An Old-Fashioned Plan and Perfect Execution Key to Leicester’s Amazing Success

When Greece won the UEFA European Championship in 2004, Otto Rehhagel had his side man-marking. Forwards brought up to play against zonal systems found themselves unable to cope, and over the six-game span of a tournament, no opponent was able to rediscover the art of bypassing man-markers.

What Claudio Ranieri has done at Leicester City has a similar sense of invoking an old style of play and discovering modern sides have no answer.

When Ranieri arrived, he did nothing. Christian Fuchs and Kasper Schmeichel have both spoken of the way he said hardly anything for a week or so on their pre-season tour of Austria, just walked around and watched and learned. He knew the players had had a strong bond with the dismissed Nigel Pearson and realised the last thing needed was somebody to come in and start ripping apart the structures that had led to the surge to safety at the end of last season.

He did, though, make one significant decision early: The back three that had been such a key part of Pearson’s strategy would be replaced by a back four. “Because a lot of teams play with 4-3-3, if you play three at the back, you end up with three against one, and I don’t like that so much,” Ranieri explained recently.

That back four has played extremely narrow all season, Danny Simpson on the right and Christian Fuchs on the left limiting their forward forays. Because the back four has sat deep, there’s been little space in behind them. That has essentially given opponents two options: play through them or look to get wide and get crosses into the box.

With the two central midfielders sitting deep and the full-backs tucked in, there has been limited space for teams to try to pass through. Leicester have essentially ceded the wings to the opposition, knowing Robert Huth and Wes Morgan are good enough in the air to win the majority of crossed balls—Huth has won 3.3 aerial duels per game and Morgan 2.5 in the league this season.

It took a little time to get the shape right—Leicester didn’t keep a clean sheet in their first nine matches. The 5-2 home defeat to Arsenal in Leicester’s seventh game of the season proved pivotal. Until then, Ritchie De Laet had played at right-back and Jeffrey …

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