The Other Football

Getafe is challenging conventional wisdom about how to keep the ball in the opponent's half.

Just like he learned at La Masia, Marc Cucurella saw his forwards start to press and sprinted into the highest third in the 80th minute to help close down the opponent’s buildup. His defense was driven back into its own half, but Cucurella read an attacking move on the flank and cut underneath his fullback to help a central defender trap the ball two-on-one in the corner. None of this would have looked out of place at his former club, where high pressing and position swaps are key elements of Barcelona’s style.

But when he won the ball, Cucurella did something very un-Barça: he lobbed it over the top for a striker to chase. He wasn’t under pressure. He didn’t even look for short passing options. Instead of trying to build from the back, his teammates streamed upfield in unison, scooped up a second ball, and had three runners in the box when the cross came in. The whole move zipped from end to end in two passes and 13 seconds. Cucu, we’re not in Catalonia anymore.

Welcome to Getafe, home of what Spaniards call el otro fútbol.

Sometimes the phrase has a broad cultural sweep, an “against modern football” kind of thing. That’s how the former president of Eibar meant it when he wrote a book about his small-town Basque club subtitled Another Football is Possible. But “the other football” can also describe a specific playstyle that's gaining popularity among La Liga minnows like Eibar and Getafe. Sid Lowe once defined it as “knowing when to break a move down, how to effectively end a game.”

“What he wants,” Lowe wrote of Getafe’s manager, José Bordalás, “always includes not letting the other team play.”

If the globalization of soccer has produced a consensus at the top in favor of passing short and defending high, it’s been a more interesting story among the small clubs just looking for ways to survive. Early on, opponents learned to combat elite possession sides by getting more compact, dropping into a low block rather than let passing patterns rip holes in their lines. But while bunker and counter has produced plenty of upsets and a few champions, sitting deep doesn’t offer great odds over the long term. You make a mistake, the danger’s already on your doorstep. Your opponent makes a mistake, you still have to beat 10 men over 100 yards to get a shot.

Bordalás is emphatic that his team doesn’t play like that. “Whoever labels us anti-football doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” he said, using Barcelona’s pet pejorative for opponents that pack the box against their passing game. “[We] press in their half, play direct, look for goal as much as possible, and get into the box with as many players as possible. This is modern football and Getafe is one of the teams that is best at modern football.”

It’s true that Getafe tilts the field like a superclub. Two of the three sides in the top five leagues that took more of their touches in the attacking third last season made the Champions League knockouts. Five of six that took less of their touches in the defensive third did. It sounds simplistic, but there’s a healthy correlation between playing in the opponent’s half and winning games, whether you do it with pretty passing or not.

Thing is, tilting the field like that is supposed to require a possession game. Pep Guardiola famously claimed it takes 15 passes to create the right structure to counterpress. He likes to quote one of Juanma Lillo’s aphorisms: “The quicker the ball travels forward, the quicker it comes back at you.” Like Pep and Ronald Koeman, Bordalás has always said Cruyff is his model—if he had the players for it. But he’s dismissive of the need for buildup play his squad isn’t talented enough to pull off. “When we played against Barça, their goalkeeper played 69 passes,” Bordalás said last season. “I don't want my goalkeeper to play 69 passes, something we wouldn't do well. I want to create goalscoring chances.”

As if to prove the point, Bordalás beat Koeman’s Barcelona this weekend, 1-0, on just 27% possession. It wasn’t a fluke. Getafe had more shots, more expected goals (even if you don’t count the penalty that won them the game), and kept play tilted toward their vastly more talented opponents’ goal. But how do they attack so directly and still stay structured to keep the ball from coming back fast the other way?

