Hansi Flick and Roberto De Zerbi are both coaches who heavily emphasise '3rd man connections' to progress in attack.
But, despite this shared feature, it'd be very unusual (I'd say inaccurate) to propose that the play styles of Flick & De Zerbi are particularly similar.

Why?
The 3rd man (of which there are many variations: up-back through, escadinha etc) is a PLAYING CONCEPT.
There are many (infinite?) different playing concepts: 1-2s, find the free man, diagonal dribble/pass, underlap, overlap, double movements, parallels etc etc.
Graphic @jatowens

When I’m judging the ‘risk aversion’ of a team/coach the main thing I’m looking at is how often they’re willing to enter into and combine through the opponent’s defensive block.
If we’re gonna use metrics to try to identify ‘risk-aversion’ then these are what I’d point to. Risk-averse possession coaches like to use positional structures to ensure safe ball possession until moments when the opponents get tired, lose concentration and gaps appear.
These teams are excellent at recognising these moments and then accelerating into an attacking pattern.

Positional Play experts often explain that, for them, football is a matter of space and time.
But, as @xThomas_Nail explains, this framing relegates 'movement' to a location inside the jurisdiction of overriding spatio-temporal configurations with their own universal laws.
Relationist logic rejects this framing and proposes that movement itself is primary and that any definitions of 'space' or 'time' are generated from the dynamic interactions of movement.
Movement comes first, movement is primary.
Space and time are results of movement.

I don't think the problem is that 'tactics' are introduced too early.
The problem is how we define 'tactics'.
For a long time now popular discourse has pushed a version of 'tactics' which is heavily weighted towards bird's eye view structures, shapes and pre-planned patterns.

https://twitter.com/WeAreTheOverlap/status/1853769427524747314

For me, 'tactics' occur at the perceptual level.
Eg - people will talk endlessly about a concept like halfspaces without acknowledging that the strategic benefits of playing through a halfspace come from how the game appears in the player's perceptual field.

In simple terms its just emphasising certain diagonal ball progressions.
Or, as @MartinRafelt put it in his recent @spielvercom seminar, 'get the ball diagonally as far as possible'.
Obviously this has a lot of implications for communication/dynamics/interactions between players.

https://twitter.com/_ToddBeane/status/1822588491542266003

“my objective is to reach a professional team and not do tactics…’tactics’ as they are understood train the coach more than the players”

- Jordi Lie @jordifdezlie, Director of Methodology at Venezia FC, ex La Masia.

Interview with Martí Cañellas @martict99 It’s an incredibly exciting moment in football tactics as a radical rejection of the current paradigm is growing in influence.

Increasingly we are seeing leading coaching practitioners shift away from birds-eye-view, chess-like, positionally structured ideas of ‘tactics’.

There's quite a lot here so I'll address Todd's points as clearly as possible. 🧵

Relationism does not claim 'random positioning is creativity'.
Relationism refers to how a team organises in a non-zonal attack.
Positional Play refers to how a team organises in a zonal attack.

https://twitter.com/_ToddBeane/status/1788893466161987959

For clarity, here is Guardiola explaining some of the requirements and references which guide organisation in the Positional (Zonal) attack.

Here’s something which I struggle to understand:
In the defensive phase we are happy to talk about zonal and non-zonal approaches (and mixtures between the two).
Why then, are so many people unable to observe/comprehend differences between zonal and non-zonal attacking?


Once you can identify these distinctions (tactical analysis) it becomes possible to conceptualise and implement hybrid systems.
Of course, hybridity and mixture are impossible if you don’t start with at least two fundamentally different Ingredients.

I think it’s worth exploring this a little more.
If you are ‘adapting player’s ineffective natural positioning tendencies’ doesn’t that mean you are imposing some idea of what is better or more effective? This is fine, but what is your idea of ‘better positioning’ based on?

https://twitter.com/ijasport/status/1670803297169555459

It’s obvious that different coaches/players have different beliefs about what ‘effective positioning’ is in any moment. Eg while Pep prefers wingers to stay high and wide, Diniz often prefers the winger to move over to the opposite side when the team have possession there.

