EPL and La Liga Proving Rush to Declare Possession Football Dead Was Too Hasty

It was one of the iconic quotes of the season among several from Claudio Ranieri, who, while taking on everyone with a smile, became part adorable grandparent, part tactical visionary. Or at least that's what the depiction of him swung between. 

"My team is like the RAF...beep, beep, beep, I love it," the Leicester City boss said last September following his side's lightning start to the 2015-16 Premier League season, according to Football365. Ranieri would go on to liken his Leicester with the Royal Air Force several more times before the historic campaign was done, often using a rapid hand gesture to reinforce the idea: fast, direct, lethal. Successful, too. 

Leicester's astonishing title last season became hugely significant in a multitude of ways. The obvious one was the scale of the achievement in the current landscape. Another key focus became how the Foxes had pushed football into a sort of new dimension, where what constituted possible suddenly looked different. Another was, tying into Ranieri's RAF quote, what many perceived as Leicester ushering in a new tactical era. 

One statistic was the bedrock of that notion. While toppling the established order, Ranieri's men recorded the third-lowest possession figure in the Premier League, ahead of only Sunderland and West Bromwich Albion. They were the counter-attack merchants: win it back, thrust it forward and run. Who needs possession?

Quickly that theme was jumped upon. Possession football was dead, they said. A piece from the The Independent declared it "the era of the counter-attackers." Another at Football 365 celebrated the "death to 'death by football' bores." Another from the Daily Mail was more measured but argued that, on the back of Leicester, Pep Guardiola would need to adapt his style to the Premier League, rather than it to him. Except none of that is what's happening.

In England, Guardiola's Manchester City not only sit atop the pile right now but do so as the highest-possession side the Premier League has had this decade. Next on the table are Arsenal, who, even after years of intricate football, are running at their highest possession average for five seasons. After them are Liverpool, going at a possession clip of almost 60 percent. Counter-attacking? Not even close. 

It's true that we have seen tactical changes this season, but they've come within the framework of possession football, not outside it. Pressing is on the rise, the area at which players are winning the ball back is moving further up the pitch, and the speed of exchanges is increasing. But the bottom line: Good teams have the ball. 

"We are a ball-possession team," Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp told Sky Sports' Monday Night Football, refuting the idea his team's best work is done without it. "We have the ball most of the time."

It's the same in Spain. Real Madrid and Barcelona naturally lead all comers and sit in the top three for possession. But it's Sevilla and Atletico Madrid who stand out in this respect.

Jorge Sampaoli's men are threatening to make this season's title race a four-way fight, and they are doing so with an audacious template that has them second in the league for average possession at 59.5 percent. As for Atletico—the wonderfully diverse side too often mistaken as resilient, defensive, plucky or representative of "anti-football"—in this particular moment, they're staking a claim to be the standout team in Europe. Their possession figure? The highest of Diego Simeone's five-year tenure at 53.1 percent.  

It's still early, but such figures reject the idea of Leicester marking a tactical shift. Yet this is about more than just the Foxes, too. 

For several years, the possession-football-is-dying belief has been growing in part due to a selection of high-profile examples that seemed to indicate such and perhaps in part to a yearning to see it die (more on that second bit later). 

It was Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan who perhaps started it all with their extraordinary defensive display to thwart Guardiola's Barcelona in the 2010 Champions League semi-finals. Chelsea then did the same two years later. Bayern Munich crushed the Catalans the year after that.

Then 2014 came along. Real Madrid counter-attacked Guardiola's Bayern to shreds, Mourinho's Chelsea "Mourinho-ed" Liverpool late on in the Reds' title push, Atletico triumphed in La Liga, and the Netherlands and Chile ambushed Spain in the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

Those events put the belief out there. Then 2016 confirmed it for those who saw it in such a way, as Leicester did their thing; as Atletico dumped Barcelona and Bayern out of Europe while recording possession figures below 30 percent in all four legs; as Euro 2016 became the most reactive tournament imaginable. Possession football: dead, they said. Except it's not.  

Too often overlooked when declaring an era of counter-attacking and football in fast transitions, and therefore the death of possession, is the difference between choice and necessity.  

In the Premier League, Leicester did what they did last season because there was no other way for them. If they had the capacity to retain the ball, they would have. "I like to keep possession of the ball," Ranieri admitted, according to the Mirror's James Nursey, "but we don't have those characters." It was the same for Atletico in the Champions League, where going blow-for-blow with Barcelona or Bayern would have represented suicide. But—and this is the crucial part—they had wanted to do so.

As explained here at Bleacher Report, Atletico spent the beginning of last season trying to force through a period of stylistic evolution. Simeone spoke of a "new stimulus," and of playing in a 4-3-3. The idea was that Koke would go into the middle and that the team would grow more technical, adding another dimension. 

At the time, several statistics reflected the shift, but concurrently, Atletico were scoring less than ever before and had found themselves stuck at an awkward halfway point. So the process was shelved, and only this season has it resumed.

Still, after the first leg against Bayern, Gazzetta dello Sport depicted Simeone as Che Guevara. It declared him the leader of a revolt against tiki taka, missing the fact that Simeone had wanted to go with the trend they'd depicted him as revolting against but had found out he couldn't. He didn't have the resources for it. Again, necessity—not choice. 

By contrast, Euro 2016 saw countless teams choosing a counter-attacking approach. "Many games have seemed almost a battle not to take the initiative, a slow bicycle race of non-possession," noted the Guardian's Jonathan Wilson, an authority on all things tactics. But it's important to recognise the tournament itself created such a dynamic.

A bloated format, in which more teams reached the knockout rounds than didn't, rewarded draws and thus encouraged defensive football. If you got a goal on the break, then great; if you didn't, no biggie. You'd probably progress anyway. League football is nothing like that. 

That last fact didn't matter for many, though. Euro 2016 was the convenient "proof" they could use to declare what they'd wanted to declare.

If there's been a certain yearning from a large enough section of football fans to see the high-possession game die, it's tied into the hyper-scrutiny Guardiola receives.

The Catalan didn't pioneer the approach but is the leading figure in its post-2008 dominance. He's won 21 titles while pushing the boundaries with it, adhering strictly to the principles of Johan Cruyff that don't please everyone—particularly in England, where stylistic roots of physicality and charge-like dribbling have existed since the late 19th century.

There's also an element of resentment here. Human beings, after all, are inherently threatened by the success of others. That success poses difficult internal questions for those looking at it. Amid the current wave of anti-intellectualism, there's a mistrust or bitterness toward the sophistication in the Guardiola model. Its perceived arrogance or elitist whiff clashes with football's "get at 'em" strain that some hold onto ever-more tightly as the game drifts further from it.  

It's hard not to feel that gets pushed on to possession football more generally. Declaring, then—and some do it with such joy—the death of that style and the supremacy of counter-attacking is, for many fans, a way to reject the supremacy of Guardiola and, by extension, that of intellect above football's more emotive or masculine components. 

But the idea of counter-attacking being supreme in some way misses the point of that word before the hyphen. By definition, counter-attacking is a response to something. It can't be a dominant style or represent an era on its own; thriving possession football is a pre-requisite for it to exist. 

Or, put simply: If everyone opted to counter-attack, there would be nothing left to counter-attack. But that's not the case, because elite teams are showing they still want the ball. Possession football is alive and well. 

All statistics courtesy of WhoScored.com.

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