Brighton's season not only has them on the cusp of the Champions League, but has included impressive victories over Liverpool, Man United, and now Arsenal. But what is it about Roberto De Zerbi's team that means they give the so-called "bigger clubs" such a tough time?
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00:00 Hello there everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here and it is time finally to talk about
00:08 Brighton.
00:09 Just take a quick look at this table and the 11 players you see before you, don't worry
00:13 about these guys just yet, and acknowledge that you are in the presence of greatness.
00:18 Now the thing is, if I had said to you in September when Graham Potter had just departed
00:22 Brighton for Chelsea that come the end of the season, one of these two teams will be
00:26 the best thing to watch in the entire league, guaranteed European football just missing
00:31 out on the Champions League but still bloody in the noses of Arsenal and Man United on
00:35 the way, and the other would be an absolute clown car circling the drain and with the
00:39 season to go on for any longer, quite possibly going to get themself relegated, you would
00:44 have said, "Why yes of course, that sounds perfectly sensible and what I expect to happen
00:48 to these two teams."
00:49 Which of course it did, just the exact opposite way round and well, that's football baby!
00:55 So how then we all must ask, has Roberto de Zerbi gone and done this?
00:59 Well, the very short answer is, Roberto de Zerbi knows ball.
01:05 Right then chums, feast your eyes across this, Brighton's 4-2-3-1, which I admit it doesn't
01:10 really look like but just bear with me.
01:12 On the face of it, it's nothing particularly exciting, like both the centre backs stay
01:15 quite deep, the wide players stay quite wide, and the two Shetland midfielders just kind
01:19 of float around their own box.
01:20 But the thing is, if that sounds very passive and unexciting, that is the point.
01:25 You see, if you've been watching a lot of football this year, you will know that the
01:27 buzzword of the last 12 months is the high press.
01:31 Teams absolutely love it, don't they?
01:32 They want you to have the ball at the back, they want to kind of trap you in certain situations,
01:35 and they want to jump on you, win the ball back in dangerous areas, and create chances
01:39 really near to the goal.
01:40 Clubs Liverpool are like the poster boys for this kind of football, and because it was
01:43 so effective for them, loads of other teams try and do the same thing.
01:46 But what Roberto de Zerbi has done at Brighton, the thing I would literally give him a Nobel
01:50 Prize for, is he has gone, "Okay, I'm not going to try and beat your high press, that's
01:56 boring.
01:57 I'm actually going to try and manipulate your high press.
02:00 I'm going to turn it around on you."
02:01 And that is exactly what Brighton do.
02:04 No team in the Premier League, I dare say no team across Europe, is as comfortable having
02:08 the ball in their own defensive third, just casually knocking it about, inviting teams
02:13 to come and try and win it back, because that's what they want you to do.
02:17 If you would like some proof of this fact, just quickly ask yourself the question, which
02:20 player in the Premier League do you think has had the most touches of the ball this
02:25 season?
02:26 Rodri, perhaps?
02:27 A goalkeeper, maybe?
02:28 Virgil van Dijk?
02:29 All good guesses, but wrong, it's Lewis Dunk.
02:33 Yeah, Brighton spend so much time just knocking the ball about in this area that it means
02:38 Lewis Dunk has touched the ball this season more than any other player.
02:42 And it also means he's making and receiving more passes than pretty much anyone else in
02:45 the league as well.
02:46 Lewis Dunk.
02:47 Anyway, the reason for this, and allow me to just start putting another team here so
02:50 you can see what a high press sort of looks like.
02:53 The reason Brighton want to have the ball here and to invite the opposition on is because,
02:58 you will note, it leaves an awful lot of space here.
03:02 Now historically in football, if you wanted to have this kind of situation to exploit
03:05 the space in behind, what you would do is you would just defend very, very deep.
03:09 You would sit back, you would let the opposition have the ball, you would let them come onto
03:12 you as they're trying to attack, and then you would try and break really quickly into
03:15 the space behind.
03:16 And the reason for that is because counter attacks are a really good way to score goals.
03:20 A team has to go from its attacking shape to its defensive shape.
03:23 That takes time, that causes a bit of confusion, and in the transition, which is another word
03:27 you hear quite a lot in football now, in the transition between those two shapes, you can
03:31 make opportunities.
03:32 And you can make them a lot easier than if you are the team trying to do the breaking
03:36 down.
03:37 But the problem with that is obviously that to do it, you've got to then surrender the
03:40 ball.
03:41 You've got to sit really deep, you've got to defend, you've basically got to give the
03:43 other team loads of opportunities to score, hope they don't, and then try and get one
03:47 when you finally do win the ball back.
03:49 So what De Zerby and Brighton are trying to do, and please forgive me for how nerdy this
03:53 sentence sounds, is they are trying to artificially recreate the transitions from defending deep
03:59 by actually controlling the ball in deep areas.
04:02 So basically it's the exact same scenario as if they were defending, it's just that
04:06 they have the ball, not the opposition.
04:08 And when I say deep, I really do mean deep.
04:10 Brighton in their build-up phase will have as many as seven players pretty much on the
04:13 edge of their own box, as you can see here.
04:16 And that means that if a team really does want to get the pressure on and starts going
04:19 man for man, you can already see here, they have to commit six players to that as well,
04:24 which leaves a lot of space here.
04:26 Now, the only reason they can get away with this is because all six of these players are
04:29 excellent on the ball and they won't give it away in dangerous positions as much as,
04:32 say, other players might.
04:33 And also, the goalkeeper being good with his feet effectively means they have an extra
04:38 man here.
04:39 If Boggs, for example, tries to close down the goalkeeper, straight away, free man.