“To make players understand the positional attack, which in my point of view is the most important: make players understand that by not intervening, you are helping. By not intervening, you are helping. And this is very hard to understand even in very top-level players".

https://twitter.com/gauravanlyst/status/1660286338623578113

‘And why, why?’
“Because players want to be protagonists. To tell a player: you now stay open and in 3 minutes you are not going to touch the ball, but it will eventually come, or maybe not and you have to wait more, but you have to wait there because that means that you are…

I’m happy to see Diniz and the Functional/Relationist style go mainstream.
There have been, and still are, many who dispute whether this style even exists.
If you’re interested in what @RorySmith wrote, I’d point you to these articles by @Jozsef_Bozsik, myself and others ⚽️❤️👇

https://twitter.com/nytsports/status/1631693394589122563

medium.com/@stirlingj1982…

The 4 articles through which the concepts of Positionism & Relationism are developed.

⚽️FERNANDO DINIZ VS THE MAN-MACHINE
⚽️STOP MAKING SENSE
⚽️THE POSITIONIST
⚽️YEAR ZERO

medium.com/@stirlingj1982… medium.com/@stirlingj1982…

Rai in Tele Santana’s Sao Paulo (1992)

Toco y me voy (I play and I go)

Oscar claims the Functional style is 'less structured' in comparison to the Positional.
This claim is useful to analyse because it goes right to the heart of the discussion surrounding the topic.
That is to say, we are dealing with our fundamental understanding of STRUCTURE.

https://twitter.com/ohr75/status/1630205888874139654

In the Positionist paradigm, structure is recognized by a pattern's adherence to certain fixed principles.
The principles are anchored to classical geometric logic, rationality and linear order.
In football this manifests in aspects like standardised spacing and zonal occupation

I’ve written a lot about Positionism and Relationism in terms of systems and structures.
But this is only a macro-analysis.
At the micro level we need to understand the differences in terms of how the players on the ground are interpreting concepts like ‘ball progression’. For example, a Positional coach like Xavi wants his advanced midfielders or ‘interiors’ to occupy the ‘squares’ between the opponent’s players/lines (the subtitles say ‘occupied by the ball’ but it’s a mis-translation).

Even the most radical Relationism does not mean the players just 'do whatever they want'. This is a misunderstanding of the concept.

Here the short pass is available. The receiver has scanned and gestures for the pass with the right hand. There are connections ahead on the left. The pass is rejected and the ball is played back. Diniz holds out his hands and leans back in exasperation. Important to note that the preferred receiver is not 'between lines' or 'behind opponent's line of pressure'.
He actually has 2 guys arriving to pressure him from behind.

The article has now received numerous criticisms on the grounds that Positionism & Relationism creates a ‘dichotomy’ which is apparently needless and problematic for our understanding of football. This is not the case. 👇

https://twitter.com/stirling_j/status/1613478014725099520

The distinction between Positionism & Relationism is no more a needless dichotomy than that which exists between Zonal and Man2Man defending (a distinction that has existed without issue in football for many decades).

This is tactical analysis of the highest level by @JBozsik3

An analysis which does not abstract the game away from the material reality in which it is embedded.

This is meta-tactical analysis - CosmoTactics.

A nice description of Positionism from Camilo in his thread.
The concept of ‘uncertainty’ is very important in appreciating the differences in approach.
The idea that uncertainty should be actively reduced is based on the assumption that uncertainty is a negative aspect.

https://twitter.com/camilosperanza/status/1599767284137934849

We’ve heard coaches like Guardiola describe how uncertainty/chaos etc is not a good thing and the idea of the coaching is to reduce these uncontrollable aspects.
This is why so much of Positionism is based on pre-designed structures and repeated patterns of play.

The main issue I have with Positionism is the idea that it is somehow the ‘correct’ way to play possession football.
Here John Muller describes the symmetry and uniformity of Spain’s play as ‘perfection’.
Maybe John simply means it is perfect Positionism, not perfect football.

https://twitter.com/johnspacemuller/status/1595460459750105089

Positionism is often trained without opposition.
This is because the pre-planned positional structure and distribution plays a primary role in dictating which actions, connections and sequences will take place during the game.