There isn’t enough deception in football tactics.
There are the ‘dark arts’ of defending, the dummy and the no-look pass. But where are the Trojan horses, the tactical decoys?
Players are getting more versatile all the time and (most) managers are too, regularly changing formation between matches and within them. In fact, a lot of managers these days would reject the idea of the formation.
But there are still basic differences between, say, the 4-3-3 and the 3-4-2-1, and although a lot of coaches are comfortable switching it up based on the game state – moving to a back three to see out the final few minutes of a 1-0 lead, for example – nobody changes formation early in a game.
And nobody is doing it to fool the other manager.
Imagine two teams lining up in similar 4-3-3s, with touchline-hugging wingers and two number eights in front of a defensive midfielder. For the first 10 minutes they feel each other out, getting used to their opponents’ patterns.
Then all of a sudden one team swaps to a 3-4-2-1. The wingers disappear, the three-player triangle in midfield becomes a box-shape four, and the other side has to scramble to keep up.
Five minutes later, they change back again. Or switch to a third system entirely. It would be chaotic, but the team who planned the switches in training would have a huge advantage in those frantic few minutes of adaptation.
And it could have a huge impact on the game because, at the risk of getting highfalutin, it would require a new way of thinking about time.
Currently football people only think about time in quite a limited way: how long we have to hold on to the lead, when the first substitution should be made, when to throw the kitchen sink.
Time is an attritional dance with the other team, something we react to, the variable that slips through our fingers.
Decoy formations would require breaking up the game into chunks of time and planning each segment. Once we start thinking this way, the 90 minutes could feel longer and richer – something to seize and control.
