Muller (Ribery was out injured) in roles so fluid they could barely be called positions. Sometimes Bayern's wingers received out wide, yes, but more often they drifted infield to pop into unexpected channels, combine with one another or even swap sides.
The attacking variation worked. With the wingers appearing to improvise in the middle of the pitch while the full-backs manned the wings, Bayern exploded for four goals in the second half.
But the lack of width on the front line also caused defensive problems. With no safe outlet on the wings, Guardiola's team had to rush their build-up and force risky passes before they were set up to counter-press.
In recent years, it's been rare to see a Guardiola side who didn't keep their wingers high and wide in possession. Against Dortmund's 5-3-2 in 2016, the positioning of Ribery and Douglas Costa pinned the opposing wing-backs deep and helped make room for the wide players in midfield, who returned the favour with switches of play to put the opposite winger one-on-one.
The gradual back-and-forth of Bayern's build-up meant that by the time a winger cut inside to shoot or put a ball in the box, the rest of their team-mates had caught up to help cut off any counters. Width was the key difference between playing fast and loose like the Bayern Guardiola inherited and the slow, controlled side he left behind three years later.
Guardiola's wide wingers come in different flavours. Some years at City, he used Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling as natural wingers who make sneaky diagonal runs onto through balls in the half-space — the perfect place to unleash a cutback or low ball across the six-yard box on their strong foot.
In that 2020-21 Champions League final against Chelsea, Sterling played inverted on the left, but his main threat still came from runs in behind. When City's liquid centre-forward play drew the centre-backs up, he would curl inside for dangerous balls over the top.
This season, Guardiola has come back around to the winger as an instrument of control. When City don't have the ball, Jack Grealish and Riyadh Mahrez stay wide to open space in the middle. When they get it, they take their time dribbling and circulating to make sure the team catches up to them.
City's wingers are excellent attackers in their own right, but like a young Bergkamp coming through at Ajax, their main job is positional. The goals go through one man — the guy in the middle.
Striker: true or false?
If there was one tactical innovation Guardiola was already famous for when he got to Bayern, it was the false nine.
In 2009, he shocked the world by benching Samuel Eto'o and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, two of the best strikers of their generation, to make room for a young right-winger named Lionel Messi in the middle of the attack. That worked out pretty well.
Guardiola may not have invented the concept of a mobile striker, but the way Barcelona used Messi as a fourth midfielder in the build-up was a defining trait of their possession game. When he got to Munich, the manager was already dreaming of which player — Ribery? Robben? Mario Goetze? — would fill a role he considered essential to his style of football.
The answer, as it turned out, was none of the above. As good as they were, those players couldn't match Messi's intuition for how to use his positional freedom to drag centre-backs out of position, exchange a few passes and then slip behind for a ball over the top or appear near the penalty spot just in time for a cutback.
It wasn't having a false nine that had made Guardiola's version of positional play so much more fluid and fun than, say, Van Gaal's — it was having Messi.
In that 2013 game against Mainz, Guardiola turned to Mario Mandzukic, a conventional but selfless centre-forward who didn't mind making way in central channels for Robben or Ribery to attack the goal.
The next summer, Bayern signed Robert Lewandowski, an even more traditional striker. He then became the clear focal point of Guardiola's attack, offering depth runs to keep opposing presses honest and a target in the box against the low blocks that became more common as Bayern's build-up got safer and slower.
In 2015-16, Lewandowski scored 30 goals, the most the Bundesliga had seen since Gerd Muller in the early 1970s. But as a team, Bayern's attack was fizzling. They got 94 goals in their 34 league games in Guardiola's first season, when the scoring was evenly distributed around the squad, but that was down to just 80 in year three as Lewandowski went supernova.
Moving to Manchester that summer, Guardiola tried to restore a more balanced, unpredictable attack by tweaking the false-nine concept. He still didn't have a Messi but for the last few seasons, he experimented with structures that used one or even two players dropping off the front line to overload the midfield and scramble the centre-backs, opening space behind.
That's how City attacked Chelsea in the Champions League final two years ago, with Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden riffing off each other in the middle to open spaces for the other to run into.
In some ways, the double false nine was a dream come true for Guardiola, who once said he'd like to play with 1,000 midfielders. City's shapeshifting attack was virtually impossible to plan for, and the extra bodies in the build-up gave them maximum control.
But when it came to actually putting the ball in the net — well, it's not like last season's 99 Premier League goals were a bad haul, but Guardiola still seemed haunted by his team's failure to score a winning goal in the Champions League.
Enter Erling Haaland.
It's no secret which end of the false-to-true-nine spectrum Guardiola is on at the moment. More than any striker he's ever used, Haaland is a pure goalscorer who does almost nothing else on the ball.
Like Guardiola's positional wingers who stretch the defence from sideline to sideline, Haaland's job is to stretch it vertically, pinning the opposing centre-backs to open space for two attacking midfielders between the lines.
And, oh yeah, he also scores a lot.
It's up for debate how successful Guardiola's return to a pure centre-forward has been. Like Lewandowski in his Bayern side, Haaland hoovers up everyone else's goals, setting scoring records while the team as a whole are on pace to score slightly less than they did last season.
The less flexible 10-man build-up can't circulate in the attacking half like it used to, which causes problems for the rest-defence structures and defensive transitions that are the main purpose of positional play. This season's City are on pace to concede the second-most goals of any side Guardiola has managed.
Still, if Haaland can crack Tuchel's Bayern defence over these two legs and go on to lead City to a Champions League title at last, Guardiola — a thoughtful pragmatist often miscast as an idealist — won't mind compromising some principles.
If there has been one constant in his coaching career, it's change.