How Bob Bradley Sees Soccer

An interview on tactics, coaching, data, the influence of Sacchi's Milan, the evolution of Guardiola's City, and everything in between.

I probably don’t need to tell you who Bob Bradley is, right? He’s the coach who beat 2009 Spain—maybe the most dominant international side ever—with the goddamn United States Men’s National Team. The first American to manage in a top European flight. The first American to manage in the Premier League. Definitely the first American to coach Mo Salah for Egypt. He’s the guy who won a domestic double with the Chicago Fire in their inaugural 1998 season, then came back twenty years later and turned another MLS expansion side, Los Angeles FC, into the best soccer team America has ever seen by a palm-tree-lined mile. In short, quite possibly the greatest coach my country’s ever produced.

So it was pretty cool to learn last summer that Bradley was one of space space space’s earliest subscribers, and I’ve been angling for a newsletter interview ever since. Last week we finally got a chance to go on the record. The Zoom call ran almost two hours. What follows is a heavily condensed and edited version that’s still like a million words long, but trust me, it’s worth it. The conversation paints a portrait of a coach who’s opinionated but curious, confident he’s seen it all but always wondering if there’s something he might have missed. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

On what Bradley pays attention to when he watches a new team

One of the first things I take note of is their ideas when they have the ball. Positionally, how does it work, how do they find space, how does the ball move—does the ball move forward? That’s probably first, and then at some moment they lose the ball. Now what happens? Are they a team that defends immediately, are they a team that reorganizes, do they back up? I start to see those two things together. Those are basic things that I would start looking at to try to get a feel for what that team’s all about.

I appreciate the teams that have really good ideas against the ball, but I really appreciate teams that combine their ideas with the ball with their ideas against the ball. When I watch teams that are more focused on work against the ball, I want to know how they make it hard for the other team. How do they engage, how high? Where are they trying to win the ball?

And yet I like to see them in the moment that, after they’ve done that good defensive work—what happens next?

When you win balls, I think everybody would say that the idea of going forward quickly is important, to take advantage of the space that’s there and the opponent’s disorganization. But the key moment that separates different styles is the decision that says, is it the right time to go? Can we push forward and make a chance, or is the opportunity not there, so we quickly switch gears and find some passes, some control, some fluidity?

I think in principles: how do you find space, play on the right number of touches, create advantages, or do midfield rotations and exchanges. In all of this the idea is fluidity, right? If I watch a game and every time a player gets a ball there’s a guy right on his back, then there is no fluidity. Every play is a wrestling match. Yeah, okay, a great player sometimes can turn with a guy on his back and make something happen. But it’s in the timing of movement, finding space, that fluidity starts to happen. There are parts of that that are maybe gameplanned, but I think far more of that comes from basic principles that get worked on every day.

The part about trying to balance attacking ideas and defending ideas, when I watch a game I’m looking for that. There are different ways to go about playing. There’s no one correct way. But I’m constantly thinking of how does attack go with defense, and how does defense go with attack. Those are sort of my things that are going through my head.

On phases of play

The phases of play go together for me. There are more people who see the game in phases. I think in most coaching courses, that’s still the starting point for how things are done, the very distinct phases of play. The Portuguese model. I think I understand all that, but I feel so strongly that they’re connected.

It’s not like I think I have the right way, it’s just that you’re working on the whole package. Look, you’re attacking. You lose the ball. At the moment you lose the ball, what is happening? The players that are closest to the ball, what are they doing?

I’ve coached in different countries. If an outside back is going forward and the ball turns over, I know that in a lot of countries the outside back’s job is to run back into his position. But if we lose the ball and the ball is three yards inside the outside back, do you want him to run back to his position, or do you want him to go defend the ball? If in the process of running back to his position, he runs right by the ball, then you ask yourself, is there a reason to do that?

The reason to do that would be that all we’re doing is returning to our defensive organization. If that’s the way you feel most comfortable with that group of players, then yeah. You reorganize and work on the basics, being compact, probably not letting anything come through the middle, preventing crosses, box defending, all those things are important.

But before it ever got to that point, you still say to yourself, when we lost the ball—freeze it. This is what it looks like. Do we want to try to win it there?  If we do, what are the advantages? If we go for it and we don’t win it, how much of a risk have we just taken? I’m not that smart, so I just think, how could you think about that without thinking about what just happened when we had the ball? So for me, those things just have to go together. I think that makes sense for players. But like I said, there’s so many different ways to look at all that.

