‘Find me players who can dribble’: Cherki, Ait-Nouri, Reijnders and Guardiola’s desire for ball-carriers

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Shortly after the arrival of Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s 100-plus battalion of global scouts assembled in the same room to discover the special ingredients he looks for in a player.

It was his first address to the recruitment staff but rather than a list of tactical intricacies, his message was surprisingly unvarnished.

“It’s simple, guys, find me players who can dribble. I will do the rest,” was the gist of it, before he entered into the more layered details.

That was in 2016. He had recently worked with two direct wingers in Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery at Bayern Munich, having nurtured Lionel Messi into the best player in the world by placing his dribbling ability front and centre of his Barcelona team in the false-nine position.

Guardiola as a constrainer of creativity was not a mainstream theory then, but Manchester City’s dominance over the past nine years has greased those wheels.

It is regularly claimed that his football is incompatible with individualism and sidelines the art of dribbling, and that he has spread this illness in the game. 

Jack Grealish, who has been left out of City’s squad for the Club World Cup, has become the poster boy of this accusation since he joined from Aston Villa in 2021 for £100million ($141m) and transformed from a roving maverick to a wide possession retainer.

Guardiola has spoken of what he values in dribblers (Photo: Andrew Matthews/PA Images via Getty Images)

To some, he represents the robotic nature of Guardiola’s positional play. To many of those who have worked with him, they see it as a myth that has been perpetuated without understanding the nuance of what makes his genius.

His message to the scouts was to find dribblers because he primarily views his role as a coach to be responsible for strategising how his team work the ball into the final third, as Thierry Henry outlined on Monday Night Football, citing his experience of playing on the left wing under Guardiola at Barcelona. 

“The first time he took the team, he said to us, ‘My job is to bring you up to the last third, your job is to finish it’,” Henry said.

Guardiola laughed at the idea he is against dribbling in an interview last season. “If your quality is there, dribble,” he said.

“I will tell you when (it) is better to do it and try to provide Jeremy Doku, through our game, chances to use his dribble as much as possible. This is my job. You get the ball in the better conditions with more space to control and dribble your opponent.”

This requires elite one-v-one dribblers but, having moved away from that model in the treble-winning season of 2022-23 when he deployed a mix of Grealish, Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden in wide areas, Guardiola is recruiting more and more dribblers into his team.

Rayan Ait-Nouri’s biggest strength is his ability to receive under pressure and skip past a player in either direction, so much so that only 10 players attempted more take-ons than the left-back did for Wolves last season in the Premier League.

Rayan Cherki is like a street footballer in how expressive he is and how many tricks he throws in, which is why no player in Europe’s top five leagues last season created higher-value opportunities for their team-mates last season per 90 minutes.

Tijjani Reijnders is so adept at driving through the middle of the middle of the pitch that only Lazio’s Matteo Guendouzi made more forward carries of 10 metres or more last season in Serie A.

Add to that Phil Foden, Jeremy Doku, not the most efficient but arguably the most jinky and explosive dribbler in the game right now, and Matheus Nunes, whose ball carrying was the standout trait that won him a move from Wolves, and there appears to be a tilt towards ball-carriers.

The graph below shows how City have recruited some of Europe’s most direct dribblers of the last few years. Doku is in a world of his own in terms of how many take-ons he attempts each game, averaging over 10, and how many times he enters the box with the ball, averaging over six.

Savinho and Cherki are in the cluster of players below him but what does it tell us about how Guardiola views the tactical changes he is facing in the Premier League and what does that tell us about the next edition of Manchester City we are about to see? “Pep said to me, ‘When you have the ball, you are free’,” Cherki said after signing.

He has shown the ability to re-imagine his teams both tactically and physically, shape-shifting several times.

When Guardiola arrived, inviting the press to play through the opposition was new to English football. Two wingers providing the width for the team had always been a key principle of his teams and the opposition taking the bait meant that when they found Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane, they could take advantage of the space left in behind given their pace and dribbling ability.

Teams adapted and low blocks began to be the main tactic used against City. It created the necessity for more small-space players who could play their way through this mass of bodies. Riyad Mahrez could straddle both genres but two of Grealish, Foden and Silva were often used to provide a more surgical approach.

To buttress that desire for control, the profile of full-back Guardiola employed changed. Gone was Joao Cancelo, in favour of four centre-backs to help guard against counterattacks with John Stones playing a hybrid role in the treble-winning season in which he would move into holding midfield when City had possession.

Last season, though, that approach became stale and too many teams were comfortable defending their box before launching counterattacks.

“Today, without players who can dribble, nothing can be done,” said Guardiola in 2023.

“Attacking a team that is stuck in its own goal, without players who dribble, who do not get you superiority with moves into spaces, is impossible.”

With more and more teams pressing in a man-to-man style, players must be able to dominate their direct opponent in bigger spaces.

In that context, Guardiola’s signing of players who excel in one-v-one situations could see a more direct possession style than we have been used to, particularly with the influence of former Liverpool assistant coach Pep Lijnders as his new right-hand man.

After Josko Gvardiol’s late forward dashes against Club Brugge in January and Nico O’Reilly’s eye-catching performance against Bournemouth in the FA Cup where he repeatedly drove forward from deep, Guardiola seemed to appreciate what double width could bring to his team.

Nunes and Marmoush combined effectively on the right flank in the final game of the season at Craven Cottage, a game in which City looked most dangerous when presented with space to run into.

It is in those situations that Erling Haaland thrives. If Guardiola is building a support cast that suits those conditions, then City could pose a whole new type of threat.

This news was originally published on this post .

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