Photo by @shaker_jpg on Unsplash
by George Rasch
Football, or soccer for those on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, has long been the most widespread sport outside of the United States, where it has been growing rapidly in viewership and play. The coaching style in the U.S. has been modeled on the success of the English Premier League and those associated with it. One successful Premier League coach is Manchester City manager Josep (“Pep”) Guardiola, who is Spanish and started his professional soccer career as a player in 1991 for FC Barcelona (or “Barça”), a team in Spain. He spent 15 years playing for various teams until his ultimate retirement from playing. After his retirement, Pep took on his first manager post at Barça, and before leaving after four years, he amassed 14 trophies across six different competitions. After his success in Spain, he moved on to FC Bayern Munich, a team that plays in Germany’s Bundesliga, and brought home seven more trophies in the three years he managed the team. Following this success, Pep was ready to become the English Premier League’s Manchester City manager in July of 2016 and has been there ever since. At the end of the 2023/24 season, Pep brought an astonishing 18 trophies home to Manchester, including four straight titles from 2020/21–2023/24. Pep Guardiola and the dominant coaching style that he has perfected have changed soccer forever.
There are many different soccer styles and formations used across the world. As a soccer coach myself, I have researched many of the managers, leagues, and styles in an effort to become a better coach. In the simplest explanation, there are three main coaching styles that are currently in use in the Premier League. All three strategies are still in use today, but not all are equally effective.
The first style, the offensive, is based on playing directly and aggressively. In this style, the players are set up in a formation designed to attack the goal. Formations are the basic areas and positions each player will have on the field. In offensive formations, the team positions more players to attack, leaving fewer players in the back to help defend the goal. This style gives the team more players pressing the ball forward, but it tends to force the defending players to work hard to pass the ball a great distance to those players. There are also a limited number of players defending against another team playing that same style. These games look like a tennis match where the ball is sent back and forth by the two teams in hopes of gaining possession. Luton Town, a team in the Premier League, has had some success with this coaching style but ultimately finished low in the league, finishing 18th out of 20 at the end of the 2023/24 season. Ultimately, this led them to being placed into a lower league.
The second style used in the Premier League is based on a counterattack. Counterattacking is when a team keeps more players back on defense to take back possession of the ball and sends the ball quickly to one or two fast players on the offensive side, attempting to catch the opposing team with fewer players on defense. This style is more balanced than the offensive style. The downside to this style is that with only a few players attacking, there is a risk of losing possession quickly against teams with a well-balanced defense. One team known to use this coaching style is West Ham, who finished the 2023/24 season much higher than Luton Town, at ninth. However, this style is unsuccessful against possession-based teams because of the short passes, which are difficult to keep up with while defending without the two players who are waiting for the ball on the offensive side.
The final style is what Pep Guardiola has made the new standard in the Premier League: possession. In Pep’s style of soccer coaching, he combines possession, small passes, and breaking down a team until they are exhausted. The idea is to have the ball and keep it as long as possible. Pep explained, “‘I want the ball for 90 minutes. When I don’t have the ball, I go high pressing because I want the ball.’” Everything starts with a balanced formation: defenders playing “back” provide support and have the opportunity to help attack when possible, and there are enough players in the middle to keep the ball moving and players at the top who will be able to receive a pass and go to goal. The idea is that while the team has possession, the players make short, quick passes. This will not only move the ball but will also keep the other team moving, inevitably tiring them out and potentially frustrating them to the point of making a mistake.
Capitalizing is essential once that mistake is made, and as Pep said, it must be done for all 90 minutes of the game. In the game played by Manchester City on March 1, 2025 against visiting team Plymouth Argyle, Manchester City was able to win the game 3-1 using this style of passing and moving the ball. The largest discrepancy in stats was not the score, but the number of passes that Manchester City made in comparison to the visiting team. Manchester was able to score off of 679 passes compared to Plymouth’s 257 total passes, with their total possession of the ball being 73% of the game to Plymouth’s 27%. This coaching style has been proven to be the best by leading Manchester City to win multiple trophies in the eight years leading up to the 2024/25 season. Pep has led his team to make history with their four consecutive Premier League titles.
Over the last several years, several teams have modified their tactics to emulate Pep’s and Manchester City’s success. Arsenal in the Premier League, for example, hired a coach who had worked directly under Pep Guardiola in the past. Mikel Arteta was an assistant under Pep at Manchester City for three and a half years. Since taking the head coaching job at rival Arsenal, Arteta has come in second behind Pep and Manchester City in the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons, utilizing that same style of possession soccer. Like Guardiola, Arteta bases his coaching strategy on possession, player tactics, and discipline. He also brought players familiar with the style from Manchester City to Arsenal, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko. The influence of Pep’s coaching style is being seen through coaches’ and teams’ performances around the world.
Based on Manchester City’s and Arsenal’s team performances over the last several years, the superior results of Guardiola’s possession-based coaching style, compared to other styles, are hard to argue with. Pep Guardiola, who has won a record number of Premier League titles, has demonstrated that he is not only a quality manager but also has created a dominant style of soccer responsible for this success. At the start of the 2024/25 season, more teams had adopted this coaching style, and it has made the competition much tighter throughout the Premier League. Through the established results of both Guardiola’s and Arteta’s use of the possession style, it has become clear that it is the best and most effective style of soccer, and for good reason: you can’t win without the ball.
References
BBC. (2022, July 22). Arsenal sign Oleksandr Zinchenko from Manchester City on ‘long-term’ deal. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/62188094
BBC. (2022, July 4). Gabriel Jesus: Arsenal sign Brazil forward from Manchester City for £45mon long-term deal. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/61983873
BBC. (2025, March 1). Match stats. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/live/c3w1eg69v8pt#MatchStats
Bundesliga. (2023, November 4). Pep Guardiola: the Bayern Munich years. https://www.bundesliga.com/en/bundesliga/news/pep-guardiola-bayern-munich-years-barcelona-manchester-city-coach-catalonia-12008
Dawson, R. (2023, January 26). Pep Guardiola: Mikel Arteta didn’t want to wait for Man City manager job. ESPN. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/37635841/pep-guardiola-mikel-arteta-want-wait-man-city-manager-job
FC Barcelona. (n.d.). Pep Guardiola’s Barça. https://www.fcbarcelona.fr/fr/guardiolas-barcelona
Oatway, C. (2016, August 20). Guardiola: I want the ball for 90 minutes. Manchester City FC. https://www.mancity.com/news/first-team/media-watch/2016/august/manchester-city-transfer-talk-august-20
Premier League. (n.d.). Stats and records. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://www.premierleague.com/stats/records
Soccer Coaches. (n.d.). Mikel Arteta’s blueprint: Transforming Arsenal with tactical genius. https://soccer-coaches.com/mikel-artetas-blueprint-transforming-arsenal-with-tactical-genius/
Transfermarkt. (n.d.). Pep Guardiola. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://www.transfermarkt.us/pepguardiola/profil/trainer/5672
WorldFootball. (2023, May 28). Premier League: 2022/2023 results and standings. https://www.worldfootball.net/competition/co91/england-premier-league/se45794/2022-2023/results-and-standings/
WorldFootball. (2024, May 19). Premier League: 2023/2024 results and standings. https://www.worldfootball.net/competition/co91/england-premier-league/se52517/2023-2024/results-and-standings/
Stark Voices 