Arrigo Sacchi
Hat tip to Maciej for this interview with Arrigo Sacchi, the prior Italian and Milan's coach, published today by the U.K.s The Guardian.
Team unity: playing as one.
"... It is not a question of 4-4-2 or 4-2-1-3, it is a question of having a team which is ordered, in which the players are connected to one another, which moves together, as if it was a single player," "Today few teams know how to do this. Few teams work as a unit – few, really few teams. They are all made up of little groups. There is no great connection, nor a good distribution of players around the pitch.
"Barcelona has this. You saw it against Manchester United [in this year's Champions League final], this was the big difference between the teams. One was very much a unit, all 11 players were moving as if they were one. The other was moving as individuals who happened to be in proximity to one another. ...."
"He thumps his fist into the table as he lays out his vision of how the game should be played, espousing total football concepts of a team who attack and defend as one. "You see defenders today who follow an opponent everywhere," he protests in one of his more heartfelt monologues. "The defender's point of reference should never be his opponent but a team-mate.""
Specialization is Bad
"What Sacchi found in Italy's youth teams disgusted him. "I see kids who are 14 or 15 years old who are already specialists. But football is not a sport of specialists," he says. "I was watching the under-15s the other day – 14-year-old boys – and the central defenders arrived and all they did was mark their man. They took themselves out of the game. This is suffering, this is not joy, this is not football. If someone does just one thing over and over, they will get better at that thing. But is football just one thing?"
Opening up to different ideas
"But to achieve such goals a new generation of coaches is required and it is here that Sacchi's most radical and most strongly held beliefs come to the fore. Having never gone higher than the amateur ranks as a player, Sacchi believes fiercely that it is time football opened itself up to the idea of more non-footballers becoming coaches, citing the examples of José Mourinho and Zdenek Zeman as supporting evidence. As he famously put it when questioned during his own coaching career: "I never realised that to become a jockey you needed to be a horse first."
"I would let everyone – from pharmacists to porters – any person – become a manager. This way, in my opinion, we will end the domination of a single way of thinking. Instead we will have a thousand different ways of thinking. The more thoughts you have, the more you can grow."
Foundations
"When you build a skyscraper, you make really strong foundations – if you don't make the foundations you will never see the skyscraper," he says. "If you build a shed, you don't need those foundations but it will never be an important building.
The Need to Win: LTPD!
"... where the need to produce immediate results has led to a suspicion of youth. "When teams lose two games they sack the manager," says Sacchi, noting how fans will even go so far as intimidating the directors in order to affect a change of coach. "There is a great tension, a great pressure from the press but even more from the fans, a great violence.""
