Wes-ward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

What can Weston McKennie teach us about Andrea Pirlo’s idea of positional play?

He called him l’americano. No name, no nothing—just, you know, the weight of a country’s hopes and dreams. “As for the American,” Andrea Pirlo told reporters after his first game in charge of Juventus, his eyebrows arched with a hint of irony, lip stiff under the always immaculate beard, “he is working hard.”

In the month since Juventus baffled the world by signing the 22-year-old Weston McKennie, tutti gli americani have been trying to understand what Pirlo saw in the kid that we hadn’t seen ourselves. A year ago fans were arguing about whether McKennie was really the future of the USMNT’s midfield. Three months ago we were wondering if it was worth suffering through another ninety minutes of Schalke to watch him. Now here was one of this century’s great registas, the manager of the perennial champions of Italy, offering an explanation so simple it almost made sense. The American. He works hard. Wasn’t that enough?

Of course it wasn’t. People—the bianconeri, Americans, that one Athletic writer who said he wasn’t good enough for Southampton—need to know how McKennie fits in at Juve, something to reassure us they’re not pulling the world’s most elaborate Youtube prank. And now, thanks to the internet, we can copy our answers off Pirlo’s actual homework.

Okay, a little background. In order to coach top-flight European soccer, you need a UEFA Pro coaching license issued by your national federation, which in Serie A means a year of study followed by a month of intensive training at Italy’s soccer headquarters, Coverciano. They call the program Il Master and get very academicky about it. There are oral exams. There’s a thesis defense. The thesis itself is a 30-page written document, closer in form to a slideshow than an academic essay, on some tactical subject. But aspiring coaches shouldn’t think of themselves as theorists. Since the game is both universal in form and particular to the players on the field, Coverciano’s most sacrosanct rule is that candidates are forbidden to use the phrase il mio calcio: my soccer.

“If someone says that,” the director of the coaching school told the New York Times, “they cannot pass.”

Anyway, after he retired Pirlo decided he wanted to coach, so he enrolled in Il Master, did his time at Coverciano, and produced a thesis subtitled—you guessed it—Il Mio Calcio. Because he’s Andrea Pirlo, and because the director of the coaching school presumably wanted to keep being the director of the coaching school, he passed.

The soccer ideas in Pirlo’s thesis aren’t exactly groundbreaking. He likes juego de posición, possession, counterpressing, yada yada yada. He shouts out Cruyff, Guardiola, Van Gaal. As the first friend who sent it to me said, “ngl reads like a jdp thread on FT.” But the thesis is still the most useful guide we have to the coaching style of a guy who until last week had exactly zero managerial experience at any level. What can it tell us about how Pirlo sees Weston McKennie—and more importantly, what does his apparent fondness for McKennie tell us about how Pirlo thinks about positional play?

The Profile

McKennie is a famously versatile player—quite possibly the most versatile in Europe’s top leagues, according to some recent work Ben Torvaney did with position data. Fortunately for everyone, Pirlo seems to have a clearer idea of what he wants from him than Schalke did. McKennie has started Juve’s first two games in a double pivot next to Adrien Rabiot, which puts him in some pretty tough competition with Rodrigo Bentancur (whenever he’s fit) and Arthur (whenever he feels like being a professional athlete).

Here’s what Pirlo’s thesis says about the center mid position:

The soccer of the last 20 years, from Ancelotti’s Milan, Guardiola’s Barcelona, up to Zidane’s Real Madrid, has shown that it requires technical midfielders. After a historical period dominated by physical midfielders, soccer has rediscovered the effectiveness of technical players with great vision in the middle of the field. Of course there must also be a good dose of mobility to perform multiple roles (buildup and finishing, for example) and especially a mental predisposition for defensive transitions, with immediate re-aggression in case of a turnover.

