On Sunday, Brighton will play host to Liverpool, and De Zerbi claims that his team is only operating at 30% of its ability.
Brighton has established itself as a model of how to handle player theft, but can they handle the theft of their ideas?
Since joining the Premier League, Roberto de Zerbi has had a significant impact on teams far beyond his own: Pep Guardiola described him as “one of the most influential managers in the last 20 years” before he had even been in England for six months.
In football, every big advancement has been made in response to an earlier breakthrough. The deep, low-block defenses used by Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benitez to win championships in Europe were exposed by Pep Guardiola’s tiki-taka, and Guardiola’s core philosophy was in turn countered by Jurgen Klopp’s aggressive pressing.
With his center-backs luring opponents into pressing them before passing around them, De Zerbi’s style of football allows him to defeat high-pressing sides. Guardiola’s admiration for De Zerbi was not just lip service; during the summer transfer window, he placed a strong emphasis on signing dribblers like Gvardiol, Kovacic, and Nunes because they can exploit an opponent’s press as a single player before breaking it.
De Zerbi’s flattery doesn’t end in England. In comparison to how De Zerbi expects Evan Ferguson and Danny Welbeck to play when they are paired together, Harry Kane mentioned how he and Jamal Musiala faced Manchester United as two number 10s last month
. Meanwhile, Paris Saint-Germain traveled to Newcastle on Wednesday night and attempted to play similarly to Brighton by passing the ball back and forth between their center backs in an effort to entice Newcastle into a press that would allow them to play. Sadly for Luis Enrique, PSG lacked the quality in the middle to counteract the pressure and the hold-up play further forward to overcome it. Let’s just say that Kylian Mbappe is not Evan Ferguson in this regard.
Thoughts can be copied, but they can also be dissected. Unai Emery, a man with no genuine ideology other than to act in opposition to the other person, enters the scene from stage left.The 6-1 thrashing of Brighton by his Aston Villa team last Saturday afternoon was a game-changing victory that was overshadowed by the VAR drama at Tottenham.
Actually, Emery built on Erik ten Hag’s initially disruptive style in Brighton’s 3-1 victory at Old Trafford in mid-September, sowing the seeds of this disaster. United really got off to a strong start in that match, shocking everyone by choosing a midfield diamond and switching up their pressure on Brighton’s center-backs. Brighton was unable to play through the middle of the pitch because United pressed in a front two with Bruno Fernandes in the back.
By moving his center-backs farther out when in possession, De Zerbi was able to generate the angles necessary to move around United’s triangular front three. And as is customary for United and their close to bovine midfield, they were unable to respond and subsequently soundly defeated.
However, the situation was different at Emery’s Villa. Their strategic method
To summarize, when the Brighton center-backs and goalkeeper had the ball, Villa pressed high in precisely the same formation as United, which clogged up the center and made Brighton play out wider. However, if this strategy succeeded against United, it failed against Villa because Emery’s team possessed greater vigor and tactical precision in the middle of the field.
Villa then collapsed into a 4-4-2 formation and pressed man-for-man when their high press failed, avoiding the overloads and player triangles that Brighton’s method relies on. Furthermore, once Brighton did manage to enter the final third, Villa’s midfielders shifted into the defensive position to once more avoid the kinds of numerical imbalances that make Brighton’s wide strikers so dangerous.
Due to this, Brighton was compelled to recycle
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