04:42 But doing this is one thing.
04:44 How it creates chances is quite another.
04:47 Now, both the wide players and the two attackers will tend to stay high to force the defence
04:50 back.
04:51 Not always, but we'll get to that in a minute, meaning that these six are quite isolated.
04:54 And the problem these seven players now have is that in order to confidently knock it around
04:58 in this area, you kind of have to be facing the play, which means the fullbacks will be
05:02 side on, the defensive midfielders will be facing their own goal, which is fine for doing
05:06 what they're doing, but doesn't enable them to play any forward passes.
05:09 Like, for example, let's say a passing lane opens up here.
05:12 The goalkeeper is then free to get the ball into McAllister, but because he's facing the
05:15 wrong way to receive that pass, the attacker can just get behind him, stop him getting
05:18 turned and his only options are square or backwards.
05:21 So what Brighton are trying to make happen is they're waiting for one player to leave
05:25 their man.
05:26 Let's again say this is McAllister and the man marking him decides he's going to press
05:29 the goalkeeper instead.
05:30 Now, teams that press are very good at doing this.
05:32 He will make sure that his run to the goalkeeper still blocks off the pass to McAllister, meaning
05:36 that he's not just leaving him open.
05:37 So what Brighton then do is they know they want to get the ball into him.
05:41 So it then becomes the job of another player to provide the bounce pass, let's call it.
05:46 Recognizing as a team that this is happening, the other defender, let's say that's Webster
05:50 or somebody, he'll make that kind of movement to drag the defender away, creating space
05:53 for the pass.
05:54 Caicedo will come short to receive it and then bang, he can't get turned and play anything
05:59 himself, but he can drop it off very easily to McAllister, who is now not only free of
06:03 his marker and in space, but facing the right way.
06:07 From there, he can either run it up the pitch, he can play one of these in, whatever his
06:10 little heart desires.
06:11 Here is just a brilliant example of them doing this to Arsenal.
06:13 The midfielder receives the ball, but his back's to goal, he's getting pressure, there's
06:16 nothing he can do with it, so he just goes back to the defenders.
06:19 They knock it about a bit before they realize that there's actually quite a lot of space
06:22 opened up on the left-hand side of Arsenal's defense and the fullback is perfectly primed
06:27 to run into that.
06:28 Now, they could play a long, inaccurate ball over the top end of the space and hope he
06:31 just wins the footrace, but that's not what they do.
06:33 Instead, one of the attackers runs fully 20 or 30 yards to show short for this pass and
06:38 he is the bounce that then puts the fullback in.
06:41 And it quite often will be the two attackers who drop deep as well.
06:44 It's not just all limited to this area of the pitch.
06:47 Sometimes you'll get whoever's playing up front and the number 10, they'll come right
06:49 the way back to get involved in the midfield to try and tempt the two centerbacks to go
06:53 with them.
06:54 And if they do that, that means that whoever's playing wide, either Matoma, March, whoever,
06:57 they're more than happy to then make a run directly into the center, into the space this
07:01 is left to receive a long pass from either one of the midfielders, the defenders, or
07:05 even the goalie.
07:06 Here's that in action against Leeds United.
07:07 They've got the ball in the middle of the pitch, not a lot's really going on.
07:10 Then bang, two players step up, create a little bit of space.
07:13 One player makes the run and he's in.
07:14 My particular favorite bit about how Brighton set up is there is a thing in football, which
07:19 you may have heard of, called pressing triggers.
07:21 And that's basically the term for a specific action that the defending team does, which
07:25 is the cue for the attacking team on mass to then really, really ramp up the press.
07:30 Now that can be really obvious stuff like a player miscontrolled the ball or he receives
07:33 it on his weaker foot, just moments where they're obviously going to be a little bit
07:36 more vulnerable.
07:37 But it can also be more subtle stuff like the defenders play a square pass across their
07:40 own box or someone puts their foot on the ball.
07:43 That can be the cue to try and get in their face.
07:45 But Brighton, and I love this, they deliberately do those exact things, things they think might
07:51 be pressing triggers to try and bait a more aggressive press out of the opposition, to
07:56 try and get them to leave more space.
07:59 You watch a Brighton game between now and the end of the season, you watch how many
08:03 times you see one of the defenders or the goalkeeper put his foot, his studs, directly
08:08 on the ball.
08:09 It's genuinely like, teams must have cottoned on to them doing this by now.
08:13 And he still occasionally will catch a player out and be like, "Oh, he's standing on the
08:17 ball, he's not set, he can't pass it, I'm going to give him a fright, I'm going to get
08:21 in his face.
08:22 You dope, you idiot."
08:23 That's exactly what they want you to do.
08:26 And that's why this always seems to work against the big teams, the teams who want to play
08:30 the game as much as possible in the opposition's defensive third.
08:33 They've beaten Liverpool with this, they've beaten Man United with this, they have, as
08:37 mentioned, slapped Arsenal across the face with a kipper with this.
08:41 It is specifically designed to give these teams nightmares.
08:45 And that's also why they got beat 5-1 off Everton, because Everton just refused to play
08:48 this game.
08:49 They did not want the ball at the back.
08:50 Every time they had it, they just lumped it long to give it back to Brighton to force
08:54 them to try and break them down.
08:55 Basically doing it the old-fashioned way of, "We'll just defend, and if we win the ball
08:59 back, then we'll just run it up the under end of the pitch and you can try and catch
09:02 us."
09:03 As ever though, I would love to know what you think of Brighton, so do let me know in
09:05 the comments below.
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09:16 Until next time though, I have been Adam Cleary, this has been 442.
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