Part 3: The Balance Between Floor Raising & Ceiling Raising in Coaching
Why Pep Guardiola's mythos might be his most unique advantage.
This is Part 3 of a three-part series on floor raising and ceiling raising in football coaching.
Part 1 and Part 3 are for paid subscribers only. The intro and Part 2 are 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)
Part 1 and Part 2 covered coaches who sat closer to the extremes of floor and ceiling raising. For many of their specific contexts, that archetypal bias was necessary for their particular context. But, as we examined clubs with greater and greater ambitions, we saw that there was potential for circumstances to change dramatically from season-to-season, namely due to squad decline and transfer decisions.
Thriving in this environment not only requires a certain level of flexibility but the tactical skill to make up for any squad deficiencies that appear over time. It is true that rapid and dramatic change is a part of any club — big or small. However, it is much more unlikely that teams lower and lower down the rankings will experience massive differences in player quality year-upon-year, bar a few edge cases. For those at the very top, it is very easy to get 5-10% worse when you’re battling for the scarce resource that is a world class footballer.
This reality makes a coach who possesses a balance between floor raising and ceiling raising attributes very desirable for championship-caliber organizations, as they need someone who can establish a strong baseline of performance without irritating or limiting stars, which would lower the potential of what is possible.
Is the Perfect Balance Even Attainable?
In a mere 1:06 seconds, Thomas Tuchel lays out what a balance between floor and ceiling raising looks like from a tactical perspective.
If you’re too impatient to watch the whole thing, here are some key quotes:
If you just put them [the players] in and let them play by intuition, I think it’s too much for them.
It’s very important that we don’t suppress creativity — the opposite — but in your room, in your space, in that moment, where you are protected, please, find your solution.
I will never tell Neymar what to do in a certain close space because he will find a solution I’ve never dreamed about. I will never tell Kylian… why? Why should I? I will never tell Marco Verratti what to do. He will find a solution that I did not find — not even if I think about it.
Tuchel gets right at the heart of the careful game coaches need to play: how do you ensure sufficient organization so as to prevent chaos but not suppress creativity?
The answer is to build a system that leaves room for spontaneity in situations that are beneficial for the team. When Tuchel says “where you are protected,” he is probably referring to sequences when his side is set up so that that there are numbers behind the ball to deal with a giveaway. Because of this, it is now less risky for his players to find their own solutions.
The idea extends well beyond that particular scenario. For example, structuring your offense so that you can create isolation situations for a talented 1v1 dribbler is an example of a good mix between structure and freedom. It is necessary to be disciplined as a team in order to manipulate the opposition to create the 1v1, but you also need unpredictability and imagination to capitalize on that advantage.
But tactics is just one part of the whole equation and Tuchel has a track record of being unable to maintain harmonious relationships when boards make decisions he dislikes. Setting aside PSG, which just might be too messy of a situation for anybody with Leonardo Araújo around, Tuchel famously fell out with decision-makers at Dortmund and left for France in a huff.
Hans-Joachim Watzke, Dortmund’s chief executive, once called him “a difficult person” and other reports have made it clear that the passion and intensity that drives Tuchel’s tactical brilliance can sometimes negatively affect the interpersonal aspects of his job.
Finding out how to create a calm and productive working relationship with those who run high-level clubs might be the last hurdle for coaches who have figured out all the tactical nuances and how to get buy-in from the dressing room.
Tuchel once again demonstrated his brilliance this season at Chelsea, constructing a 3-4-3 system that optimized the strengths of N'Golo Kanté, Jorginho, and Mason Mount en route to a Champions League victory over Manchester City.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how his dialogue with Roman Abramovich and co. develops and whether Tuchel has learned to keep his fiery emotions under control.
Getting Buy-In From the Club
At a certain point, there does seem to be a tension between more philosophy-oriented styles and rolling with whatever transfers a DoF makes. If you wish to use a specific methodology, you need certain players to carry out your vision. One would think that clubs would recognize this and do more to be on the same page as their head coach, but football is a volatile world and it takes an immense amount of trust for that to happen.
A team cannot spend hundred of millions of euros to obtain every peculiar piece required if the manager this is all for bounces in a season or two, underperforms, or turns the dressing room against him. This risk is compounded by the fact that a squad tailored specifically to one person might hinder the effectiveness of the next manager, who will have their own preferences and requirements.
It takes a very special individual with an exceptional skillset and grand mythos to overcome those worries and get an institution with millions on the line to fall in love with their vision.
One such figure is Pep Guardiola. Rising out of the ranks of Barcelona B, he took over an underachieving side and immediately catapulted La Blaugrana to historic heights, winning the treble and fully unveiling the potential of Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, and Sergio Busquets. Pep’s model of “positional play” has become renowned for the various principles and rules associated with it, but the rookie head coach was wise enough to allow his GOAT-level talent to break free from strict instruction when they desired.
