My heart is like a wheel
Falling in love all over again with Atalanta's whirling center backs
Stuff I’ve written lately
How Football Works: Wide rotations to disrupt defensive structure
How can you tell if a football manager is actually good at their job?
Why progressive actions are football’s most important metrics
The signature passing moves that explain why this Premier League title race is so close
Erling Haaland is not in crisis – but the Man City striker is human after all
I woke up this morning thinking about Plato’s Symposium. If it’s been a while since your sophomore intro to philosophy, that’s the one where a bunch of dudes get drunk and give speeches about love. The most memorable speech comes from the drunkest dude, Aristophanes, who says that in the beginning, humans were eight-legged androgynous ball-creatures:
The form of each human being as a whole was round, with a back and four sides forming a circle, but it had four arms and an equal number of legs, and two faces exactly alike on a cylindrical neck; there was a single head for both faces, which faced in opposite directions, and four ears and two sets of pudenda, and one can imagine all the rest from this. It also traveled upright just as now, in whatever direction it wished; and whenever they took off on a swift run, they brought their legs around straight and somersaulted as tumblers do, and then, with eight limbs to support them, they rolled in a swift circle.
These Vitruvian blobs were “terrible in strength and force,” so, naturally, being Greek, they “had high thoughts and conspired against the gods.” To cut them down to size, Zeus chainsawed them right down the middle, condemning us four-limbed modern humans to spend our lives running (not rolling) around in search of our other half.
Ah, romance.
Now I’m not saying everything is about soccer, but maybe the wheel people came to mind because I’ve been watching some Atalanta ahead of today’s Europa League final.
Four years ago, in one of the very first posts on space space space, I wrote about how Gian Piero Gasperini’s soccer is built on two wide diamonds where players rotate like the tires on some deathtrap Italian motorbike, spinning opponents in circles as they zoom downhill toward goal. This includes the center backs on either side of Atalanta’s back three, who aren’t afraid to bomb forward into the final third when they spot a good space to arrive in.
Today’s How Football Works is about how center backs find those spaces by continuing their run after a carry:
For anyone other than a centre-back, that might have been a normal tactical choice. Most players are coached from childhood to keep moving after they pass, taking advantage of the split-second lapse in attention as opponents turn to follow the ball to slip behind them and get free behind the next line.
What makes Atalanta different from most teams is that it’s not just their midfielders and attackers who pass and move through the lines. In Gasperini’s unorthodox 3-4-3 setup, the outside centre-backs are just another interchangeable component in the two wide, whirling diamonds that deconstruct defences with a constant flurry of runs and rotations. Even the defenders have to be ready to go forward.
When they work, Atalanta’s center back rotations are godlike. There’s an example in the article where Berat Djimsiti receives a sideways pass in his own half, dribbles forward a little bit, lays it off, and a few seconds later he’s receiving in the box before Marseille can figure out who’s supposed to track a central defender on a striker run. Is it safe? Hell no, but it’s a lot of fun.
This is soccer the way it’s supposed to be: not individuals playing positions but a team playing with space, neither defenders nor attackers but some indeterminate third thing hurtling at you like an eight-legged freak. I think I might be in love.