Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2025

28 29 11TH ASPIRE ACADEMY GLOBAL SUMMIT ASPIRE IN THE WORLD FELLOWS You can see a lot of games man to man because you have to go to press high. And they have the keeper and your keeper’s not going to press. So you need to go player against player. You want to be sure that you have a chance to regain the ball. So we have been watching games, analysing a lot of of man to man when we have been watching between jobs. I’m working as a technical observer for UEFA. That means that we were analyzing games, we were analyzing the EUROs. We are analyzing champion league games. And then I was in one of the games the last weeks and then we have seen that. So what we are talking about here is what we have seen in a lot of games. There are now more open matches with instruction to press when the ball is lost, because the other team is playing short. You go to press high which means that you can regain the ball high if the other team is playing. You can regain the ball, so the instruction is to press when you give the ball away. So all the time, we can see that it’s happeningmore andmore in every game which leads to greater positional fluidity, accelerations, decelerations, and changeof direction physically, because it’s man to man. The players need to be stronger, faster, then when they are aggressive, change of directions and then contacts. Every time it’s more about physical condition of the players. That is something that also is happening all the time. The other teams, they press high because they know that they will make mistakes. So we have a lot of data that we will be checking and you concede a lot of goals. You play nice football, but you concede a lot of goals, you lose games. And the top sides, they continue winning because obviously they have better players, but that is something that changed with the rule. They will not work with the rule because everybody was trying to play from the back. And then the approach of a lot of teams change. Now you have a lot of teams doing man to man. Always, you need someone to support. (Speaking) Rafa Benitez: MASTERCLASS