Former Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca once wrote a thesis comparing the beautiful game to chess. Mixing his passion for tactics with his love of the strategy game, he believes the board can be divided like a football pitch and vice versa. As modern football continues to evolve, elite tacticians and managers are becoming more like chess grandmasters. The importance of off-ball work and innovative player roles is becoming the new meta to succeed at the highest level.<\/p>\n
One thing that a <\/span>grandmaster chess coach<\/span><\/a> will tell you is your pieces and your own movements are only half of the battle. The rest is about baiting your opponent into making moves that fall into your traps. In recent times, we have top teams in the Premier League and Europe take this mentality to how they play.<\/span><\/p>\n Nowadays, you\u2019ll see Mikel Arteta<\/a> set his side up in a predictable fashion. Every goal kick starts with the goalkeeper in the middle and two centre-backs spreading wide in an attempt to bait the opposition’s attackers into leaving spaces. This is akin to a chess move\u2014force your opponent\u2019s pawn into a position that leaves them prone to be picked off by the more mobile pieces. The Knight or Queen acts like the strikers or wingers who benefit from the press bait and turn the tide to pull their team forward.<\/p>\n One thing football managers have over chess grandmasters is in football, you can rethink player roles and innovate in ways that chess doesn\u2019t allow for most players. Even the greatest chess player can\u2019t change how a pawn moves, unlike Pep Guardiola<\/a> who has repeatedly managed to take previously static pieces and make them into active participants in the game.<\/p>\n To a degree, this is another aspect that was taken from chess, the best player has a use for every pawn, every knight, every queen. What we have seen from Guardiola over his career is a similar mindset, how can he turn his goalkeeper into a part of the attack, how can he best utilise full-backs, how can he best utilise wingers.<\/p>\n Arguably, the most famous example of this was with Manuel Neuer<\/a> at Bayern Munich. Here, the Spanish manager turned the goalkeeping position on its head, bringing the sweeper keeper idea to the forefront of football. He took a King like Neuer who is seen as the last line of defence, and asked him to do more, to become part of the baiting process, to help the offensive side of the mind games as well as adding another element to the defence by allowing him to rush from his goal to cut off attacks.<\/p>\n We also saw this in recent years with the innovation of the inverted full-back. It was akin to finding a new use for pawns, Guardiola saw a position often used to provide width and asked what if they were instead used to solidity in the middle. Such thinking would likely make him an absolute nightmare to play at chess as he\u2019s always thinking of new ways to use the pieces available to him.<\/p>\n One thing that major possession-heavy teams have started to do more and more often is focus on controlling and overloading the centre in new and distinct ways. This is another strategy ripped right out of chess where having the centre of the board is seen as key to achieving victory.<\/p>\n This has been done with the onset of the box midfield, a unit of two attacking midfielders, and two central midfielders occupying passing lanes in the centre of the park when in the attacking half. We saw Guardiola do this with the inverted full-back, turning Kyle Walker<\/a> and Nico O\u2019Reilly into pawns that occupy the middle along with a Kevin de Bruyne, Rodri, or Bernardo Silva<\/a>.<\/p>\n This was built on a little in 2025 by Maresca, a disciple of Guardiola, who used a diamond midfield at Chelsea. This saw him take what would be deemed a flank pawn and add it to the centre, he did so by using his left-back Marc Cucurella in the half-space on the left while his double pivot pushed one player up to join the attacking midfielder, providing three central pawns against the opposition back line and at least one further behind to recycle possession.<\/p>\n The box and diamond midfield, along with wingers staying wide was designed to pin back the opponents. A pawn or stronger piece can be used to prevent your opponent from controlling the centre, which we would have seen replicated on the pitch with a Jeremy Doku or now Antoine Semenyo staying wide to pin back the defenders and protect the box midfield.<\/p>\n Featured Image Credit<\/strong><\/p>\n Manchester City FC official photo<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca once wrote a thesis comparing the beautiful game to chess. Mixing his passion for tactics with his love of the strategy game, he believes the board can be divided like a football pitch and vice versa. As modern football continues to evolve, elite tacticians and managers are becoming more like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2013,"featured_media":669300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":true,"sfio_embed_code":"The Cheat Code That Only the Top Managers and Chess Grandmasters Have<\/h2>\n
Controlling the Centre – The Box Midfield<\/b><\/h3>\n