On training players his way

The way we implement ideas, it’s probably different than most guys are used to, because we don’t usually go page by page. It tends to be a package approach. Page by page is, you know, today we’re working on possession, tomorrow we’re working on transition, the next day is whatever. Coaching a lot of things together, for me, is how I believe you create something where right from the beginning, players start to have an idea of what you’re trying to do as a team, and some mix of positional ideas with how you find space with how you react when the ball turns over.

For some guys who’ve not been here, you find out quickly when there’s a lot going on: Is it exciting for them and now the world is wide open, or is it like putting the 110 computer in the 220 volt and things just overheat?

I think the package approach connects with what players experience on the field. But it’s all happening faster, so the ability to find space, body orientation, number of touches, how long windows stay open, all these kind of things—you get a sense quickly as to which ones start to adapt to the speed of everything, and which ones don’t.

If you create game actions that fit your game model, those game actions can help players make good decisions. Say the outside back has gone forward. He has a chance to pass inside to a No. 8. The No. 8 takes a bad touch and they win the ball. The No. 8 is making pressure and the outside back is three or four yards away. That’s a simple picture for that outside back.

You’re just helping him understand, okay, now if he hits a long pass to the other side and they’re going forward, then his job on the other side of the field would be to recover quickly and get connected with the center back, because we’re not pressing.

When you have some idea of how you want your team to play, these are the kinds of actions and situations that you’re trying to create, and you’re trying to get everybody on the same page. How do you do that? Do you start that in situations of three on three, or do you start from a bigger picture? You can always go smaller to sharpen up some details after the big picture has been laid out.

On coaching players to find space

From the very first time I watched Xavi, when I would see his way of finding space and the rhythm that he gave his team, his ability to take the right number of touches, play the right passes—I’m thinking, in young players, is there a way to open their eyes up to a little of that? Xavi’s not just running all over the field, he’s finding the right moments to stop, to look, to back up. In certain moments, when he backs up, if the space is in front of him, then he’ll make a short sprint to be on the move. But it’s this incredibly perfect way of finding space.

When you have a young talented midfielder, usually they have some ability on the ball, so on their team the idea is to get the ball to them. There’s a tendency for that midfielder to literally just chase the ball. You’re trying to get them to understand that the best midfielders don’t just follow the ball. They stop, they back up. If the ball’s on the side, they don’t just run toward the ball and face the sideline. You want to find ways to orient yourself so you can receive and see the rest of the field and connect other players.

Now, there are some teams that would still say, you know, Xavi’s a great player, but he doesn’t fit the way we want to play. We want midfielders that are quicker to press and more athletic and can do more to produce turnovers, that kind of thing.

On coaching decisionmaking

Again, I always go back to Xavi as the example. When Xavi gets the ball and looks forward and there’s a three-meter window and Messi is on the other side of it, that’s no problem. He can make that pass 95% of the time. But if in the next moment, he receives and looks up and the window is one meter, he says no, that’s a little too small. He passes to Dani Alves and gets it back and sees that the window has gotten a little wider.

In order to make good decisions, you have to look forward. In order to look forward, you have to know how to find space and receive the ball in the proper ways. In order to do that, you have to know when to back up, when to stand, when to be on the move.

If we want to go forward every time, and even when it’s not on we keep trying, the end result of that is that the game starts to get stretched and very end to end. Often the decisions to try to go aren’t right. Instead of waiting for halftime to tell them, you hope players can start to see and understand that on the field.

On preparing for an opponent

Basic things I want to know are: How do they build, and are there moments when we can press them? Are there certain cues that you pick up in terms of how they want to press us? Is the team playing in a lower block, are they a team that plays more man-to-man and follows guys? Are they a team that seems to adapt every game, changing slightly based on the opponent? And of course, who are key players?

We like to help our midfielders understand what the game will feel like and how they can find space. If you have a key player who’s a No. 6, making sure the team understands, is the other team going to really mark him? What are our different ways for him to get into the game? He might move slightly and somebody else can circle back. Or he moves slightly and a center back carries the ball, forcing the one who’s marking the deep midfielder to make a decision: Am I staying or am I leaving? Those are little things that help players understand what’s the game going to feel like, how this game is going to work.

