I’ve been doing a lot of chess puzzles lately. Actually, I can be more precise than that. Since June 13, 2022, when I wrote a long profile of Christian Pulisic, a full-time chess player with a lucrative soccer hobby, I’ve completed 3,982 puzzles on chess dot com — an average of 6.5 every day, seven days a week, going on two years now. The app says that comes out to more than 36 hours of my one wild and precious life spent solving chess puzzles, which honestly … feels low?
I’ve learned a few things in that time. One is that I still sort of suck at chess. But to the extent that years of practice have made me a better player, it’s mostly been about learning to appreciate the principle behind almost all chess puzzles: tempo.
That’s what I wrote about in today’s How Football Works:
When we talk about tempo in football, we usually mean it in the musical sense. Teams can ‘control the tempo’ with a largo passage of circulation or ‘push the tempo’ with an allegro fast break (not to be confused with an Allegri fast break, which involves glaring dourly from the sideline while Weston McKennie has unauthorised fun). That’s not the kind we’re talking about here.
The tempo that matters for pressing tactics is a technical term from chess, where it means, essentially, earning an extra move. “When a player forces their opponent to make moves not according to their initial plan,” explains Wikipedia, “one is said to ‘gain tempo’ because the opponent is wasting moves.”
Even though football isn’t turn-based like chess, this can be a useful way to think about how pressing works. If you can close down an opponent and force a sideways or backwards pass, you gain a tempo — they’re reacting to you now instead of the other way around.
More importantly, you’ve limited the other team’s options in a way that allows your team-mates to anticipate when and where the ball will go next. A good high press sends players forward in waves so that a marker is always arriving at the next receiver at the same time as the ball, stringing together tempi to drive the attack back and seize the initiative for the defence.
Some of my favorite passages of play start from a compact mid-block, as if the defense isn’t interested in pressing high at all, but the moment they see a chance to trap the ball against the sideline the press springs to life and streams forward in synchrony, jumping at triggers, anticipating passes, and winning tempo after tempo to force play all the way back to the box.
Tarrasch once called tempo “the soul of chess.” I think it might be the soul of pressing, too.
Over the last six years or so, as the German pressing craze and the dominance of Spanish positional play have put a premium on press resistance and organized buildup play, we’ve started to see less pell-mell high pressing and more of this patient, opportunistic kind. It’s been fun to watch.
In the article I took a look at how Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid — who have always been sneaky good at pressing out of a mid-block — did it well against Inter last week in the Champions League. Dortmund scored a goal from it against PSV. I also wrote about how Man City tried and failed to do it against Chelsea when their press couldn’t execute fast enough to keep Axel Disasi from getting on the ball facing play, winning the tempo back for the buildup and producing some killer attacks.
Hope you’re having a good weekend getting out in the sunshine with people you love. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got chess puzzles to do.