All posts tagged: football tactics

how Rudi Garcia rebuilt Belgium

how Rudi Garcia rebuilt Belgium

Published by Webster

Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsí had yet to kick a ball. Gavi and Nico Williams had only just joined their local academies. Captain Rodri was on the verge of being released by Atlético Madrid’s youth setup for lacking the necessary physicality. None of Spain’s 26-member World Cup squad had made a professional appearance when Rudi Garcia won his last trophy, the 2010/11 Ligue 1, and can be forgiven for knowing little of Belgium’s manager. The Belgians didn’t know much, either. They do now. The resentment at his appointment in January 2025 was not baseless. He has won only two titles in over two decades as a manager. His immediate predecessor was Domenico Tedesco: young, new ideas, and the only coach to win the DFB-Pokal with RB Leipzig. Tedesco sold dreams, and then delivered nightmares. Amid rifts and disagreements, Belgium imploded early. Before him was Roberto Martinez. He was entrusted with a cohort of talent ranked first in the world, the famed ‘Golden generation’ that promised exactly what its name implied. Gold. Bronze was the closest …

How Lionel Scaloni built an Argentina side that can thrive without Lionel Messi

How Lionel Scaloni built an Argentina side that can thrive without Lionel Messi

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The perfect 45 minutes. And it came with the best player in the world sitting on the bench. Argentina unleashed the full scope of their powers against current Asian Cup finalists Jordan – sitting nine of their starting eleven, including an ageless, six-goals-and-counting Lionel Messi – and still provided a distilled Argentine footballing experience championed by Lionel Scaloni. In ways this team is more like the last Scaloni was a part of as a player and the first Messi entered into. Eerily reminiscent of the Argentina of 2006, he has fashioned a group that acts as an intense cluster of neural networks in the middle of a park, all lighting up at individual moments, each learning and moving at the whims of their peers. ALSO READ | Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe, Haaland: A golden boot race unlike any other Jose Pekerman’s 2006 Argentina had its faults. But a 52-second, 25-pass goal finished by Esteban Cambiasso, to this day, ranks as one of Argentina’s great World Cup moments. That team lost to Germany on penalties in the Round …

How Mbappe, Dembele, Doue, Olise are crushing opponents

How Mbappe, Dembele, Doue, Olise are crushing opponents

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Before the 1984 European Championship, the French manager Michel Hidalgo had a problem. He had four virtuosic playmakers, but not a centre forward. An idea was born, he made a midfield square with his gifted playmakers, helmed by the impeccable Michel Platini. It came to be known as magic square, or the Le Carre Magique, and they inspired their maiden championship triumph of note. Decades later, Hidalgo’s distant successor Didier Deschamps – whose France beat Norway 4-1 to top World Cup Group I – had a problem, too. He had a superfluity of riches that he couldn’t configure the perfect deception code. Both, Kylian Mbappe and Ousmane Dembele, were wingmen repositioned to the centre by their clubs with staggering success. But he could slot only one. He could drop Mbappe or shunt him to the left for Dembele; he could not bench Dembele, the reigning footballer of the year, either. ALSO READ | The Ousmane Dembele show: The art of minimalism and scoring goals The confusion did not end there. He had two exceptionally versatile …

The tired legs that make the greatest footballing brain work

The tired legs that make the greatest footballing brain work

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6 min readNew JerseyUpdated: Jun 23, 2026 07:35 AM IST Lionel Messi and Rodrigo de Paul are not just structural parts of the same sentence, but de Paul is the verb that makes Messi the subject moving. Messi can be watched in isolation, at walking pace, with an impermeable halo around him, a fulfilling experience in itself. But to admire Messi, the viewer should admire de Paul too. It is difficult because they are not often together, not in each other’s shadows, not indulging in one-twos or interplays, and not passing the ball to each other or assisting. But you miss de Paul, you miss part of Messi too. To watch de Paul is to watch where Messi should have been; to understand de Paul is to understand what Messi should have been doing. Messi roams, but de Paul ensures that he leaves no vacuum. He fills the space. Messi doesn’t press. He needn’t, because there is de Paul pressing for two men. Messi doesn’t run, because de Paul is running for him, covering his …

Martinez’s Cristiano Ronaldo obsession risks Portugal’s World Cup dream

Martinez’s Cristiano Ronaldo obsession risks Portugal’s World Cup dream

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4 min readUpdated: Jun 18, 2026 12:14 PM IST Curry Barker’s Obsession, the horror film that has grossed nearly $300 million from a $750,000 budget, is about a man who gets exactly what he wished for, then watches it destroy him. Roberto Martinez should book a ticket. On Wednesday night, Martinez’s insistence on keeping Cristiano Ronaldo in the starting XI, through two missed chances, 25 touches and zero shots on target, bordered less on tactical stubbornness and more on the kind of devotion that clouds judgment entirely. You cannot blame Ronaldo for wanting to start every match at 41. That competitive hunger is, in its own way, admirable. But the manager’s job is to see the player clearly. Martinez does not seem capable of doing that with Ronaldo. ALSO READ | Cristiano Ronaldo at 41: the ball has fallen out of love with him “I’ve worked with many geniuses, but I’ve never seen anyone like Cristiano Ronaldo,” he said last year. “His hunger to win is unbelievable. Every morning is a new opportunity for him to …

