Thread by @nonewthing

People don't get it. Modernized coaching and training programs that emphasize the collective in conjunction with a growing glut of good talent is bringing about an heyday of defensively compact teams at the top level.

TAA represents the solution to this evolution.

(a thread)

More accessible and better trained international pools of new talent is giving rise to a glut of top talent at the magnetic centre of the football marketplace: the European Top 5 leagues.

Compactness as the holy grail of defensive systems is also burning through coaching schools

As a result, unless a disruptive force comes into play, we will continually go on to have better coaches and better players at the highest levels. This in turn means better teams everywhere, such as can be currently glimpsed from the Premier League.

Better teams everywhere does

not mean more goals or necessarily more entertainment although it could, more specifically, it means better structures and better collectives than before, ultimately bringing about less goals.

Despite the rising glut of new talent in the global marketplace, top teams at the top

level do not have much more room to grow in terms of acquiring and using gamebreaking talent. Manchester City, for example, are not necessarily more talented than other great teams from the past. However, smaller teams have more room for talent.

Using the Premier League as an

instance, many clubs below tenth contain great talent that could potentially play at a much higher level than they currently do. It's a glut. The biggest teams in the world can't steal them all.

Although the EPL's talent collection is assisted by hyper financial growth, the same

will slowly begin to be true in other leagues and at other levels. With new talent pools opening up in previously inaccessible or dimly accessible locations all over the world and most of them gravitating towards the top leagues in Europe, there will be an 'overflow' of talent.

I believe that we are currently in the early stages of this and it will only become more and more prominent as time passes.

In conjunction with the rapidly improving state of knowledge flow in coaching (mostly due to technology improving the efficiency and broader transmission

of information to an increasingly wider pool of management talent), teams at the highest levels in Europe will begin to be better structured, coached and talented than ever before. Whether this leads to more goals will remain to be seen (it's dependent on the dominant tactical

approaches that are rife in general).

One thing it would surely lead to is better defensive structures and units, given the risk-averse nature of the sport at the competitive level (especially in management) and the disproportionate value of scoring events.

Teams will basically become more difficult to break down as the growth of the mid-level clubs in terms of playing and coaching talent rises higher than can possibly occur at the topmost level.

Superiorities generated via tactical structures are (to this author's perception) at a

peak: overloads don't get better, organization in possession doesn't get much better.

Attacking football at the highest level is currently at its peak.

But teams at a lower level will get better at defending for the aforementioned reasons.

Something about diminishing returns.

This will conceivably happen by a reduction in the time and space of execution high in opposition thirds. More compact sides resistant to overloads and better individual defenders overall.

The attacking solution to this will not be tactical. Rather, it will be qualitative.

Currently, most teams operate with the creators in advanced spaces in the opposition third but as those spaces become more rigidly patrolled tactically and by better defenders, diminishing returns will set in in general.

Creative value will drop from those advanced spaces.

The space and time for execution will go deeper. From the attacking thirds to deeper thirds. From the frontline to the rest defence.

As a result, direct creators from those deep positions will increasingly be more valued.

This theory currently explains the great success of

Trent Alexander Arnold and the Liverpool dynamic in extension. Liverpool often try to create from deep areas and succeed at doing so. In fact, a vital portion of their creative success against very compact sides have occurred with this dynamic. Examples are Diaz's goal against

Brighton and Jota's second goal against Arsenal in the league cup or Mané's goal against Bayern Munich.

This theory also validates Pep Guardiola's recruitment and team building approach of highly technical passers among his defenders. While their creation overall is not as

directly deep as Liverpool's, they have found plenty of value in creating from halfspaces and the deliveries of the likes of Fernandinho, Cancelo, Zinchenko from deep.

These two teams are the most evolved teams in the world. They basically already play in the future and their

use of deep creators have played a part in their relentless attacking success.

While Manchester City do not have a singular deep player with the consistently brilliant passing quality of Trent, in Ederson and their other defenders, they possess the accumulative quality.

Trent's capacity to so consistently access runners from deep areas is unusual and unique. It represents the next step of general attacking evolution.

More and more dominant teams will increasingly seek this specific quality among their defenders. While there are currently plenty

of good ball progressors from deep areas, the capacity to consistently access runners or final third options from deep is still quite rare at the top level. Even City have to acquire it in aggregate.

This capacity will become more pronounced in recruitment and coaching programs.

Right now, presently because of Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool are at the forefront of this evolution, which is obvious in their interest in a certain Calvin Ramsay, a fullback highly capable of striking the ball accurately across vast distances.

Preeminently, Calvin Ramsay is an 18-year-old playing in Scotland.

The talent glut is upon us and so is football's next turn in its evolution.

The future is upon us 🔥.

(End of thread. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it).

Unfortunately, I do not know why this is happening. Seems like it's only affected the ones with media attached.

@TwitterSupport why is this happening?

https://twitter.com/elonpackedme/status/1521518920439586816?t=6dWa8mrkuBodC-y0OuCBaA&s=19