There’s not a ton of substance here. What kind of team wouldn’t want a midfielder who’s technical, mobile, good at both ends of the field, and quick to counterpress? What does it even mean to say a guy who can give you all that isn’t “physical”? Compared to his more pedigreed teammates, it’s fair to say McKennie’s got an edge in mobility and aggression but probably a ways to go in terms of technique and vision. To understand exactly how that matters to Juve’s game model, though, it’ll help to go phase by phase.

Defensive Transitions

The two big tenets of Pirlo’s soccer, according to the thesis, are ball retention and “a strong competitive ferocity to go and recover it immediately once lost.” That second part may sound incongruous coming from a guy who used to treat defensive transitions like the valet line at the opera—a tedious afterthought to the artsy stuff he was there for, best handled by standing patiently while younger men ran around—but he’s not wrong. “Some studies carried out with my staff show that top teams record about 30-35 re-aggressions per game with 70% success (immediate recovery of the ball),” Pirlo writes. “The average duration of these positive re-aggressions is about 5 seconds and involves on average 2.5 players. They are mainly the midfielders, obviously.”

Obviously. According to FBref, Juve’s pressing leader through two games is Aaron Ramsey, who’s functioned more or less as an attacking midfielder in Pirlo’s hybrid structure that attacks as a 3-5-2 and defends as a 4-4-2. (The site doesn’t break pressures out by phase, but Juve’s done the ball retention thing well enough that opponents rarely see it except in transition.) McKennie was even more aggressive than Ramsey in the opener against Sampdoria, quick to initiate the press even when it wasn’t clear his teammates would follow, but the hardworking maverick American thing isn't exactly best practice. Counterpressing is a team sport. “On a turnover the player closest to the ball starts the re-aggression,” Pirlo explains, “but the primary objective of the first player must not be to recover the ball (too risky to get jumped) but to cover the ball carrier and cause him to make a mistake.”

Less than a third of McKennie’s pressures in the opener helped Juve recover the ball, one of the lowest rates on the team. Not one of his five attempted tackles did. In the second game, against Roma, he dialed back the aggression but got punished more severely when he screwed up. The lowlight came in the 11th minute, when McKennie and the 20-year-old winger Dejan Kulusevski lost the ball in an awkward exchange and McKennie charged in to win it back. Wrong move. Too risky to get jumped. Instead of containing the counter while his teammates could switch gears, he let Henrikh Mikhtaryan sidestep him and run 60 yards at Juve’s exposed back line for one of the biggest chances of the game.

Organized Defense

If you’re going to make a cardinal principle out of “competitive ferocity,” though, McKennie’s enthusiasm can be infectious. It’s why he’s stayed a lock for the USMNT as Gregg Berhalter’s defensive scheme has evolved from what the tactics writer Joe Lowery calls a “mushy” 4-4-2 block toward a Liverpool-style 4-3-3 where McKennie will, in a theoretical scenario where USMNT games become a thing that someday happens again, have a longer leash as a pressing No. 8.

You can see why Pirlo wants his midfielders to be mobile when McKennie works sideline to sideline against opponents’ possession. Juve’s hybrid tactical scheme allows one wingback to join the midfield line in defense while another has to get all the way back to form a back four. In both games McKennie has played mostly on the empty left side, whose wingback—Gianluca Frabotta against Sampdoria, Juan Cuadrado against Roma—has more ground to cover. His range of movement and spatial awareness helps plug holes while the team rearranges itself until the back four is in place and Ramsey’s made his way over to left midfield, at which point McKennie can rejoin Rabiot in the center mid pair. It’s the kind of gig where it helps to have experience at basically every position on the field.

Beyond staying “tight and short” to deny linebreaking passes while the back four find their shape, Pirlo’s light on specifics in this phase. The thesis stresses that defensive intensity isn’t just physical but mental, stemming “from that the fierce desire to recover the ball regardless of whether we are pressing or defending in lines.” If the secret to winning the ball back is just wanting it bad enough, Weston’s your man.

