How Football Works: Attacking runs by centre-backs

This is part of the How Football Works series, a piece-by-piece look at the mechanics of the game

Gian Piero Gasperini’s Atalanta only go one direction.

“He wants to go forward. His first mindset is to go forward,” Marten de Roon once said of his manager. “If you go backwards, the other team has an opportunity to press us, to go forward and everything. They’re the ones who have to go backwards. We have to go forward.”

In the Europa League semi-final against Marseille, Atalanta’s left centre-back Berat Djimsiti turned a routine build-up pattern into something more dangerous by doing exactly that. Where most defenders would go backwards, he went forward — and it worked brilliantly.

The play started plainly enough, as Atalanta recovered an overhit long ball and swung the build-up around to Djimsiti’s left side. Seeing 20 yards of wide-open midfield grass in front of him, Djimsiti did what any modern centre-back would do. He dribbled up the half-space until Marseille’s Amine Harit stepped out of the midfield line to confront him, then safely laid the ball off to his wing-back, Matteo Ruggeri.

So far, so normal.

The next thing most centre-backs are trained to do in this situation is back up. A team-mate receiving against the sideline can get trapped and may need to recycle the ball quickly. By taking a few steps back and to the outside, Djimsiti would have offered a short, safe passing outlet and been in a position to provide defensive support if there was a turnover.

But instead of playing it safe, Djimsiti did things the Atalanta way: he kept going forward.

For anyone other than a centre-back, that might have been a normal tactical choice. Most players are coached from childhood to keep moving after they pass, taking advantage of the split-second lapse in attention as opponents turn to follow the ball to slip behind them and get free behind the next line.

What makes Atalanta different from most teams is that it’s not just their midfielders and attackers who pass and move through the lines. In Gasperini’s unorthodox 3-4-3 setup, the outside centre-backs are just another interchangeable component in the two wide, whirling diamonds that deconstruct defences with a constant flurry of runs and rotations. Even the defenders have to be ready to go forward.

When Djimsiti laid the ball off to Ruggeri, Atalanta’s left-side diamond was already busy rotating. As the centre-back continued his forward run, Teun Koopmeiners, the near midfielder, slipped underneath him into the now vacant supporting pocket, collected the ball from the wing-back and flipped it over the top with one touch to the streaking Djimsiti — who was, unsurprisingly, wide open in the attacking channel. Who’s even supposed to track a centre-back as he takes off on a striker run?

It was one of those weird patterns that work so seamlessly you start to wonder why every team doesn’t do it.

When you think about it, an underlapping run by an outside centre-back isn’t all that different from a full-back who passes straight up the wing and then cuts inside for a return ball. That’s a common pattern at the highest levels of the game. Real Madrid’s Ferland Mendy, for example, will often pass up the sideline and then cut to the inside to show for the ball on the underlap while clearing the supporting zone behind him for Toni Kroos to rotate into.

Yet with a few notable exceptions — the high-flying Alessandro Bastoni at Simone Inzaghi’s Inter Milan, for one — you don’t see a lot of that kind of pass-and-move progression from centre-backs.

Part of it is a mismatch of skill sets, sure. Even outside centre-backs in a back three are primarily defenders, slow and sturdy, not the sorts of players you’d generally prefer to have probing attacking pockets and running the channels. But that’s exactly what makes their forward runs so unexpected, throwing defences into confusion as they try to figure out how to cope with surprise forward runs.

The bigger problem is defensive coverage. The main reason most teams don’t throw centre-backs forward is the obvious one: no matter the attacking advantage, it’s usually a good idea to keep the core of your back line together in case you lose the ball, which even a very good attack tends to do before getting all the way to goal.

We saw evidence of that downside, too, in the first leg of the same semi-final against Marseille.

The play was similar to our first example. Once again, Atalanta recovered an overhit long ball in their half and switched the build-up to the left side. This time it was De Roon — normally a midfielder but lately a makeshift outside centre-back — who dribbled up the half-space and laid off the ball, though this time Koopmeiners cut across the front of the run rather than behind it and collected the ball himself before it could reach the wing-back.

Just like Djimsiti, De Roon continued his run out of the back into the attacking half-space, but in this sequence the timing was all off. “It’s like music,” Gasperini once said of his attack, “if you come in too late or too early.” Without an extra beat to let his centre-back get up the channel, Koopmeiners launched the ball directly to the striker, Gianluca Scamacca.

The pass was good but not quite good enough. As Marseille corralled the loose ball, De Roon arrived at the front just in time to overrun his pressing angle by a few yards, allowing them to play around him. Instead of staying home to cover for him in the back line, Koopmeiners had gone forward, too, and the resulting counter-attack was nearly disastrous for Atalanta.

This is the basic worry for centre-backs who would like to continue a forward run — not that they can’t contribute in the attack, but that whichever midfielder is supposed to rotate into their position in the back won’t offer the same defensive coverage.

For most top teams, that’s reason enough to keep their centre-backs back. The positional play that dominates at the top of the game right now prefers slow build-ups and sturdy rest-defence structures behind the ball to disruptive attacking runs and rotations ahead of it, for the simple reason that even the best attacks will fall short and they’ll need to win the defensive transition after a turnover. That’s hard to do when your best defenders are busy crashing the box.

But Gasperini’s Atalanta offer a glimpse of another, more carefree way to play, and for nearly a decade it’s been hard to argue with the results. No team in Europe’s top five leagues have outperformed their meagre resources more consistently than Atalanta, whose success depends on those spinning wide diamonds in which even defenders are free to follow their carries with forward runs, passing and moving through the lines.

As more top teams settle on a modern back five with fast, technical centre-backs and defensive midfielders who are primarily selected for their ability to cut out counters, the skill-based argument against these wide defensive rotations starts to weaken. Why shouldn’t Arsenal send their hybrid wide defenders bombing up the channel? Why can’t Manchester City use some defender-turned-midfielder, such as John Stones or Manuel Akanji, to pull across underneath a free-running centre-back, shoring up the rest defence?

As usual with Atalanta, they’re showing everyone a different way to play — and the only way they know is forward.

(Header design: Eamonn Dalton)