Bumping this before it closes in a few hours.

Ian Barratt Hi Ian, we have sent you a DM

In your library now Daniel. 👍🏻

Hi Yagiz.

We have two projects that we are working on behind the scenes. The Bielsa one will follow, and we are looking at the first releases around September. 

One thing I didn't mention is that Domenec Torrent's definition literally includes the concept of relation within it: PP is positioning your players RELATIVE to everyone on the pitch to generate advantages. Where Guardiola and Diniz differ is in conceiving of how you structure these relationships - not in one disregarding relationships altogether.

It's worth remembering that all relationships on a football pitch are impossible without a concept of position. In that respect, relationism HAS to be positional.

They can still have their own unique existence. But they are still a subset, in my opinion, of a broader category: positional play.

By suggesting PP as a more general term is "useless", it seems as though you're saying "well we still have to differentiate between Guardiola and Diniz!" - absolutely! But the differentiator isn't PP - it's the way that these two coaches are using positional ideas in very different ways.

4)"If you define positional play as being all football it's a useless term. Hybrid play can also be some players have rigid positions and some are floaters. It's not only spoken about in relation to phases."

I completely disagree with this. My argument is that by restricting PP down to "what Guardiola does tactically" is unhelpful. Guardiola uses PP as a tool to achieve what he wants to strategically on a football pitch. In that sense, Guardiola's football and positional play are in different categories entirely. PP is basically a higher category of thing: like "animals" is to "dogs". The category "animals" is useful because it explains to us what kind of things "dogs" are. But it doesn't mean we then collapse "dogs" into other species of animal. "Dogs" and "spiders" are very different things but they are still animals. In the same way, Guardiola's football is very different from Fernando Diniz's football. 

3)"Could the rise in more chaos lead to the decline in so called specialist and instead lead to the Ascension in clubs recruiting and platforming more generalists"

Yes! I think this is exactly what we could see happening. The game will become less controllable and so rather than optimising for a one-size-fits-all approach (which is what Guardiola was able to do in many respects) it has to be much more ad hoc. This makes generalists far more valuable than in the past.

BUT if your attack breaks down and you recycle, you have more scope to generate space + time in your back line. So you can fall back into the older system of working an opponent deep into their own box in a low block.

The problem is, teams are optimising for more direct play and so we're seeing squads less optimised for low block breaking (and the risk is that destabilising a block through positional rotations leaves you susceptible to counter attacks). So what we're seeing control teams doing more of now is drawing out oppo blocks to play more transitional.

So - roundabout answer - I think possession control now has to be much less uniform than it used to be (unsettled poss--->settled poss---> sustainable progression---> final third) and more more tempo shifted (unsettled poss--->direct progression--->final third--->recycle to decompress block---> direct progression---->repeat).

Hope that explains things?

As for how you can achieve this control, for me, it's more about how you reorganised settled possession (space + time) and unsettled possession (no space and so no time). Where in the past, you would work unsettled possession from GKs into settled possession in your back line, m2m means many teams simply don't allow you space + time in your back line in these scenarios and so the space has opened out in behind presses. This speeds up play: you play through or over presses into this space and then tempo shift into more direct attacks.