Part 1: The Best Floor Raising Coaches in Football
Why Big Sam is one of the best in the business.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on floor raising and ceiling raising in football coaching.
Part 1 and Part 3 are for paid subscribers only. Part 2 will be free.
INTRO: June 9 (FREE)
PART 1 — Floor Raising: June 9 (PAID)
PART 2 — Ceiling Raising: June 10 (FREE)
PART 3 — Best of Both Worlds: June 11 (PAID)
Defensive Floor Raising
Coaches managing teams expected to finish at the bottom of the league don’t have much to work with, often overseeing a squad full of second division-caliber players, washed up veterans, or promising but raw youth. Most of the time, they serve organizations whose ambitions encompass nothing except survival.
These clubs need coaches who can build a collective out of a very uninspiring set of parts. It doesn’t have to be pretty — it just needs to be effective.
Enter:
Sam Allardyce made his name in the present consciousness by becoming a godsend for struggling clubs who needed to turn the ship around and/or avoid relegation.
His modern legend started with Sunderland in 2015 and continued at Crystal Palace and Everton before West Brom proved too much even for Big Sam.
There’s no saving historically bad:
In the Premier League era, no club with fewer than eight points after 14 games have stayed up. This was West Brom's 14th game. They have seven points, three from safety but with a worse goal difference.
Allardyce accomplished these impressive feats by returning to the basics. He coached for the talent he had — not for who he wished he had.
In a 2017 interview with Sky Sports, he shared his ‘Premier League Survival Blueprint,’ which consisted of seven principles:
Keep clean sheets
Don’t lose possession in your own half
Play the first pass forward
Win second balls
Prioritize offensive and defensive set-pieces
Exploit opposition weaknesses
Have quality in the final third
The first two principles emphasize improving defensive solidity — the simplest way (conceptually, at least) to improve a team’s floor. If you don’t concede, you will gain one point at minimum. There’s only so high (ceiling) you can go with no offense and all defense, but reaching exceptional heights isn’t something a relegation-threatened team is particularly concerned with.
Sam achieved his clean sheet aim by setting his sides up in compact low blocks, getting everyone behind the ball in order to compress the most dangerous areas closer to goal. If the opposition was to find the back of the net, they would need to wade their way through ten to eleven tightly packed individuals who moved as a unit to shut down space.
Once the ball was won, principle two came into play. Passing out from the back may be increasingly in vogue but it carries risk, and Big Sam is all about reducing risk even if it simultaneously reduces reward. In an age where counterpressing is becoming more and more of a thing, clearing the ball prevents the possibility of any dangerous turnovers and allows you to reorganize defensively in time for the next attack.
Of course, Allardyce would prefer not to lose possession pointlessly, which is why principles three and four are important. He sought to capitalize on his risk-mitigation long ball scheme by aiming passes at a big target man who was quickly supported to win second balls.
The simplicity of these tactics have been ruthlessly criticized by fans (even those of the teams Allardyce has managed) and coaches alike. Mourinho once called it “football from the 19th century.” Oh, don’t we just love irony.
The hyper-focus on his style unfortunately undersells the revolutionary nature of his career; he was a trailblazer for the use of data analytics, specialized backroom staff, and opposition scouting (principle 6). He’s also a set-piece wizard (principle 5), regularly concocting routines that keep his offenses above water and balance out his unimaginative open play tactics.
Regardless of the aesthetic debate, Allardyce’s effectiveness is apparent. For example, he immediately picked up five clean sheets and went unbeaten in his first seven games as Everton manager.
Perhaps that’s why Pep Guardiola once called him a “genius.”
Big Sam’s success revolves around simplifying the decision-making process for players who don’t really have the skill to be wondering what type of pass should be used to evade Sergio Busquets’ counterpressing action. All they need to do is defend deep, boot it long, fight like hell to win that second ball, and blaze upfield for an attempt on goal or to win a set-piece.
But can this style ever scale up to sides that want to win things?
Diego Simeone’s time at Atlético Madrid provides one of the most interesting case-studies on how much lift excellent defensive tactics can provide an ambitious, title-seeking club.