You want to have an idea of what they’re looking to do and how we’re going to deal with that. You want your team to understand patterns and ideas: Here are things that repeat themselves, here are things they like to do.

Say the left-sided attacker likes to move in between the right back and the right center back. When they play to the left back, then that left-side attacker is running in behind, and the left back is playing a ball down the line to the player who’s making that run. There’s different ways that you would deal with that. When the ball goes to the left back, is your right back stepping to him? If that happens, you better be ready to get it tight, and the right center back better be ready to move over because he’s the one who’s going to deal with the next runner.

In certain cases, the left back is too far away from your right back, so it doesn’t make sense for him to try to run 15 or 20 yards—he’s not going to get there. So maybe the right back isn’t moving all the way to mark that attacker, but he can see the ball, he’s aware of that the attacker’s going to run behind him, and now the right back has to be ready to protect that run. The center back’s still going to move over, but how are those two working together? That has something to do with how you play and what you see from an opponent.

On adaptability versus consistency

I think there are some coaches that are very good at planning for how they engage with how the other team builds. I think Nagelsmann is really good at this. What he has to ask himself when he does this is, okay, now we’ve done a good job of how we’re arranged to deal with the other team, but then when we get the ball, am I happy with where all the players on my team are? Are they getting the ball in the spots that we think make the most sense?

Liverpool, at their best, certainly they would have an idea of the other team, but there were certain ideas that stayed the same, especially in the arrangement of that front six. The midfield three a little bit flatter, the ability of Firmino to come underneath, the way Mané and Salah defend narrow, that is all designed so that in certain moments, when they win the ball, the opportunities that they get from Mané and Salah are very dangerous.

On man-marking

Finding space changes greatly when the opponent is going to play more one-to-one. The extreme version of one-to-one is Bielsa and some of the people who like his ideas. In those situations, you have to make sure your team understands that how you find space will be completely different than how you do it in other games. And that’s true of literally every position. If you’re just coming back to get the ball, you can bet that there will be a guy following you and tied to you every time. If you just keep repeating that and repeating that, it’s going to be a struggle.

And then there are other teams that the whole team isn’t playing one-to-one, but you see a clear idea that as we start to play, they want to go one-to-one in the midfield. Then the natural example is Sergio Busquets and Xavi. Someone’s clamped down on Busquets, he moves slightly—doesn’t usually run all over, but he moves slightly to move a marker and open up a space for the next guy to circle back or carry forward.

Playing defense where everybody’s marked up and the striker’s got to deal with both center backs and do sprints back and forth, that’s hard. I coached Fernando Llorente at Swansea. He was at Athletic Bilbao under Bielsa, and he would just say yeah, by 60 minutes he was finished.

On pressing traps

If you’re a pressing team, you have to have a sense of, as you step up, is the other team going to play through you at all, or are they just going to play over the top long? You may have to be a little smarter as a team. You can’t show everything so early. If the guy on the ball is 15 yards away from your closest guy and you step at the wrong time, they’ll see it coming. That team’s not going to play into a trap. They’re going to try to take advantage of a second ball or something.

If we’re a team that wants to win some balls and use transition as a playmaker, and we press high and they never try to play in the midfield, we won’t win balls in the areas that we want to win balls. You need a little bit of cleverness. Can we invite them to play in the center, get them to come in here? Are we going to push them toward the sideline and go and win it over there? Based upon how you think a game will work, those are things you need to spend time on.

If a team doesn’t want to play in the center of the field because they don’t want to be pressed, and you press them, they’ll play over the top. You’re not going to have too many opportunities to win the ball closer to goal. But the thing you control is, when you have the ball and you play from the inside outside, now you see a chance to come back inside via a dribble or a pass. As that’s happening, your team becomes narrower, and if you lose the ball, now you have more people around the ball. The other team doesn’t want to play in the center, but in that moment they have no choice. The ball’s in the center, they have it, and you’ve got a bunch of people there. You’ve created that by the way you’ve worked on your attacking ideas.

On his development as a coach

For me, learning the game has been from coaching and watching. I believe that for any young coach, you have to understand what’s in the book, but when it’s time to go to work, you’ve got to have personality. In anything, there are people who think and see things by the book. That may translate better to some fields than others. Then there’s other people that don’t see anything by the book. Somehow I ended up in that second category.

