Pep Guardiola’s Positional Grid: Team Training Exercises using the Positional Grid

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About Pep Guardiola’s Positional Grid: Team Training

Positional soccer provides a set of guidelines and structure for the attacking phase of the game. The positional soccer field is divided into vertical and horizontal zones that indicate positional responsibilities for the players. The interesting thing about positional soccer is that the player’s options to some extent are predetermined by the position of the ball. The central theme behind positional soccer is to create superiority of numbers in a specific area of the field, using mainly shorter range passing. If a team can fully shift the opponent by drawing them to one side of the field with short passing, the opportunity to attack the weak side becomes the objective. Guardiola spoke about this aspect of positional play saying, “the objective is to move the opponent, not the ball. The secret is to overload one side of the pitch so the opponent must tilt its own defense to cope. When you’ve done that, we attack and score from the other side. That’s why you have to pass the ball with a clear intention. Draw in the opponent, then hit them with the sucker punch.” The tactics Guardiola speaks about sound simple but in order to accomplish this way of playing, the team structure must be correct. Guardiola believed in order to build the proper team structure, the team would need to complete roughly 15 passes, this would fully create an attacking team shape. In tactical periodization this would be called the attacking organization phase. Once the teams positioning in attack was established, if they lost the ball, the players are already in a good position to press the ball to win it back. This is one of the important aspects of positional soccer that makes it so effective. The former Barcelona great, Johan Cruyff was asked, how do Barcelona win the ball back so quickly? He replied, “It’s because they don’t have to run back more than 10 meters as they never pass the ball more than 10 meters.” That statement alone sheds some light into the secret of positional soccer, with a