Saturday’s Clasico defeat to Real Madrid made it plain that Ronald Koeman has plenty of tactical issues to address at Barcelona, and perhaps the most urgent of those is sorting out the midfield.
From the fifth minute, when Fede Valverde ran unhindered into the penalty area to receive a pass from the unchallenged Karim Benzema to fire home the opening goal, it was clear that the visiting team were able to find space in front of Barca’s back four far too easily.
This, of course, is nothing new, because exactly the same problem was the root of the Catalan club’s infamous Champions League losses against Roma, Liverpool and Bayern Munich, but so far little has changed and top quality opposition are still able to expose and exploit the physical limitations of Sergio Busquets.
The veteran midfielder was conspicuous by his absence when Valverde raced through to open the scoring in El Clasico. Despite a starting position a couple of yards goal-side of Valverde as the build-up play started, Busquets left for dead by his far quicker Uruguayan adversary and did not even attempt to keep track with his surge into the box.
A few minutes later, Busquets was again nowhere to be seen when Toni Kroos ran onto a throughball from Vinicius Junior to tee up a good chance for Karim Benzema.
The same pattern was repeated throughout the game, with the home team’s defence failing to receive the adequate support from its midfield and leaving far too much space open for Real to create goalscoring opportunities – something they would have done far more regularly if their forwards, especially Vinicius Junior and Marco Asensio, had played better individual games.
And the sorry state of affairs culminated, of course, in Real’s third goal, scored by Luka Modric at a time when Barca had completely lost any kind of control of the space in front of their goal.
Considering this, it’s not surprising that a lot of the post-match criticism has focused on Busquets and his ongoing frailty. But it’s not fair to point the finger solely at Busquets, whose weaknesses are well-known and therefore should be, but are not, better covered by the team’s collective structure.
Koeman, we all know, favours a 4-2-3-1 formation, which should in theory give the necessary help to Busquets because it places Frenkie de Jong alongside his veteran teammate as a double-pivot in front of a back four, in the same kind of system that Busquets used to play alongside Xabi Alonso to great effect for the Spanish national team.
But it’s not actually working like that. Rather than playing next to Busquets to form a solid central platform, De Jong is consistently lining up towards the left-hand side – as shown by both his heat map and his touches map from El Clasico.
This is probably intended to cover for the forward runs of Jordi Alba, but it is quite simply not the positioning of a double pivot in a 4-2-3-1 formation, and looking at the shape of the team during Real’s chances and goals from this weekend’s games it is notable that the Dutchman, not only Busquets, was also guilty of failing to support his back four.
Another issue for Koeman to address is that the gap between the midfield and the back four is so great because central defenders Gerard Pique and Clement Lenglet hold such a deep line. If the midfielders are trying to support the forward line in pressing the opposition high up the field, but the defenders are dropping back towards their own goal, it leaves the midfield in an impossible position of needing to be in two places at once.
To maintain a compact shape, which denies space to the opposition, it is necessary either for the back line to push high up the pitch closer to the midfield and the forwards, or for the whole team to drop back in a low block towards their own goal. At the moment, Barca are doing both but neither, and comparing the average formation maps from Saturday’s Clasico make it obvious that Koeman’s team were much more open and left much more space than their adversaries.
So what needs to happen? Well, there is no single, simple answer, but Koeman does have a number of options.
Firstly, he could instruct Pique and Lenglet to push higher, therefore narrowing the gap between themselves and the midfield – but that might meet resistance from Pique, who likes to compensate for his lack of pace over the first ten yards but giving himself a safety cushion.
Or he can tell the midfield and forwards to drop deeper, essentially asking his team to become a low-lying counter-attacking side – something which could work well for Ansu Fati but not so well for Lionel Messi and Philippe Coutinho.
Koeman could also position De Jong more centrally, closer to Busquets, and go with a real 4-2-3-1 rather than the unsymmetrical hybrid we’ve seen so far.
He could also take the bold but probably necessary step of dropping Busquets, relegating him to the status of back-up, and promoting into the starting eleven Miralem Pjanic, a player who was signed for €65 million in the summer but has so far only been given a total of 104 minutes of football.
But whatever he does, Koeman has to do something. Because if he doesn’t fix the midfield, the rest of the team will never take shape either.
