Louis van Gaal, Manchester United and the English Fear of the Long Ball

There’s something slightly strange about the ongoing to and fro over whether Louis van Gaal’s Manchester United are a long-ball team or not, and that is the notion that different ways of playing somehow have a moral value. It’s assumed that being a long-ball side is somehow a bad thing, that for a team like Manchester United, after all their summer expenditure, there’s something de trop about a direct style of play.

The oddity of it all, of course, is heightened by the fact that when Sam Allardyce made his comment about West Ham United being unable to deal with United’s long-ball football, he was essentially making a joke at his own expense.

Van Gaal, though, seems to have taken either that or the subsequent press reaction seriously, and the result was the awkward distribution of a four-page statistical summary of United’s season.

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Figures from WhoScored show that after the weekend’s games, only Burnley, with 1,877, had played more than United’s 1,861 long balls. Queens Park Rangers, West Bromwich Albion and Leicester City were third to fifth in the list—which implies that there tends to be a correlation between playing long balls and being at the wrong end of the table.

That thesis is supported by the fact that Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Swansea City have played the fewest long-balls.

But one long ball is not the same as another. Opta define a long pass as one that travels over 25 yards. It could go forwards, or it could go across the field—or it could even go backwards.

The tendency still, in these post-Guardiola’s Barcelona times, is for the best sides to prioritise possession, to see that as the best way for a strong team to impose itself on an opponent, denying it the ball and wearing it out with its passing.

But that doesn’t have to be the case; in fact, it’s one of the great glories of football that it can be played in a variety of ways.

Equally, it’s understandable that weaker sides, having to defend more, end up sitting men behind the ball and, at times, whacking the ball forward toward an isolated team-mate at the other end of the pitch. But that doesn’t mean that that’s what United do.

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In fact, the pressing football traditionally favoured by the likes of Van Gaal and Marcelo Bielsa has often gone hand in hand with direct play: Part of the point of hard pressing is to recover the ball and implement an attack before the opposition has had time to set itself.

The characteristic profile of that sort of side—Southampton under Mauricio Pochettino last season—for instance, shows a high number of long balls but also high possession: they give the ball away a lot, but they also win it back a lot.

Sure enough, United’s possession average this season is 59.3 percent, the second-highest figure in the Premier League. Tellingly, no side in Europe’s top five divisions plays more accurate long balls than United.

This isn’t hit-and-hope football. It’s not the long balls of Wimbledon, Watford or Cambridge United, aiming vaguely at a target-man or looking to put the ball in the corners and then press up on a turning opponent. This is about a rapid transfer of the ball from front to back, about verticality and pace—and, yes, on Sunday, of using the aerial presence of Marouane Fellaini as a successful Plan B.

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Some prefer a more patient build-up, just as some prefer to see the ball worked wide and wingers dribbling at full-backs, and others are thrilled the sight of a target-man winning headers, but that doesn’t invalidate a swift transfer form back to front as a style of play.

Given the number of accurate long passes, United can even claim to be good at it, which is presumably the point Van Gaal was making.

The oddity, really, is not that his side are playing that way, but that the term “long-ball” has such a toxic quality. There is a skill to playing the ball precisely over long distances.

Football is a game of great variety, and it might be best to recognise that rather than condemning, as many have done this week, an approach that differs from mainstream conceptions.