Which position would you say is now the most important in football? That’s a difficult question to answer for a team - or squad - sport where the form or performance of one player should have little effect on the fortunes of the team as a whole.
But allow me to argue anyway that it is the defensive central midfielder. Fans of a popular football management simulation game will know this position as the DMC. A tackler, a breaker-upper, a ball retriever, possession winner and passer to those with the ability to actually put the ball in the net. Nigel de Jong, Sergio Busquets.
If you agree with this point of view, you must also agree that - for the time being at least - this sounds the death knell for the traditional number 10 as we know it.
In the 2003/04 season, Arsenal’s ‘invincibles’ deployed a 4-4-2 formation:
Jens Lehmann
Lauren Sol Campbell Kolo Touré Ashley Cole
Fredrik Ljungberg Gilberto Silva Patrick Vieira Robert Pirés
Dennis Bergkamp Thierry Henry
Dennis Bergkamp, of course, operated as a withdrawn striker or number 10 and the support from Ljungberg and Pirés on either flank was crucial to the side’s attacking success. Patrick Vieira had licence to get forward but he actually scored fewer league goals (3) that year than his defensive cover Gilberto Silva (4).
So, those who dislike the rigidity that the 4-4-2 label suggests could convincingly argue that this side more often operated as a 4-2-3-1:
Jens Lehmann
Lauren Sol Campbell Kolo Touré Ashley Cole
Patrick Vieira Gilberto Silva
Fredrik Ljungberg Dennis Bergkamp Robert Pirés
Thierry Henry
Whichever way it’s labelled, the system’s attacking potency relied on a centrally creative force operating as a traditional number 10. That is, a player who is essentially a non-scoring striker who relies on support from wide players to create space for an advanced goalscorer, so that said number 10 can create goal scoring opportunities for the 3 other advanced players.
But then everything changed. José Mourinho arrived at Chelsea in the summer of 2004, with an approach that would eventually consign the number 10 role to the archives (for now at least). Eidur Gudjohnsen did play an important support role to Didier Drogba, with Frank Lampard and Claude Makélélé operating as a midfield two, in Mourinho’s first two title winning seasons in charge.
However, the desire to establish success on a foundation of defensive solidity was there from the start and it was Makélélé’s deeper role that would define Mourinho’s ideology in the long term, not Gudjohnsen’s. Who now do you think is the first name on Chelsea’s team sheet? Without question, it’s Nemanja Matić.
This shift has signalled the end of the number 10, whose place is now out wide or in the centre of midfield. For these square pegs, fitting into either round hole requires superhuman levels of restraint of their natural instincts, something Wayne Rooney and Santi Cazorla know all too well. Eventually, as the players born in the 80s and early 90s end their careers, we will watch a generation of footballers for whom Mourinho’s system is the norm.
Indeed, the early Mourinho acquisitions hinted at this eventual abandonment of the number 10 in favour of the defensive protection afforded by a holding midfielder. The attacking threat in this system relies instead on two quick wingers as well as two central midfielders for whom strength, fitness and scoring prowess are of paramount importance. Those recruits included Essien, Robben, Kalou and Mikel.
This is now the dominant tactical approach in European football, deployed by the vast majority of the continent’s elite club sides. And so I arrive, in typically laboured fashion, at my point. The most obvious tactical casualty of the first Mourinho Chelsea era was Joe Cole. Cole grew up during a boom era for the number 10, the days of Gascoigne, Baggio, Zola and (later) Riquelme and Zidane. Cole’s natural position is through the middle, where he is given a ‘free’ role behind a goalscorer.
Cole is not a winger. He has never been blessed with terrifying pace and crossing was never a strong point. He is a ‘playmaker’ in the traditional mould, somebody who beats opponents with skill and technique rather than pace, using vision to make a perfectly weighted five-yard killer ball rather than one who routinely delivers devastating whipped crosses from the flank.
At Chelsea he fell victim to Mourinho’s system and languished out wide (when used at all) before eventually joining Liverpool on a free transfer in 2010. He also, unfortunately for the so-called ‘Golden Generation’, suffered the same fate for his country.
"The manager said I would be playing in a more central position and, having those fast players in attack and around me, I feel like I can supply them with the bullets and get them the ball in the final third."
Joe Cole upon signing in June 2014 for Aston Villa,
his 4th club in as many years.
As an Arsenal fan, then, it is difficult for me to observe Arséne Wenger’s misuse of Mesut Özil; a playmaker. Özil’s assist record prior to joining Arsenal for £42.5m in 2013 was well documented. So why did Wenger sign him? He doesn’t fit into the system that Wenger now plays (the Mourinho way) and the Frenchman has proved time and time again that he’d rather use talented players out of position than adapt the set-up to suit the strengths of key players.
In 2003/04, Henry, Bergkamp, Vieira, Ljungberg and Pirés were all operating at an astonishing level. But this was because the system suited their natural strengths. They were allowed to do what they were good at.
Mesut Özil is never going to be the player that justified a £42.5m price tag while he’s played on the left. And it’s frightening to think that we might lose him in a season or two when the frustration becomes too much. And that a side with a less stubborn boss who’s willing to use tactics to get the best out of his players’ natural abilities - rather than to suppress them - would benefit. At a hugely reduced price too, no doubt.
I don’t think for a second that Özil’s career will flounder the way Cole’s has since Mourinho first joined Chelsea in 2004. Cole was 23 when that happened. He was 29 when he finally left west London. Özil is now 26. He is a World Cup winner and his assist record to date already eclipses any single, comparable statistic of Cole’s. But it would be a shame for Arsenal fans if his stay in north London is a brief and unhappy one.