Manchester City kicked-off their 2024-2025 English Premier League season with two wins against Chelsea and Ipswich Town, earning six points out of six with a +5 goal difference. Pep Guardiola faced two teams with different targets, levels of quality and game models. However, a lot of similarities were noticed within the Citizens Build-Up schemes, or even within their two opponents’ Pressing/Blocks. There were some tweaks and variations too, let’s take a closer look.
During the first game, Man City relied on a Build-up shape of (3+GK-1-5-1), with a trio of 10’s (Lewis, Bernardo Silva and De Bruyne), quite distant from each other to occupy the maximum possible width of the pitch, against a hybrid Man-Oriented (1-4-4-2/1-4-3-1-2) high pressing shape from Chelsea. Using Ederson as a second centre-back, Manchester City’s first line could be easily stretched wide to widen the distance covered by Chelsea’s front two (Jackson and Enzo Fernandes), who were alternating pressure on the ball holding centre-back and Kovacic, the sole pivot.
In addition, Manchester City three 10’s always granted numerical superiority against Chelsea’s double pivots, or at least numerical equity with positional, time and space advantage while their backline circulated the ball from one side to the other. For example, during the time taken by Palmer to shift across to mark De Bruyne, similarly for Caicedo and Lavia, Lewis could easily drop in wide areas or the right half-space to create 2V1 situation against Enzo/Nkunku. As it’s clear that Lavia couldn’t jump to press him aggressively to prevent leaving such a huge central gap without cover, especially none of Chelsea’s backline players could be much proactive in order to maintain their numerical superiority against their opponent’s ball progression from central areas.
In the flow of the game, Lewis, Bernardo Silva and Kevin De Bruyne were literally using the maximum width of the pitch sometimes, the huge distance that Lavia had to cover to leave Lewis for his nearest team mate and shift across to mark Bernardo Silva is very clear.
During the second half, even when Maresca used a more passive approach by his wide players (For example, Nkunku was instructed to close the passing angle from Akanji to Lewis, without pressing the Swiss defender aggressively), Pep found another solution:
It was as simple as this: Let the ball circulate from side to side, and as Caicedo (Chelsea’s ball side pivot) was ready to jump and press De Bruyne (the ball side 10), the near winger started to drop beside the Ecuadorian midfielder, drawing his attention to give De Bruyne enough time and space on the ball again.
In the second game, Manchester City’s opponents, Ipswich Town switched from back five to (1-4-3-3) shape. During their high pressing against the Citizens build-up, Ben Johnson (RWB) moved to the second line to mark De Bruyne, so the home team trio of 10’s were man marked.
In addition, Ipswich Town high pressing scheme was aiming to force the home team build-up towards the wide centre backs (Akanji/Gvardiol), in order to prevent the central/half-spaces gaps and overloads that were created against Chelsea, hence to be able to control the space in the mid-third of the pitch.
But Pep found the solution even earlier, which was quite similar to Chelsea second half scenario: Switching Doku and De Bruyne positioning; Doku starting position became from the left half-space (pinning Tuanzebe, Ipswich wide Centre Back) until coming short to draw Johnson’s attention, so that Tuanzebe found himself out of position, wide against De Bruyne, which proved problematic for Ipswich.
Such a gap behind Tuanzebe had to be covered by the nearest Ipswich defender, which provided room to Haaland’s central run leading to the Citizens third goal.
As Kieran McKenna looked to solve this issue during the rest of the first half by prioritizing delaying, regardless of time and space provided for De Bruyne on the ball, Guardiola adapted again.
Building up using two pivots was Pep’s solution as Lewis dropped next to Stones (Kovacic substitute), making it very difficult for Sam Morsy to jump and press him aggressively, leaving a huge gap behind. Lewis was able then to receive the ball as a free man facing forward using up-back combination. Moreover, moving De Bruyne to the right side was probably to prevent Johnson intervention, which served the applied variation, as Leif Davies (left-back) is much more conservative than his team-mate.
It is well noticed that Guardiola’s use of a trio of 10’s is one of his main ideas in-possession this season, we have seen something similar but using minimum width with Germany’s national team under Nagelsmann leadership during 2024 Euros; the same even was applied by Guardiola himself, during the 2023 UEFA Champions League final against Inter, relying on De Bruyne, Stones and Gundogan (who re-joined Manchester City) ahead of Rodri, which makes us think about similar tactics with some tweaks and variations in Build-up/Progression phases for the rest of the season.
You may have also noticed while watching the Premier League already this season that many other teams, such as Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham (for the second season) are using the wide 8’s/10’s to serve their different game models and playing philosophies. These are certainly topics to be discussed later…So stay tuned!
This article was written by Louai Hussain
Comments