Granite Pressing: the stats behind Thelin's Red Revolution
Granite Pressing: the stats behind Thelin's Red Revolution
A relentless mid-block, the most clinical finishing in Europe (I have proof) and more goalscorers already than in the entirety of 23-24. I'm here for Aberdeen
Adam Clery is FourFourTwo’s ‘tactics guy’ and has built a huge following with his insightful, clear-eyed analysis. The magazine’s YouTube channel - built around his digestible and hugely entertaining tactical breakdowns - now has 600,000 followers. We are delighted to welcome Adam as Nutmeg’s new monthly tactics columnist.
By Adam Clery
I went to Aberdeen once. People tell you that it’s a “uniquely miserable” place - mostly on account of the buildings being so grey that it looks somehow like they’ve died - but they’re missing the point. Collective misery in Scotland is never about the aesthetics, it’s purely about the football.
This time last season, Aberdeen were in free fall. They’d been dumped out of Europe by PAOK, drubbed 6-0 by Rangers and, in a move that I’m still convinced involved him losing some sort of bet with his wife, they’d have Neil Warnock in charge in a few short months.
“Let’s have fun!” he said at his unveiling. They didn’t.
Now, you may have heard about this somewhere already but just in case: they’re actually doing quite well this season. Ten league games, nine wins, second in the table and deservedly so, they’ve just spun Rangers FC like a Beyblade and sit a staggering nine points ahead of them. An unbelievable gap to have opened up before Aberdonian children had even donned their Ryan Jack masks and gone guising.
Within the circles of footballing tactical discussion (hello, fellow nerds!) the emergence of some exciting new team in a lesser-watched European league normally starts with adjectives like ‘revolutionary!’ or ‘innovative!’, and ends with a new term master-crafted to annoy your dad in the pub. If nobody’s gone with ‘granite-pressing’, ‘cullen-enaccio’, or ‘Jimi-taka’ yet, you can have those for free.
But what Jimmy Thelin has done, actually, is to boil football down to its simplest principles, and coached them into his players within an inch of their lives.
Defend as a unit!
Invite the opposition on!
Work it into the spaces!
All concepts you’ll see right the way down the pyramids to the muddiest, coldest Sunday league pitches, but ones that remain effective for a reason.
If you do want to get tactical then Aberdeen’s success comes from how well they go from their 4-2-3-1 in possession, to their 4-4-2 out of it. But where a lot of unfancied defensive solidity comes from dropping deep to restrict the spaces in behind - think Moyes, think Dyche - The Dons use it far more aggressively. Holding a shape so compact you could throw a signed Annie Lennox 8x10 over them, they stick rigidly to the middle of the pitch to swarm the opposition and regain the ball.
The mid-block is not without its risks, but the advantages are worth it
To use technical terms, this is a ‘mid-block’; the act of blocking both man and ball from progressing in the middle of the pitch. If a low-block is the same principle applied to the edge of your own penalty area, this is it with the confidence of about five pints. It’s not without its risks, and Celtic in particular profited twice from painfully simple balls, slipped down the flanks into the space left over, in that ‘is-this-actually-happening’ afternoon at Parkhead. But the advantages are worth it.
With so many players condensed in the middle of the pitch, Aberdeen’s ability to win the ball back high up increases. From there, you have what are known as ‘transitions’. When both sides are disorganised and pockets of space aren’t predictable, Thelin’s coaching has his players grafting to first get into those chaotic openings, and whoever’s on the ball is exploiting them.
Their winner against Rangers wasn’t a picture book example of this, coming as it did from a defended set-piece, but you can see how ingrained the ideas are.
Here, Rangers have cleared, but there’s no great panic to retreat and surrender the central area in fear of a counter, as four Aberdeen players swarm the loose ball. The resulting pressure forces a heavy touch, and they mop it back up.
But this here, this is the good stuff. Seeing that Vicente Besuijen has managed to isolate Dujon Sterling (brought on to offer an attacking option down the right, not a defensive one), left-back Jack Mackenzie knows two things.
1) Sterling doesn’t really want to be there
2) Besuijen being right-footed means Rangers are actively leaving the outside space wide open. They’re not properly set yet, the game is in… say it with me… transition.
He busts a lung to make an overlapping run, that no Rangers player has the foresight or the endeavor to stop, and puts in the cross that ultimately wins the game. Football’s really, really simple sometimes.
What’s helping more than anything though, is ruthlessness. Aberdeen trail only Celtic for goals scored in the league this season, but rank ninth - between Ross County and Dundee - in number of chances created. A goal every 0.51 shots on target is not only a simply staggering statistic, but one that puts them miles ahead of Celtic (0.31) and Rangers (0.27), as well as even Man City (0.31), Arsenal (0.32), Bayern Munich (0.39), PSG (0.34) and Real Madrid (0.26).
In fact, an extensive 30 minutes trawling the sort of sites that tell you this stuff (27 minutes closing the tabs of websites I can’t mention here because my mam might read it, three minutes actually checking) yields no team anywhere in Europe posting similar numbers. Only Sunderland, flying high on top of the English Championship, are even near them at 0.43. But no, you’re right, that’s not spectacular pub ammo.
What makes this even more remarkable is the source of these goals, and the fact it’s not being propelled by one mercurial striker grossly overperforming and dragging an otherwise average team up the league. Habib Gueye was fantastic before the injury that will keep him out until the New Year, but he accounts for only five of their 18 goals in the Premiership. Nicky Devlin’s strike against Rangers made it three for the season, and there are two each for Jamie McGrath, Kevin Nisbet, and Topi Keskinen.
Shayden Morris’s dramatic winner made him the 11th player to have contributed to this unprecedented clinicity, and the sixth time a substitute has managed to get on the scoresheet. In the entirety of last season they had only 10 different scorers, and five goals from substitutes. For the detectives amongst you, magnifying glass in hand and ‘hmmmmmmm’-ing at how all these different stats seem to be trending upwards, the answer is simple: Good Coaching.
It’s earned them a lot of points, and you’re regularly told in football that they win prizes. While a first league title since Alex Ferguson was wearing bootcuts still seems annoyingly fanciful, the prize that’s well within their sights now is Champions League qualification. It would require them to maintain this form until the end of this season to hold off Rangers and also carry it on into the next one as well.
Scottish Premiership runners-up face three rounds of qualification to enter Europe’s top-level competition, where the winners of the Croatian, Austrian, Greek and Danish leagues wait, as well as also-rans from France, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
Do all that, somehow, and you’ll never notice what colour all the buildings are.