“Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is joyous football,” the late Johan Cruyff once said.
Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner whose sartorially splendid suits and temperament most resemble Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber from the Holiday classic Die Hard, is famously impatient. Chelsea have featured 12 managers under Abramovich’s helicopter ownership style, and that includes the relative stability of the first few years of the Abramovich era under the stern Jose Mourinho.
As such, the Cruyff quote resonated when Chelsea appointed Maurizio Sarri, the architect of Napoli’s joyous teams that barnstormed the usually stolid, somber Serie A from 2015 until last spring.
The time it takes to construct a team capable of playing beautiful, simple football made the appointment feel a bit uncomfortable and the concern with it obvious: would Sarri be afforded enough time to build the type of team he needed to not only win but to play the joyous football you hope for when you hire a manager like Sarri?
History tells us also that even if Sarri were given additional time, that’s no guarantee he’d succeed, The transition from Spain, Germany and Italy to the Premier League has swallowed up plenty of coaching talent since the Premier League’s rise to global footballing benchmark over the last two decades. But that’s doesn’t belie the central point, which is that to hire Sarri should be to commit to a long-term plan.
It took the Italian nearly 18 months to build a Napoli side that became one of the true joys to watch in the whole world in 2016-17, when Sarri easily won the award for Serie A Manager of the Year.
That team lost just four league games all season, playing a spectacular brand of attacking football not seen in Italy in ages, scoring 94 goals in 38 games, by far the highest tally in the league. That they did so despite the club selling star Gonzalo Higuain to Juventus the prior summer made the accomplishment all the more remarkable.
Sarri’s use of the diminutive wing forward Dries Mertens was particularly revelatory, as the Italian tucked Mertens in as a false nine with support from the likes of Jose Callejon and a rejuvenated Lorenzo Insigne and suddenly, Mertens, a role player most his career, couldn’t stop scoring and was Belgian footballer of the year. Mertens ability to play off Insigne, Callejon and a criminally underappreciated Marek Hamsik made Sarri’s system of quick, incisive attacks moving wide to central especially devastating– and deceptively, perhaps, made it look easy to set up.
In truth, it’s anything but that.
The system itself is wholly reliant on players who are comfortable with the ball in tight spaces. Waiting on opponents to press and then exploiting it with line-breaking passes means you get numerical advantages with pace, but it also means you make more errors close to your own goal. Watching this clip of Napoli executing Sarri-ball to perfection against Atleti is excellent because it exposes both the risks and rewards.
When countered properly, as we saw this weekend, the end result can be not just that a team wins the ball in dangerous areas with the invited pressure but that they turn it into consistent opportunities.
Sarri’s misuse of N’golo Kante, the world’s best defensive midfielder, has complicated his transition to Sarri-ball as has the continued struggles of Jorginho, the “other” lion of Sarri’s Napoli midfields, to adjust to life in the Premier League. But given time, he’d likely be able to address the dearth of creativity elsewhere on the pitch that has made life so difficult on Jorginho.
Which leads us to Pulisic, the wunderkind signed for 73 million dollars by Chelsea this January.
Forever insecure, American soccer fans wondered about the decision of Pulisic to move to a club culturally disinclined to allow young players to develop in London. The list of young starlets signed by Chelsea only to disappear into a star-crossed fog of loan after loan is long and its victims include the likes of Christian Atsu, Lucas Piazon, Danilo Pantic and Matt Miazga, among others. Even footballers who have become stars, such as Mo Salah and Kevin de Bruyne, found breaking through and attaining regular time at Chelsea difficult.
Of course, none of these players came with Pulisic’s resume or price tag, which meant a series or even single loan of the 20-year old American was never going to be likely. Further, with Willian and Pedro aging, there figured to be plenty of space for Pulisic to command playing time rather quickly after his arrival in London this summer. What’s more, the chance to play extensively for Sarri, who loves high, wide inside-out wingers in his system and who turned Mertens into a star and has seen Eden Hazard, another player with tremendous technique and talent on the ball succeed in his system, seemed a promising idea.
But what if Sarri loses his job before Pulisic even arrives?
Following Chelsea’s 6-0 defeat Sunday at the hands of Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, there are whispers that could happen as quickly as later this month, when the Blues complete a Europa League Round of 32 tilt with Malmö FF of Sweden.
The sheer size of Pulisic’s transfer fee suggests he’s not going anywhere and will receive every opportunity to break through, regardless of manager. But the idea that Pulisic could develop as a finisher and central playmaker while also thriving where he’s best on the wing seemed a concrete reality under Sarri. A new manager offers fewer guarantees, which, given his decreased playing time on a crowded roster that included burgeoning star Jadon Sancho, is partly why he was leaving Dortmund to begin with.
Is there light at the end of this tunnel of uncertainty? Perhaps.
Abramovich, should he opt not to sell the team this summer, famously hires good managers, even if he doesn’t keep them for a while. It isn’t like Chelsea are going to replace Sarri with Mark Hughes or Tony Pulis or another Premier League retread. Yes, if Pulisic blossoms from elite prospect to global star in London, he’ll likely do so under the watchful eyes of several talented managers- caretakers, if you will- instead of one cultural custodian. But history suggests he’ll be guided by someone with an impressive footballing mind.
Further, there’s a little secret about the Bundesliga that needs to be explained to fully understand the value of Pulisic’s departure. While Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund have an idea of how they want to play and a system, the league itself, as a whole, lacks much of a footballing identity beyond a host of teams that want to play counterpressing football. That a team with as few footballing ideas as Schalke, where Pulisic’s American teammate Weston McKennie plays, is consistently able to reach the Champions League from the Bundesliga is instructive.
By leaving Dortmund, Pulisic gets out of his comfort zone not just from a system standpoint, but from an opponent standpoint. He’ll see different things and have to react to a host of new challenges and tactical demands in a way that simply doesn’t happen to players developing in Germany. That’s challenging- and hints at why growing up as a young player in the Premier League isn’t for everyone. But there’s value in it– perhaps even more than getting the chance to play for Maurizio Sarri- even if that would bring us great joy.