His impact after arriving in late December of the 2011/12 season was dramatic. Los Colchoneros won the Europa League in his inaugural stint and then proceeded to claim the Copa del Rey off the back of a third-placed league finish in the following campaign.
2013/14 saw the greatest season in Atleti’s modern history: a league title and a Champions League final appearance. The latter accomplishment would be replicated another time in 2016 and the Mattress Makers have proven to be a threat to go deep into the competition in most seasons that Simeone has been manager.
In 2020/21, Simeone won his second league trophy.
Similar to Sam, there are some misconceptions about who Diego is as a coach and the strategies he employs. It’s easy to say that Simeone merely copied Catenaccio and is, in fact, a more charismatic version of Allardyce.
It is true that the heart of much of Atleti’s success revolves around their organization in deeper defensive phases.
Atlético have been uncannily good over the years at shutting off complete access to the center, ushering passes into seemingly open space out wide. Once they’ve guided the opposition there, Atleti’s lines shift over, looking to trap play on the wing. They simultaneously look to protect against the switch of play by having the far side winger stagger their positioning between the lines or by dropping into the back line completely (in the case of a back five, which they used for a lot of the 20/21 season, the far side wing-back might hedge upwards).
Simeone requires a high work-rate from his attackers in these situations, asking them to use their positioning and pressing to cut off short options back into the middle and complete the net cast across the wing.
That’s just the general idea. His defensive game plans are often fine-tuned to the opposition and possess a variability that is severely underrated. It may not always happen, but Atleti are more than comfortable pressing and counterpressing high, adding a modern element to his defensive tactics that make him anything but a Catenaccio-copycat or Allardyce regen.
Put simply, Simeone is quite possibly the most complete defensive coach of all time. The complexity of his schemes, especially from a pressing perspective, stand in stark contrast to the simplicity desired by Allardyce. Simeone does have better and more intelligent footballers to help him realize all this variety; however, the intricacy is largely structured and player decisions have been largely pre-determined — it’s a question of execution and situational recognition.
To achieve this, Simeone requires total buy-in from everyone involved. No one gets to skim defensive duties and every single player is expected to commit to learning their roles and to perform them with the utmost intensity. Marcos Llorente likened Atlético’s training sessions to a “war.”
This, unsurprisingly, creates a very specific profile for Simeoneball — one that doesn’t make much room for breathtaking attackers who aren’t willing to put in a shift against the ball.
And what of teams that try to out-Simeone Atleti? This has been the major question following the Argentinian ever since weaker sides began to see and treat the Colchoneros as one of the Big Boys. When asked to dominate vs. increasingly organized and modern low blocks, Simeone has been found lacking and a heavy offensive burden tends to fall on a few of his attackers, who have to do a lot of heavy lifting to keep the goals flowing, like was the case with ceiling raiser Antoine Griezmann.
Atlético entered a period of stagnation and slow decline post-2016/17, culminating in a 2019/20 league campaign that saw them pick up only 70 points — the worst total in Diego Simeone’s tenure as head coach of his beloved club (ignoring 2011/12, where he took over halfway).
It’s also worth noting the moments in which Atleti picked up their league titles. 2013/14 was a period of relatively average xG overperformance for Barcelona’s Lionel Messi under a coach who didn’t work out. Real Madrid were the favorites but collapsed near the end thanks to injuries to Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale, causing them to drop seven out of the available twelve points in the last four games of the season.
2020/21 bore witness to some of the weakest Real Madrid and Barcelona sides since 2007/08, culminating in a league race that made an 86-point total sufficient to claim the crown.
Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid have never reached more than 90 points in 38 games (this pales in comparison to the 100-point seasons achieved by Real Madrid and Barcelona in 11/12 and 12/13, respectively), averaging close to 81 points per season since 13/14.
In essence, Simeone kept Atlético Madrid somewhere in the upper echelons of the league table and then took advantage when his rivals were weak or underperforming. This isn’t a knock on what he’s done as much as it is a cold observation. Simeone has taken Atlético as high as they can go, which is only good enough to win when the two titans of Spain stumble.
