Zidane's Galáctico Brain Plan to Break Down Chelsea

How a coach who's usually more vibes than tactics deconstructed his buildup.

In some ways managing Real Madrid is the easiest job in the world, and Zinedine Zidane is good at it precisely because he knows this. If your teamsheet starts Ramos, Kroos, Modrić, Benzema, and the other slots are filled with dollar-sign-tongue emojis, you will win things. Relax! Tactics are for nerds, not legends. Zizou’s usually been happy to throw his best eleven out there in a 4-3-3 or a diamond midfield and let them figure out the small stuff for themselves. What’s the point of buying all the best players if they don’t already know how to play?

This season, though, something’s gotten into him. Maybe it’s the aging squad. Maybe he’s just sick of wondering how many Champions Leagues he has to win to get the kind of adulation that’s heaped on, like, Graham Potter. For whatever reason, Zidane has decided it’s time to Do Some Tactics. Madrid’s spent a lot of this season flipping the midfield triangle so that both center mids come deep while Casemiro pushes up as a No. 10 for inscrutable reasons. Lately they’ve glommed onto the three-at-the-back trend and started trying Nacho Fernández as a left-sided elbow back. But even if you’ve been paying attention, I’m not sure anything in Zidane’s coaching career so far could’ve prepared us for the second Champions League semifinal leg against Chelsea.

The plan didn’t work, obviously. Sometimes it failed in hilarious ways. But basically nothing that anyone’s tried against Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea has produced goals in the last four months, and they’ve faced a lot of really smart managers. So instead of making fun of Zidane for getting creative, I want to take him seriously as a tactician for a minute and try to figure out what he was thinking in that first half on Wednesday, because for better or worse, I promise you that Pep Guardiola’s doing the same thing right now. The game was a mess, but it was a fascinating mess — and it might wind up informing what we see in the final.

The Press

Tuchel’s 3-4-2-1 typically defends in a medium block with the three center backs a little deeper and wider than the center circle, like so:

The front five work together to nudge the opposing buildup out to the flanks, where the two closest midfielders will squeeze play against the sideline so a wingback can press up to snap the trap shut. Statsbomb’s pressure map from the first semifinal leg gives a pretty clear picture of where Chelsea’s looking to win the ball.

There’s not a super obvious way to crack this pressing shape, which casually adjusts to different buildups by rotating Mason Mount into a front three or off to one side of the middle five depending on the number of opposing center backs and defensive midfielders. Jorginho’s probably the defensive weak link at the base, but with N’Golo Kanté nearby and three center backs behind him, he’s not asked to cover more ground than he can handle. Chelsea’s forwards are pretty good about dropping with the ball to keep the midfield tight, and their lightning breaks up the middle help the team hold its shape from phase to phase. It’s a simple, stable formation that’s not trying to do anything too fancy.

So Zidane decided to get fancy to crack it.

The Plan

In the first leg, Madrid tried to do what usually works for them in big games: Get Vinicius Jr. one-on-one on the left wing and let Karim Benzema figure out the rest. Some of the left-side rotations in the lopsided 3-5-2 were pretty slick, but the overloads drew a crowd and ended in lobs from deep that never really troubled Chelsea’s right center back, Andreas Christensen, who’s got 5 inches and 20 pounds on Vini. Real Madrid’s circulation at the back was too slow, too predictable, to wriggle out of Chelsea’s touchline traps. The buildup never really got into gear.

With a week to plan for an away leg where Madrid would have to score, Zidane broke out the tactics board and went full Galáctico brain. Getting Sergio Ramos back would help. Getting Eden Hazard back … well, that was also something that happened. Vinicius got stuffed into the lineup at right wingback, a position he’d played once, against Getafe, for all of about 45 minutes back in February. Madrid was still a 3-5-2 on paper, but any similarity to the first leg ended there. “I think the system was very clear,” Zidane said after the game. “We've played many times in that formation.” With the possible exception  of “I think,” nothing in those two sentences was anywhere close to true.

What was very clear was that Madrid wanted to solve its slow circulation problem by exploding its back line. That 3-5-2 on paper became — look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to describe this — a single-center-back formation with not one but two elbow backs. While Ramos roamed the middle, Nacho and Eder Militão split all the way to the sidelines from the very start of the buildup, pushing up into the fullback spaces. It looked like a standard back-four buildup with a gaping hole where the left center back should be. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it.

The idea was to drag two of Chelsea’s three forwards to one side and then isolate the other guy, Kai Havertz, with a switch, which wasn’t a terrible plan. With Chelsea’s right wingback, César Azpilicueta, pinned deep by Ferland Mendy, Ramos was repeatedly able to pick out a wide open Nacho on the flank. Madrid’s midfield was comically left-side heavy in the first half as they looked to overload the weak side after the switch.

With more than a few days to train the new tactic, Madrid might have worked out some dangerous combinations on the left. But playing to Kanté’s side doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for error, and between Kroos’s adlibbed movement and Mendy’s loose touches under pressure, they didn’t have much luck breaking into midfield on the first try. The best of these sequences swung back around a couple times after the initial switch, spreading Chelsea’s front five a little wider each time until Modrić and Kroos could shake loose.

The more interesting twist on Zidane’s wide back three was when Ramos didn’t hit the switch right away but shoveled it to the goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, in the hole where a left center back should have been. There’s been a push lately toward bringing ball-playing keepers into the back line to overload the midfield, and this was a clever way to do it. Havertz was caught in a dilemma: stay central and leave an easy outlet to Nacho, or follow the momentum of the ball and lose Casemiro in the middle. Against a better passing keeper — like, say, the guy Chelsea’s going up against in the final — this could’ve been a real problem. Against Courtois, who’s got the technique of a drunk giraffe, a 10-yard pass to Casemiro’s back foot was too much to ask.

In the end, the lack of practice showed. Zidane’s asymmetric back three was an interesting rough draft of a script we may never see developed — like most one-off big game tactics, the novelty was both its charm and its undoing. At halftime, Madrid switched to a less exotic buildup shape. The few times that Ramos found himself as a lone center back late in the game, usually when Nacho charged forward on the underlap, Christian Pulisic was ready to counterattack into the empty side of the back line. The magic was gone, the gimmick found out. Still, you can bet Guardiola, the king of big-game gimmicks, was scribbling notes on this one. If City finds itself down a goal and struggling to break Chelsea’s front five in the final, don't be too surprised if the best manager in the world borrows a page from the guy we all thought didn’t do tactics. ❧

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