Barcelona, thus, became synonymous with flowing, short-passing moves that often saw “improper” occupation of zones as Messi roamed well into the midfield line and Iniesta and Xavi seemingly hopped into whatever space they pleased. Arbitrarily restricting that level of off-ball genius and technical quality in favor of automatisms 100% of the time would’ve been madness.
As Pep entered different contexts, his willingness to afford that level of freedom changed according to the quality and type of players he had. There is a tendency to just assume that Guardiola has one philosophy and applies that wherever he goes. While that is certainly true at the broadest level, it overshadows the variety of ways he goes about implementing his view of the game. At Barca, it was as fluid and attack-minded as it was ever going to get.
At Bayern, he created a rigid machine. Don’t take it from me, take it from Thomas Tuchel:
The way Bayern played under Pep was different to how Barcelona played under him. For me, Bayern were not as fluent, rhythmic, [and] fresh and [were] completely different as Barcelona were under Pep.
He came very close in his first few months. I remember a game against Manchester City and I was thinking, “this is unbelievable, we have reached this point again.” Nobody could touch the ball and you could almost play music to their rhythm.
But the ongoing development and attempts to minimize risks [were] too rational for me. They kept on winning and winning after that great start and still got 90 points or so, but it was no longer as beautiful to see.
It was all planned through and through, they suffocated opponents. Things became more static. It was even more impossible to counter-attack against them in their 4-1-4-1. They were very clinical. They would always score.
They were incredibly consistent, but they were no longer entertaining romantics like at Barcelona or during his first six months at Bayern.
Germany was also where we saw more regular use of inverted fullbacks to solidify the midfield and protect against the counter, something he carried over to Manchester City. It is in England where we saw the most pragmatic and tactically adaptable Guardiola yet, fixing the defensive woes of a season ago by returning to the rigidity of reminiscent of his Bayern sides and, amazingly, accepting the restraints of pandemicball and drilling City as a deeper defensive unit when he had always relied on aggressive pressing in the past.
Guardiola: We talked with Juanma, Rodo, Manel and Txiki and we said, “OK, we have to come back to our first principle,” and we had to reconstruct the team from that point. What we are as a team, how we had success in the past.
We had to come back to our game, move the ball quicker, do more passes, stay in position, run less with the ball, do it together. We don't have a specific player to win games, we have to do it together.
With Sergio Agüero entering post-prime territory and the underperformance of Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus, Pep created his most unique side yet, slowing the game down to the point that İlkay Gündoğan could become an elite runner into the box. The German midfielder led the team in league scoring at 13 goals, unheard of for a Guardiola outfit.
Without that decisive final third individual, Pep’s tactical mastery facilitated offensive dominance by committee.
However, let’s not pretend like Guardiola is some unfortunate coach who has had to struggle for quality his entire career. As his critics will gleefully point out, he has been lavished with some of the most gifted footballers of all time and has had millions (billions?) poured into his projects.
Unfortunately for Mourinhoisthegoat2004, that is actually not a knock on Guardiola’s skill as a coach. The ability to elevate incredible talent to unbelievable heights while creating a similarly high baseline level of play is extremely difficult, as has been established in Part 1 and Part 2.
Even more impossible is the ability to convince clubs to consistently fork over that kind of money in a way that perfectly fits what Pep needs. And, yet, he has managed it, experiencing relatively little trouble getting who he wants. Boards love his style, results, and vision of football — all of which serve to create a clear philosophical base that can beneficially influence how the entire club operates.
Much of this is certainly down to the mythos he established at Barcelona, where he was not initially guaranteed this level of respect from everybody; he had troubles with Samuel Eto’o as he tried to move on from an aging core. His status as a former Barça player helped him ride rocky moments (well, except with Eto’o) and the institutional backing he received because of his Cruyffian philosophy was a unique advantage that Pep fully catalyzed in order to implement his vision and prove himself as a winner.
From then on, the respect and buy-in he got from superstars and boards was because he was Pep, much like how Zidane gained respect for being Zidane. Again, if you feel that’s some sort of cheat code, feel free to become a very good Barcelona midfielder, master positional play, coach Barcelona B to promotion, and then win a treble in your first season as the head of the first team.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that circumstance and timing has a role in all of this. Had Pep started off somewhere else, would he have been able to start the legend that further cements itself after every 100-point season and broken record? Possibly, but it’s hard to deny that he found himself in an extremely ideal situation in Catalunya.
Which brings me to my final point: so much remains out of a coach’s control. They do not really decide winning — players and the people who buy players do. Hence, everything about what makes a manager good comes down to how they optimize what they have in the situations they find themselves in. That takes a ton of skill and, depending on the situation, different kinds of it.
However, if you want to thrive at the very top, with the best players and all that sweet cash, you have to find that perfect balance between floor and ceiling raising, which means having a clear tactical philosophy that is flexible enough to allow freedom without chaos and, more importantly, obtaining buy-in from some of the most powerful and difficult-to-impress decision-makers in the world.
Good luck with that.