WHAT would the modern football coach do with a player like Carlos Valderrama?
Where would he fit into the team?
Those sumptuous short passes.
The tricks. The flicks. The nutmegs. The vision. The awareness.
It’s a hypothetical question, of course, because we’ll never see a player of that ilk again. That flamboyance. That spontaneity. That kind of ridiculous creation.
What would the modern football coach do with a player like Gheorghe Hagi?
Or Dragan Stojkovi? of the former Yugoslavia?
Or Gianfranco Zola? Or Rui Costa?
Romario of Brazil was probably the greatest goal predator that ever lived.
But how would the modern coach react if Romaria didn’t ‘work the back four’?
Would he become an unaffordable luxury?
Today, would Romario be re-invented as a game-changing substitute in the final 20 minutes of games?
A wondrous talent pushed to the game’s periphery by football scientists where all that matters are trying to control outcomes.
I had the privilege of watching the last great Brazil team – the World Cup winners of 2002 – in the flesh when they dazzled Costa Rica 5-2 in a group game in the city of Suwon in South Korea.
Luiz Felipe Scolari fielded Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Rivaldo in attack. He was blessed with attacking full-backs Roberto Carlos and Cafu.
Even his centre backs – Lucio and Edmilson – never thought twice about charging up the field to get involved in an attack.
Sixteen years later, on home soil, Scolari embarked on one of the darkest experiments Brazilian football ever witnessed when he thought the national team could hack their way to World Cup glory, with a bit of creative genius thrown in from Neymar.
Minus the injured Neymar, Germany thumped them 7-1 in the semi-finals.
The problem with football is that it has become over-run by the Fernandinhos of the world.
Hard running destroyers with not a creative gene in their body.
I sat down to watch the English Premier League clash between Burnley and Chelsea a couple of Saturday tea-times ago.
It was the kind of game that would kill your spirit.
On the night, Burnley struggled to string two passes together. Their general play was bordering on embarrassing at times. So many of their players – like many modern-day players – lack personality.
There wasn’t one player in claret and sky blue who was capable of affecting the game in their side’s favour. Each player stuck to their specific zones and were lost to the game.
Upon making his debut with Nottingham Forest, Roy Keane remembers the advice Brian Clough gave him.
“I’ve seen your pre-season,” said Clough. “You can control the ball, you can pass it and you can move.”
“He just told me to do those things,” says Keane. “And that’s my career in a nutshell. You would think that all professional footballers can do those three things, but a lot can’t.”
When the going got tough against Chelsea, Burnley got worse.
And yet, Sean Dyche is lauded in English football for always getting Burnley to punch above their weight.
Dyche’s team are a hard watch. But Burnley are not alone.
Most English Premier League clubs are a hard watch. Despite the bouquets of flowers being thrown at Pep Guardiola’s feet, it is difficult to watch an entire Manchester City game without your eyes glazing over.
Contrary to popular opinion, their football is far from great to watch.
It is overly prescriptive to the point where every attacking move looks the same as the last one.
Sergio Aguero occasionally reminds us that football was once grounded in spontaneity.
Liverpool are arguably the last team in English football worth watching, a team that attacks with so much vigor and variety that they compel you to stay to the end of the game.
We're living in an era where the cult of the manager is king.
Where smart-suited men with skinny laptops carrying precious data about variables and outcomes have invaded the space once occupied by the clever artisan.
Aesthetics and entertainment don’t figure.
In Bruce Schoenfeld’s fascinating insight into Liverpool’s use of analytics in May 2019, he writes: “Soccer isn’t composed of discreet events, like baseball and American football, and there aren’t dozens of scoring plays to dissect, as in basketball.
“Rather, much of what happens seems impossible to quantify [in soccer]. Talent is often judged exclusively on aesthetics. If you look like a good player, the feeling is, you probably are.
“Most sports use a range of statistics to assess teams and players. Until recently, nobody in soccer cared much beyond who scored the goals. Now we get updates on how many shots different players have taken, what percentage of the time each team has controlled the ball and plenty of other metrics.”
As football rolls inexorably towards a scientific, ‘Moneyball’ approach, a game dominated by set-pieces, it will become even more generic as time passes.
Right now, players are already being over coached.
A tactical monolith has swallowed up virtually every coach, where every passing movement and every run looks the same.
As a consequence, players aren’t thinking for themselves.
That’s why there’s a leadership void in many teams, even at the top level because they’re taught not to leave their zones.
The prevailing wisdom is there is no point in making room for creativity for creativity’s sake when you can win a game with one rehearsed set-piece.
Aston Villa, newly promoted to the English Premiership, are an exception to the rule because they have made room for a creative player in Jack Grealish.
Grealish would be perhaps viewed as an uncontrollable variable. Generally speaking, coaches and statisticians don't like uncontrollable variables.
It’ll be interesting to chart Villa’s progress and Grealish’s goals and assists.
Once upon a time, every team had two, three or four Jack Grealishes in their ranks, and most of them played with more personality than the hundreds of top professional footballers around the globe that leave absolutely no trace of themselves on the game.
There is an ever decreasing number of great players in the world today.
Modern football is all about outcomes and less about aesthetics. If you’ve watched one football match, you’ve watched them all.
