Amit Batra

The more I hear coaches say “we play our way,” the less I like it. Fàbregas said after Como’s win over Napoli: “We can’t always play our way.” And this keeps coming up over and over again. A few years ago, before he started coaching properly and while he was doing his badges, I interviewed Cesc and asked how he was preparing himself. He told me he was basically building a massive library of different game situations, different formations, different structures, trying to understand what problems different opponents might create and what solutions might be available. So even before he had a team, he was thinking this way. Not “this is my formation and this is how my team will play,” but: what does this situation require? I wrote about this recently with Arteta too. I think we mix up coaching philosophy, game idea, game model and playing style all the time. Your coaching philosophy is probably the most stable part, your beliefs about football, learning, leadership, player autonomy, development, what you value. Your game idea gives you a broad direction. Your game model gives players shared principles for solving recurring problems. Your playing style is simply what actually shows up in the game. The mistake is taking something from the bottom of that chain and pretending it belongs at the top. “We always build short.” “We never go long.” “We always press high.” “We always play through midfield.” Those are not beliefs. They’re solutions. And sometimes the solution is wrong. Even last night in training we were playing 8v8 and one team was pressing ridiculously high. The team building out kept trying to play through the press. Over and over again. But they didn’t need to. The opposition had committed so many players forward that there was loads of space behind them. They were perfectly capable of skipping the press and finding somebody higher up the field, but they were so focused on “playing out” that they stopped seeing what the game was actually giving them. This is exactly the problem. We teach players a way of solving something, then eventually the solution becomes the objective. Playing through the press becomes more important than progressing. Keeping the ball becomes more important than attacking the space. Pressing high becomes more important than recognizing whether pressing high is actually useful in that moment. Then the opponent changes the problem and we keep using the same answer. Fàbregas dropping into a low block late against Napoli doesn’t mean he suddenly believes in low-block football. It means the situation changed and Como adapted to it. Your philosophy can stay fairly stable while almost everything underneath it changes. If the opponent sends six players to press you, maybe skip them. If they sit deep, maybe you have to circulate and move them. If you’re protecting a lead late in the game, maybe you defend deeper than you normally would. If there’s 50 yards of space in front of you, maybe going backwards to “keep possession” makes absolutely no sense. I think this is what a game model should actually help players with. Give them enough shared references to understand what we’re trying to achieve, but not so many fixed answers that they stop looking at the game. Because at some point “staying true to our philosophy” can become a very convenient way of saying: we’re going to keep doing the same thing even though the game is telling us not to. Fàbregas interview: youtu.be/4Bw--TKru_4?si=w_lr… Article: sempremilan.com/fabregas-les…