Manchester United find themselves in an unusual situation under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Throughout English football history the measure of a manager’s success is tangible progress, be it points tallies or trophy wins, and with Man Utd one point away from beating their 2019/20 points tally of 66 Solskjaer is undoubtedly achieving his goal.
But the sport has changed considerably in the last five years, the landscape of English football shifting dramatically thanks to a new wave of hyper-tacticians in the dugouts of elite clubs and thanks to the impact of the Premier League’s growing financial divide.
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Year-on-year improvement, measured by points tallies, may not be enough: just because United are on an upward trajectory doesn’t mean it won’t level off before they reach a title-challenging 90+ points.
The distorting effects of swelling Champions League revenue has created an upper-class so unassailably powerful their owners believed – briefly, wrongly – that they deserved to pull away into their own closed-shop Super League.
For now that threat has diminished, but the problem of monstrous wealth disparity remains, the biggest tangible impact of which is a tactical re-imagining of how football is played.
How have Premier League tactics changed?
Most Premier League matches are now attack versus defence. The big team has 65% possession and is faced with a deep block that looks to hold firm and counter-attack in small bursts in behind a high opposition line.
This is what happens when the quality gap is allowed to get so big, and the consequence has been a half-decade of uber-structured attacking coaches like Pep Guardiola constructing intricate set plays to pull those defensive shells apart.
The buzzword of the moment is ‘automatisms’: a series of pre-ordained passing moves etched into muscle memory on the training ground.
What is fascinating about Solskjaer is that, despite lacking the clear possession structure of the elite coaches, he is beginning to make us question whether we really need that level of tactical detail after all.
As the wealth gap gets wider and wider, Solskjaer’s reign makes us wonder if perhaps we are simply passing through a transitional period in which tactical nous is needed to turn forced possession dominance into goals, and once through the other side having better players can win the day through brute force alone.
Man Utd are a peculiar team to watch. Game after game there appears to be little semblance of a wider plan, the players drifting about in formation but rarely making runs in twos or threes, rarely repeating patterns of play, and rarely appearing to think more than one step ahead.
Solskjaer's men continue to surge late
And yet they so often seem to find a way, a spark of quality (often late on) winning Solskjaer three points from an even, and strangely ghostly, game of football.
This is not to suggest there is no skill in this. It is a testament to Solskjaer’s excellent man-management that United keep powering through to the end, and in fact his temperament, the happiness of his squad, and the individual improvements to key players points to a similarity between Solskjaer and Sir Alex Ferguson.
But Sir Alex was very much a manager, not a coach, and that is far removed from a modern game defined by the minutely crafted attacking structures we have seen at Manchester City, Liverpool (at their peak), Tottenham Hotspur (under Mauricio Pochettino) and now Chelsea (with Thomas Tuchel at the helm).
It would appear that these are necessary to win relentlessly; that machine-like structure is needed to avoid the whims of confidence and hit the 93-100 point totals that have been required to win the Premier League in each of the last four seasons.
Or maybe not. Facing a Testudo shielding itself from attack, an army will require complex war strategy to drive the huddle apart and pick them off. But there is a tipping point when the army becomes so much wealthier and more powerful than its opponent that it can simply steam-roller through.
Maybe Solskjaer is the first manager in England who will pass through this period and show that, with so much money in the game, those old-school traits are enough.
This summer United could sign an elite winger like Jadon Sancho, an elite midfielder like Youri Tielemans, and an elite striker like Erling Haaland, creating the Galacticos of Manchester and, like Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid, winning the sport’s biggest prizes through sheer individual talent. United can build an arsenal of warheads that simply blows away the smaller clubs.
Sunday’s encounter with Leeds United at Elland Road is the latest test of this theory. Marcelo Bielsa is another of these tactical ultras, the godfather of the Guardiola types and believer in implementing a mathematical approach to solving the problems on a football pitch.
As a gruff man renowned for falling out with people, in many ways he is Solskjaer’s exact opposite.
United worthy favourites
Man Utd are favourites for good reason. Leeds matches only tend to collapse into end-to-end chaos if the opposition is drawn in by their man-marking, high-pressing, and extreme verticality, whereas the visitors are far more conservative in their approach.
Solskjaer won’t press all over the pitch or hold a particularly high defensive line, pointing to a calm and considered 90 minutes.
The most likely outcome is Leeds being reduced to a flatter game than they like to play as Man Utd grind them into submission. Of particular interest is Leeds’ tendency to empty out midfield as they throw wild counter-attacks down the wings, which in turn could create pockets of space centrally for an in-form Paul Pogba enjoying drifting in off the left wing.
But that does not mean Leeds will be soundly beaten. Fred and Scott McTominay have repeatedly shown themselves to be a flat-footed midfield partnership this season, fairly easily being carved open by talented midfields; recall Youri Tielemans goal in the FA Cup quarter-final when the Leicester City midfielder played a simple one-two to cut through the middle.
Leeds love to play one-twos, love to set off on aggressive third-man sprints, and should find some joy here.
It shouldn’t be enough to deny Manchester United another three points and another milestone for Solskjaer.
The question, as we head towards a defining summer, is whether the trajectory of progress under a relatively simplistic tactician can end in a title challenge. One way or another, 2021/22 will give us the answer.
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