The influences in the U.S. when I was a player were German. There was a big focus on the individual duel. You played man-to-man and teams were almost mirror images. The basis of the game was the individual duel. If your team could win more individual duels, you would have the advantage on the day. But if you played a team that was better than you were, then out of ten individual duels, they win eight, and your chances of winning the game probably aren’t so good.

Like a lot of coaches around my age, I was influenced by AC Milan, who had a more collective approach. Arrigo Sacchi would say your positioning is based not solely on the opponent, it’s based on the ball—what Ralf Rangnick would call “ball-oriented defense.” You saw how Milan moved as a unit and stayed connected. I think that influenced a lot of people, not just me. But Sacchi would say that he loved watching Liverpool, and Rangnick loved watching Valeriy Lobanovskyi. It wasn’t just Milan from nothing. This is how it always works.

When I was coming up, you did a lot of things in tight space. You would play these tight possessions, often two-touch. So you had to know, before you get the ball, what am I going to do? I just felt that in those kind of things, everybody wanted the ball. They all gravitated to the ball. But how are we going to make a Xavi if all of our tight games look like this? And that way of thinking also meant that defensively, your first focus was more towards a guy.

When you start to open up from those tight possessions, other things happen. If there’s a player near me and he’s moving back for the ball, do I just follow him, or do I see that there’s another guy who’s making a run from deep into the space I’m leaving? You might want to be able to say, he’s just pulling me out of this space—nope, I’m not going.

On Red Bull teams

I don’t see big trends in Europe right now—I see subtle shifts. I see teams that are very much geared toward being against the ball now have games where they realize, maybe we have to improve our ideas with the ball. I see teams that are good in transition deciding that in some moments, you have to have a little more control.

The Red Bull-style pressing teams, they’re flexible with the way they set up to press. They base their tactics a lot on the defensive engagement. One of the starting points for Red Bull teams is some idea of 4-2-2-2. That means you have two strikers and you typically don’t have these outside-in wide attackers, like Mané, Salah, Ansu Fati. That goes all the way down to recruitment. What does Nagelsmann do that’s different? He’s certainly done well to take some of the Rangnick-type ideas, but maybe he’s got a slightly different interpretation. You constantly are trying to evolve.

On Manchester City

When I watch the older Barcelona, it was so fluid compared with some of Guardiola’s Man City teams, where who goes into which spaces seems a little more structured. But now we have a slightly new version of Man City. Like at Barcelona, the structure comes from certain players, but there’s freedom for a number of others—the different ways that Bernardo Silva and İlkay Gündoğan move.

He’s moved other fullbacks inside, but João Cancelo is comfortable playing different kinds of passes and moving in far different ways than most of the other guys he’s inverted. It still sort of goes into a back four when they lose the ball, but the shape that they take when they have the ball adapts in subtle ways. Also in this run, Rodri has found his place, in terms of giving them a solid reference point.

I see the way the best teams play from inside outside or outside inside, and in order for that to happen, there’s this very basic idea that, literally, as one guy moves back, another guy moves forward. As somebody comes inside, somebody moves outside. As Gündoğan moves out on the left, Foden will move in, and at some moments Gundogan’s in and Foden’s out. How natural all that looks. I don’t think that’s gameplanned as much as, within the way they play, starting to establish some basic ideas that make it difficult for the opponent.

Maybe at some point Man City went back to basics. I don’t know the relationship between Pep and Juanma Lillo, but for a while it seemed like they were faster and more in transition, and now the idea is more short passes, more options in the center of the field. Guardiola seems to see all that as giving control and being the best way to defend in transition. It would be interesting to know how much of the shift is through conversation and how much is just this natural evolution of a group of players at a point in a season. I know for me, it’s more of the second.

Is there something in the pure way that Guardiola does certain things that I need to understand better? I don’t read anything that tells me something I don’t know. The overanalysis world that we live in always makes it seem that everything is done for a specific purpose, and I don’t tend to agree with that. But then I’ll say, am I missing something here?

On Barcelona

I’d give Ronald Koeman credit, in a very difficult situation, for rearranging the way they play a little bit.