Within the context of Atleti’s relative lack of resources and institutional draw, this is probably the best that they can hope for, making Simeone the perfect fit for a club forever on the periphery of greatness. But how would Diego’s intense, uncompromising defensive style translate to the crème de la crème? Would superstars bend to his will and would his struggles to play on the front foot hurt him if he tried to adapt to more offensively-gifted personnel?¹
As admirable as his floor raising efforts have been and continue to be, there appears to be a certain ceiling for any Simeone side — a ceiling that lies just below the results of the truly all-time teams in the modern game.
Automatism-Based Floor Raising
So far, all the focus has been on what teams do without the ball, implying that there’s a natural correlation between possession and attacking tactics and ceiling raising. There is a certain logic to that.
Better and better sides tend to have more of the ball as coaches of worse teams attempt to floor raise by shelling into deep blocks. Additionally, volume scoring creates a very high ceiling for performance — netting three to four goals reduces the variance of a low event sport and pretty much guarantees wins.
Nevertheless, the reality of what makes floor raising or ceiling raising is far less simplistic once you dig into the type of attacking tactics being discussed and how that pairs with overall management style.
Remember what I said earlier about Big Sam being realistic and not expecting his teams to play like peak Barça? Well, tell that to Marcelo Bielsa.
A cult-favorite among cult-favorites and the first person a tactics nerd will cite to show off their ball knowledge, Bielsa is famed and beloved for his very particular view of the game. No matter the pedigree of the club or players at his disposal, Marcelo has an intense desire to possess the ball, play out from the back, and dominate.
One would think that a positional play style akin to what Pep Guardiola has used at powerhouses like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Manchester City would be impossible to implement with lesser talent and, yet, Bielsa promoted Leeds United from the Championship and guided his side to a 9th-placed finish in the Premier League — a mere two points off of Arsenal.
The incisive, flowing passing moves that have captured the imagination of purists and hipsters are made possible by Bielsa’s incredible commitment to detail and his obsession with tactical instruction. Leeds midfielder Mateusz Klich admitted as much in a 2019 interview with the Yorkshire Evening Post:
We don’t play games, it is tactics, tactics, tactics, and fitness. Pre-season was so hard, so much running, so much work in the gym and then tactical shape every afternoon.
We were exhausted. I was so tired. Yeah, some of the lads, they grumbled, it happens, but we respected him and we quickly understood what he was trying to do.
He is very strict, it is like being in the military. We go to the gym every day, before training, then we go out on the pitch. Every single meal, whether it is breakfast, lunch or dinner, is together as a team.
It’s interesting to see how similar this sounds to Llorente’s comments about Simeone’s training sessions. Bielsa manages the complexity of his attacking approach like Simeone does with his defense — by pre-determining the sets of decisions his players can make. In Bielsa’s case, this happens by relentlessly drilling possession patterns and rigorously coaching body shape so as to improve the level of each individual and the collective.
The decision-making on the field, then, is limited to situational recognition like with Simeone’s defensive structures. Players look for particular cues and movements to spark heavily practiced passing sequences and positional rotations, creating a very fluid look that appears to resemble the sheer chaos of a mad genius but is, in fact, reflective of careful organization by an obsessive perfectionist.
Bielsa complements his offensive style with notorious man-to-man pressing. It is unclear exactly why he is so committed to this, especially when it is obviously exploitable by opponents with highly skilled 1v1 players, but there is an argument for its simplicity (an interesting contrast to his complex ball-playing tactics) and its utility vs. worse teams, which is where a side like Leeds is most likely to gain points, anyway.
Bielsa’s preternatural grasp of tactical abstracts and specific footballing ideology has had a major influence on a number of the world’s great managers, though it is interesting that almost all have veered into more flexible tactical territory and have rarely sought to copy his man-marking approach.
The truth is that Bielsa is unique — both in terms of his footballing theories and personality. He doesn’t compromise — you have to accept all of him or none of him — as demonstrated by a series of bizarre stints at Marseille, Lazio, and Lille, where he clashed with upper management and was soon gone. The Lazio case is rather jaw-dropping, quitting just two days after signing because he didn’t get the transfers he wanted:
Bielsa: It was agreed as essential to the implementation of the work program that we would sign at least four footballers before July 5, with the objective that they would be able to participate in pre-season.