A bit of Pep Guardiola in every English football game, from Premiership to Sunday leagues

A bit of Pep Guardiola in every English football game, from Premiership to Sunday leagues

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Ten years is too short to be called an era, but Pep Guardiola’s decade with English football is an era unto its own. Ten years of stacking trophies, of varied sizes, shapes and values; ten years of building an identity and heritage for a club that had languished in the shadows of the more historic institution in the neighbourhood, and ten years of refashioning the ideals and values, methods and style of the English game. He would be immortalised as the greatest Manchester City manager, as one of the greatest of the league, but his biggest legacy is that he changed the footballing mentality of a stubborn nation that claims to have discovered the game. He found the league in English and left it Guardiola-esque. Precisely for this reason, his time in England can’t be fully quantified. To call him a supreme tactician would be to limit his aura to the numerous innovations and inventions he produced with various iterations of City; to belittle the supreme man-manager he was, in how he coaxed his men …

His tactics take time to bear fruit, have Spurs taken too big a risk?

His tactics take time to bear fruit, have Spurs taken too big a risk?

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On Tuesday, in their third managerial change of the season, Tottenham Hotspur hired manager Roberto De Zerbi to lead them out of their dire situation; 17th in the league and winless in 2026. De Zerbi’s previous romp in the Premier League was a successful stint at Brighton and Hove Albion, which he left in 2024 on the back of disagreements with the board. His exit at Marseille in February followed a similar pattern, as some sources said the relationship between him and his players completely broke down. This then raises the question of why Tottenham decided to offer the Italian a five-year contract, when he has not stayed at any club for more than 3 years. Desperation certainly plays a part and one can only assume that De Zerbi had all the power during negotiations. The Guardian reported that the club were interested in De Zerbi after sacking Thomas Frank, but the Italian was not keen on taking over mid-season, preferring to wait until the summer. But Tottenham have slumped further since then under interim …

India vs Maldives: Sunil Chhetri returns with crunch Bangladesh Asian Cup qualifier looming | Football News

India vs Maldives: Sunil Chhetri returns with crunch Bangladesh Asian Cup qualifier looming | Football News

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“It doesn’t matter if a player is 20, 40 or my grandfather at 87.” Ahead of a friendly tune up against Maldives, Indian head coach Manolo Marquez couldn’t have made it any more clear where he stood on the international retirement u-turn of Sunil Chhetri. The striker, who is enjoying an unprecedented windfall this late in his career (12 goals in 23 ISL appearances this season) comes back for India and Marquez at a time when the age old Indian football conundrum rears its quarterly head – where will the goals come from and who scores them? Chhetri is the easy fix to that answer, even though, statistically, it wasn’t like India were drowning in goals or chances created when the 40-year-old was the striker general of the team, especially in the last few years of his international reign. But as has been a regular feature of the national football team, a hopeful solution is often the only solution. For Marquez, bringing Chhetri back, even if it means bringing him on as a substitute, is …

‘Sometimes he needs to trust his teammates’: Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim on Bruno Fernandes | Football News

‘Sometimes he needs to trust his teammates’: Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim on Bruno Fernandes | Football News

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Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim lauded captain Bruno Fernandes after the Portuguese midfielder netted a hattrick against Real Sociedad to propel the club to the last 8 of the Europa League. However, Amorim also said that Bruno needed to trust his teammates a little bit more on the field. “When we need it, (Fernandes) is always there,” Amorim said. “He can bring the ball forward. He can score goals. He is a perfect captain for our team and we need to help him win titles.” “We know that sometimes he is frustrated. We know he wants to win so badly and when things are not going well, he is changing position and going after the ball. Sometimes he needs to trust his teammates,” he added. Story continues below this ad United, who drew the first leg against Sociedad last week, went a goal down after 10 minutes when Matthijs de Ligt fouled Mikel Oyarzabal and Oyarzabal converted from the spot. However, the hosts levelled six minutes later with a penalty scored by Fernandes after Igor …

Focus is to change his mind: Ruben Amorim on Manchester United co-owner’s recent criticism of select players | Football News

Focus is to change his mind: Ruben Amorim on Manchester United co-owner’s recent criticism of select players | Football News

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Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim said that the team will be focusing on changing the mind of co-owner Jim Ratcliffe who in a recent interview had criticized some players of the current squad, saying they were not good enough and were overpaid. “If we’re being honest, in this moment everybody — me, all the players — we are underperforming this season. We can always change that, so I include myself in that part of ‘underperforming’,” Amorim told reporters. “You are talking about players like Casemiro, for example, that won everything (with Real Madrid) and we know that these kind of players can play so much better. So that is the focus and he was honest on that. The focus is to change his mind and to change all the people’s minds,” he added. Story continues below this ad Ratcliffe, however, had showered Amorim with praise saying that the Portuguese was “outstanding young manager” who would be at the club for a long time. “It’s a little bit the character, we are quite similar. I always …