If they weren’t wearing Barcelona uniforms and the faces and numbers were changed, you wouldn’t have recognized them in the first Champions League game against Paris St. Germain. They were ending up with six guys in a line at the back. Why? Because they wanted two-for-one in the center, and then when the front three of PSG was narrow, they moved their outside backs in to deal with them, so now you’ve got four narrow to deal with those three. And then when the other team pushes their outside backs high, now you add Ousmane Dembélé or Antoine Griezmann or whoever. But attack and defense go together. Do you really want to end up with those guys standing in the back line?

You need a different idea. How are we going to rearrange our team, maybe make a little more pressure up the field? Now, all of a sudden, in the recent games, the balance of that team seems to be better. If you just changed the jerseys and saw what it looked like early on and saw what it looked like now, you’d say, no, those are two different teams.

I think they’ve been trying to figure out what to do with Frenkie de Jong, and when you start to tweak how you play like that, maybe it offers a better fit for Griezmann. All of it’s a challenge because your number one challenge at Barcelona, of course, is for Messi to be at his best.

De Jong’s a gifted guy, but he seems to do better when he can see things in front of him. In theory, the kind of players that became interesting liberos, who could carry the ball forward, could become an extra man in the midfield—I’ve kind of thought to myself that at some point we will see this again. That a team will have three at the back, but there will be one that in addition to being able to defend will be like Matthäus at the end of his career. We all know that in the Barcelona teams where Koeman played, he was not a classic defender. He was slow and needed to make sure that on his left and right, the players were good, quick defenders, and then he could fill the holes. He was an incredible long passer; he could step into the midfield. So yeah, even though we haven’t really seen too many teams go in that direction, now all of a sudden we see a Frenkie de Jong who’s got a little bit of that type of ability. How long will it last? Not sure, but in a moment the team seems to be in a better way.

Koeman’s also added young players into the team who fit the Barcelona identity. When you watch Pedri, like, come on, he’s really good. I’m excited when I see a Red Bull team, but I’d be lying if, when I see Pedri, I don’t think, man, that’s great. That’s a really interesting young player. How he finds space. How he receives certain balls. His awareness, his use of touches, quick little angles so now he can play a ball forward instead of square. All of those kind of things are so natural, so quick, so that it totally defeats the idea that the game’s faster and more physical and more athletic. For me it’s still exciting to see players like that. I think that’s part of the reason that I love being involved in the game.

On data and video

First of all, you can’t produce any kind of good data if the only thing you’re doing is taking stuff from Opta, in my opinion. It doesn’t take you anywhere other than telling you just basic things.

If you really want good data, at some level it has to take into account decisionmaking. That’s hard, but you want to know if a guy is in a spot defensively and therefore the first three best options can’t occur just because he’s there, rather than a moment of that guy tackling. Sometimes by being smart and being in the right position, it’s never an interception by some people’s data.

I try to challenge our data guys. I say to them, okay, progressive passes from Zone 14, blah blah blah. But how did the ball get there? What happened 10 passes before that? What happened 15 seconds before that? When you get to that area, is the other team packed in tight because you’ve been so slow to get there?

Same with this idea that if you freeze a picture, that tells you anything. So many coaches I work with, they’ll have a picture, and I’ll say, yes, but show me where all those guys were 15 seconds before. Then I can comment on the picture that you stopped. If I don’t know where they were 15 or 30 seconds before, or what the score is and what the moment in the game is, then I don’t understand what this by itself means.

What the data guys are going to tell you is that until you have tracking, until you have better AI, no, they can’t get the answers you want. I’m trying to throw this stuff at them because if we are trying to use data for recruiting or whatever, how are we thinking about all this? Unless you connect it with video, how are we connecting these kind of dots?

I think you’re trying really in a good way to connect the data part of it with what you see, or what certain people say. For me that has to be the way. In my opinion, you are not just a pure data guy. In what you put out, you are trying to connect the same dots that I am trying to connect on a regular basis, trying to take all the stuff that’s out there and connect it to what you see in the game. That’s why I’m joking with you and saying that no, you’re not a data guy. That’s a compliment. ❧

Further reading:

• Grant Wahl, How Bob Bradley Explains Soccer (Sports Illustrated)
• Frank Dell’Apa, Bob Bradley has cultivated a following of young coaches, all built in his image (ESPN)
• Bob Bradley, I Am An American Coach (The Players’ Tribune)

Image: Ed Ruscha, The Back of Hollywood