Football is dominated now as it never has been before by a handful of superclubs. For many of them, winning their domestic title has come to be regarded almost as a formality. There are vast imbalances within leagues and that, of course, conditions the tactical approach teams take.
If you expect to win most games comfortably, everything becomes focused on attacking – which can cause problems for the superclubs on the rare occasions they come up against a team at around their level: they forget not merely how to defend, but also how to fight. The standard of defending has declined alarmingly among elite clubs, something that’s not just to do with a shift to a more attacking focus. In the eight seasons of the Champions League from 2009–10, 21 of 104 games in the quarter-finals or later finished with a winning margin of three or more; in the eight seasons before that, there were only eight. Never has a three-goal lead seemed less secure.