For my style of work we needed to have these players arrive in a timely manner to train.
It’s safe to say that we’ll never see Bielsa managing a Neymar at PSG, and I’m not sure that he’d have it any other way.
This is where Antonio Conte becomes particularly useful when trying to assess how a circuit-based tactical system and controlling personality works at top sides who have title aspirations.
His league record at Juventus, Chelsea, and Inter Milan speaks for itself. When Conte gets what he wants, he delivers.
His highly repetitive build-up patterns create a clear logic for his teams in possession and Conte is similarly proficient a la Bielsa at improving individual talent, as evidenced by Romelu Lukaku, who has blossomed as an all-round forward after being maligned for his poor first touch in England.
Unlike Bielsa, Conte is far more conservative defensively and prefers to set up in mid-high blocks, demanding a level of defensive commitment, tracking, and positional sense similar to Simeone. This has often created a very peculiar mix between defensive-minded workhorses and a ball-playing system based on sophisticated automatisms, creating competent possession units that are admired by analysts but lack the raw sex appeal of a Bielsa build-up.
This mix of regimented offense and defense requires complete buy-in from absolutely everybody involved, as bad boy Mauro Icardi soon found out when Conte arrived at Inter.
This is not necessarily an attitude that appeals to ego-laden dressing rooms and, despite Florentino Pérez demonstrating interest in Conte, Real Madrid’s players reportedly came together to thwart his appointment.
Whether true or not, Sergio Ramos had this to say after a 5-1 defeat to Barcelona prompted the sacking of Julen Lopetegui and a potential Conte arrival three years earlier:
Respect is won, it's not imposed. We have won everything with managers that you know, and in the end, the management of the dressing room is more important than the technical knowledge of a manager.
It’s not just players that Conte won’t compromise with — it’s his bosses, too. Scroll through the rumors and statements made on the frictions Conte had with management at Juve, Chelsea, and Inter, and it all comes back to the same thing — transfers. If you don’t buy and sell exactly who he wants, he’s not interested. Everything from the tactics, to the squad make-up, to the staff has to be exactly how he wants it.
That creates obvious difficulties at big clubs who have their own set-ups and are reticent about handing full control over to a volatile figure who will probably leave in two to three years.
Hence, it is obvious through the Bielsa and Conte case-studies that temperament, adaptability, and comfort with a certain lack of control over how things are run are necessary components for ceiling raising, and that rigorous, demanding tactics might be poor fits with big egos.
However, I think there is something else beyond personality issues that could hinder the ability of automatism-based coaching to elevate the best sides. Bielsa’s and, especially, Conte’s systems hand over as much decision-making power as possible to the coaches. This is massively beneficial when managing even very good players, as demonstrated by Conte’s career, but there are inherent limits to this.
No matter how good a coach you are, it is unlikely that you can see things in dynamic situations like all-time players. By asking this kind of talent to consistently work within pre-defined sets, you are limiting a level of greatness that can only be unshackled by some level of spontaneity. At a certain point, one has to accept that Luka Modrić and Toni Kroos and Xavi and Iniesta know what’s best and when it’s ok to break the rules.
Allowing elite talent to innovate creates a level of unpredictability that can serve as an antidote to opponents who carefully scout the very obvious patterns on display in automatism-heavy frameworks. The ability to disrupt planned circuits is a problem that Maurizio Sarri ran into when coaching Chelsea and is arguably a factor that has stopped Conte from making consistent runs deep into the Champions League.
Ultimately, players are the ones who have the biggest impact on winning and, if a coach shackles them too much, they are limiting the ceiling of what can be achieved, even if it allows for the construction of a very high floor.
Nonetheless, this may be exactly what is required in certain situations, such as at Crystal Palace, Atlético Madrid, and Leeds United.
1. To his credit, Simeone did make adjustments to his possession game in 20/21 and that undoubtedly contributed to the league title, though this only seems to further indicate that some kind of tactic oriented towards optimizing ball-dominance is necessary to push performance that little bit higher. You can’t just rely on excellent defense to outperform the best at their best over large sample sizes.