The answer is to play like they’re always out of possession, since they pretty much always are. But this isn’t the Ralf Rangnick-style ball-swarming transition game that was popular in Germany five years ago. As José Pérez wrote for Between the Posts, Getafe plays a compact, organized 4-4-2 along the lines of Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid, only much higher up the pitch. When Getafe's keeper, David Soria, plays long—and he always plays long—the team has two simultaneous objectives. The first is for the striker pair to knock the ball down, get it out to a winger, and arrive in the box for a cross, all that standard 4-4-2 attacking stuff. At the same time, the longball sends Getafe’s back four charging upfield like they’re clearing their lines. While the wingers and strikers attack, the defenders and central midfield pair reestablish the defense right behind them, setting the offside trap between the halfway line and the bottom of the center circle. It’s all very disciplined.

Getting upfield as a unit provides reinforcements to win second balls, which is no small deal for a team that heads the ball more than anyone in Europe. More importantly, though, it sets the structure for defensive transitions. Bordalás knows he’s going to lose the ball. A game built around longballs and crosses guarantees it. But unlike sides that shape themselves for possession, with fullbacks overlapping on the wings and midfielders pushing up between the lines or high in the channels, Getafe doesn’t have to panic when they turn the ball over. There’s no six seconds of counterpressing while the team recovers its defensive shape. They’re already in their defensive shape in the opponent’s half, so the pressing never stops.

Bordalás’s defensive scheme has one cardinal rule: always maintain a narrow back four. If the ball moves wide, Getafe move wide together. If a defender leaves his line to close down an opponent, a midfielder immediately drops in to replace him, keeping the back four intact. You can try to play over Getafe or you can try to play wide, but they’re determined not to let you get through the middle. Up front, the strikers also prefer to hold their line rather than apply immediate pressure. They’ll hang about 10 yards off opposing center backs, staying directly in front of them to block passing lanes and usher the ball wide.

The flat four at the back and the flat two up top provide the shape, but Getafe’s 4-4-2 is a chaos sandwich. The midfield four play heavily man-oriented defense, chasing opponents around to make life as painful as possible for anyone looking to receive somewhere other than on the wing. In Barcelona’s first three games, Frenkie de Jong and Sergio Busquets played 11.8% of their passes under pressure; against Getafe it shot up to 19.4%, and they managed just four progressive passes between them.

The scheme’s simplicity is what makes it work. Getafe's back six basically never stop playing defense; despite the whole field-tilt thing Bordalás’s two center mids typically touch the ball even less than their keeper. That makes it easy for them to keep track of their assignments during defensive transitions. Same for the strikers, who stay matched up with the center backs in every phase. The only real difference between Getafe in and out of possession is whether the wingers are trying to get behind the opposing fullbacks to lay in a cross or hanging off them to invite the wide pass that will trigger the press.

The easiest way to stay structured for defensive transitions, it turns out, isn’t some mystical 15-pass pattern; it’s to play the entire game in transition without changing your structure. Getafe had the shortest passing sequences (4.6 seconds) and second-lowest PPDA (9.1) in the top five leagues last season, according to Opta. Their games featured the fewest total passes between both teams. They committed the most fouls per opponent pass. The other football isn’t pretty—it’s all about ripping the game into bite-size chunks that a small team can chew on—but it’s nothing if not ambitious.

“What’s the point of playing 30 passes in your half without trying to get forward? I’m a fan of Cruyff, and in his Barça, Koeman often played long,” Bordalás once said. “People have started to confuse long possessions with good football.” ❧

Thanks a bunch for being a space space space socio. Apologies for the late letter—some personal stuff has thrown off the schedule this month but we'll get back on track this week with letters tomorrow (City Football Group's artificial intelligence initiative!) and Friday (holy shit the Champions League is back already?).

Further reading:

• José Pérez, La Liga and The Revolt of the 4-4-2 formation (Between the Posts)
• Sid Lowe, José Bordalás brings life to Getafe as intense approach reaps rewards (The Guardian)
• Albert Ortega, ¿Es realmente el Getafe de Bordalás un equipo defensivo? (El Confidencial)
• Robbie Dunne, Defending Getafe (Statsbomb)

Image: Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space