How Positional Play is overrated and underused: An Arsenal case

When Arsenal played their first-leg match against Olympiakos in the Europa League, they overloaded the ball-sided half space by inverting the winger, moving both pivot players closer to the ball, with one dropping next to their centre back and the other occupying the centre. Despite Mikel Arteta being influenced by the Spanish game and being Pep Guardiola’s ex-assistant coach, these described movement patterns don’t follow the strict rules of Positional Play. This concept also happened during the North London Derby which we will analyse.

What is Positional Play?

I won’t describe the whole idea, because we’ll be here until the Pandemic is over but the basic idea is how to fill certain spaces on the pitch in a pre-defined matrix.

Depending on the coach, the positional play grid is split into four, five or seven vertical lanes e.g. Heynckes has four, Guardiola five. It doesn’t matter how you set this up but all of them have basic rules on where to position a player in a team contextual set-up.

The most common rules are:

• No more than two players in the same vertical lane at any given moment
• No more than three players in the same horizontal lane at any given moment
• All lanes have to be occupied

More and more teams are using the seven-lane grid because it’s less difficult to rotate in between zones which is why we’re…