Attacking Transitions

But you didn’t pull up Andrea Pirlo’s thesis on positional play for his thoughts on defense. You came to read about beautiful attacking soccer. I’ve written before, in the very first space space space, about how a Guardiola-style passing game is not at all incompatible with quick transitions, and Pirlo’s study of top teams backs that up. “The average dangerous transition lasts about 10-12 seconds,” he writes, “with an average of 2 passes to reach the goal and involving almost three players” (which is almost a reasonable number of players for two forward passes to involve).

In other words, structured passing and counterpressing can help you get the ball into the opponent’s half and keep it there, but when you win possession high the idea isn’t to recycle it but to get to goal fast. “In the offensive half it is preferable to try to counterattack to surprise the opponent's defense,” Pirlo writes, such as by targeting the space “behind an opponent fullback who has pushed forward.” By virtue of their position, the center mids have the most freedom—and the most responsibility—to spot a defensive weakness on either side of the field and slingshot the transition at it. There’s a reason Pirlo demands “great vision in the middle of the field.” McKennie’s unpredictable balls over the top against Sampdoria showed a knack for the transition game, which makes sense, I guess, since it was about the only kind of attacking Schalke ever did.

Organized Possession

The thing people tend to forget about juego de posición is that it’s not actually about possession. Look at the name. It’s about position. Pirlo himself is guilty when he announces that “the two cardinal principles of my idea of soccer are related to the ball” (emphasis his), but when he gets down to laying out guidelines for possession he correctly focuses not on how the ball moves but on how the players do. All four of the thesis’s main possession principles explain how to create, occupy, and use space.

Watch him for a few minutes and you can see McKennie’s still getting used to moving in a well-structured team (sorry, Berhalter, but that goes for yours too). Like in defense, though, his ranginess and obvious eagerness to learn help cover for a lot of miscues. A swiveling neck and tireless feet are good qualities to bring to a positional game. He’ll get it.

It’s McKennie’s work on the ball that looks the most out of place at Juventus. His passing’s been successful enough, but only because it’s been safe to a fault. Trapped with Rabiot inside Roma’s pentagonal pressing structure, McKennie completed 37 of 39 passes, of which only one was progressive. He was more ambitious against Sampdoria but still defaulted to bouncing forward passes from the left two center backs back to Danilo on the right—a third man, technically, but not quite the space-creating kind Pirlo says is important to his buildup. If Juve’s going to “try to build internally,” Pirlo needs his double pivot to be comfortable turning on the ball.

The biggest problem with McKennie’s play so far is a shyness about claiming space. One of Pirlo’s “important sub-principles”—the tier where he stashes his on-ball tips—is “if I have space I carry the ball until an opponent comes out (in this case our vertex prepares for a 1-2).” That means if the team’s structure has done its job and delivered you the ball in space, you owe it to your teammates to gobble up that space until the defense commits,  opening new space somewhere else. At that point your “support rhombus” (been a long time since middle school geometry, right?) should create options to relay the ball to a free third man. This is the basic rule of positional play: you keep your structure so that somewhere somebody’s always in space, and your job is to find him.

McKennie doesn’t trust himself yet to dribble at defenders until they close him down. He’s young. He’s on a new team. This is normal. But dumping the ball too early means he hasn’t yet done the work to make space for his teammates, which has led to more than a few close calls when opponents jump an early pass. “He had a good game, perhaps he could have done better,” Pirlo said of l’americano’s debut. “At times he made mistakes in the buildup, but it was the first game—we’ll give him a pass.” ❧

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Further reading:

• Andrea Pirlo, Il Calcio Che Vorrei (UEFA Pro)
• English translation (Juve Canal)
• Rory Smith, At Italy’s Coaching Academy, a Pipeline of Champions (New York Times)
• Alex Clapham, A Look Inside: The Italian Coaching School—Coverciano (Caño Football)
• Ben Torvaney, Finding the Most Versatile Player (Stats and Snake Oil)
• Kim McCauley, Weston McKennie is the USMNT player you should be excited about right now (SBNation)

Image: Jacques-Laurent Agasse, Zebra