How important is possession?

It isn't as low as Leicester City's 44.8%, but Atletico Madrid won 2013-2014 La Liga with 48.9% possession.

 

I'd subscribe to the adage that states that it's not how much possession you have but what you do with it that counts.

 

Very odd question. This is like asking how important is passing.

You need possession to score except your team depends solely on opposition errors such as own goals etc

The problem is that people think of possession the wrong way. There is alack of general understanding of it. Guardiolas team don't play 'possession' football, they played with positional play. Smaller teams like Leicester can't simply adopt it and use it because they simply don't have the players nor the managers to implement the position game.

Ball retention is both an attacking and defensive weapon if used correctly. People became enamoured with possession and pass statistics ever since the success of Guardiolas Barcelona.

No team in the epl plays like Barcelona or Peps Bayern. Generally bigger teams always have more of the ball because they have better players. Leicester were successful because they were not the big name going into games. This season they will struggle a lot more as teams will now shown them a lot more respect and cede possession to them, meaning that they will need to be proactive and face more teams with a compact defense limiting theor ability to transition. Very few teams play a position game effectively. Even Arsenal don't play possession football the way Barcelona do becaue they simply don't have the tactical structure to do it effectively.

Possession of the ball is pointless with no aim except you are looking to hold on to a result. Position game is like any other tactical plan, it has its drawbacks and it's strengths. People really need to stop thinking of it in terms of possession. Active and reactive would be a better way of describing it as big teams almost always have more possession than smaller teams except you have specialists like Paco with smaller teams.

The only teams that use positional game atm are Barcelona (much weaker than under Pep), Bayern (much weaker than under Pep), Dortmund under Tuchel, Napoli under Sarri, Paco Jemez at granada and Sampaoli at Sevilla and of course City although they are a work in progress . Obviously there variations but the blueprint is the same. All of this is from the blueprint laid out by Cruijff and LVG in the early and late 90s respectively.

I'll leave you with a quote about possession from Jorge Sampaoli:

“One night, I went to a bar, I was with a woman. We talked all night. We laughed, we flirted, I paid for several drinks of hers

“At around 5am, a guy came in, grabbed her by the arm and took her to the bathroom. He made love to her and she left with him. That doesn’t matter, because I had most of the possession on that night.”

 

Besides the other mentioned factors, one of the drivers behind it is almost certainly also the increased emphasis on possession based play in the youth formations. That creates a self-perpetuating cycle; after all, that is how new players have learned to play the game inside the institutions. Would it be just a coincidence that at the same time SkySports pundits complain about fewer great defenders and defensive standards?

A specific example are the teachings of Horst Wein, one of the more widely circulated manuals around the world, and from which specific 'finishing touches' can be built. The so called "coach of coaches", used as official textbook of RFEF since 1993 (there are a handful others at that level of circulation like Wiel Coerver but I take this example). Not coincidentally, he received the 'igniting spark' to create specific work for the football sport from an introductory conversation with Carles Rexach, who happened to be the assistent-coach for - indeed - a possession obsessed team.
http://www.horstwein.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMP-Interview.pdf

Next to other circumstances that big well-resourced clubs attract good players who happen to play with other good players; it is definitely true that players are educated to play with possession (more emphasis than before), and the sport is basically more institutionalized than it ever was. To a certain degree it creates a self-justifying cycle.

 

When talking about possession statistics, I feel that touches in the opponents box is a more reliable indicator of how dominant/dangerous a team was in the game.

 

If I remember correctly atletico Madrid beat bayern Munich in last seasons champions league semi final with around 20-25% ball possession over both legs

 

I don't know the stats for sure, but I would imagine George Graham's Arsenal were the nearest thing to Leicester in % possession terms among previous top flight English league winners from recent-ish times.

I think partly the % is due to tactics, but to some extent also to player quality as a team full of top notch talents doesn't tend to give the ball away very much.

Growing up watching and thoroughly enjoying Nottingham Forest play at a time when they were both often deemed a possession team and a counter-attacking team maybe I'd be confused on this matter lol. Also ofc 'passing' teams that are generally very progressive/incisive at every opportunity will be taking less touches than teams that pass it around midfield a lot more and having lower possession %'s I guess.

 

It's annoying that different websites have different possession percentages for the same game. One website says Atletico Madrid had 31 percent at home and 32 percent at Bayern Munich. Another website says Atletico Madrid had 26 percent at home and 27 percent at Bayern Munich.

 

I think it all depends on where the majority of that possession occurs. I don't think a team wants to just sit back in its shell all game...to me, even if you are great defensively, you are playing with fire. It doesn't nothing to have 65% possession but the majority of that come in the middle and defensive thirds.... Now if you have possession 65% and almost 75% of that is in the attacking third that means something.