Pep’s top five innovations

Manchester City’s pre-season friendly against Bayern Munich will provide the first glimpse of how they might line up under Pep Guardiola.

The 45-year-old is two weeks into his City tenure, having signed a three-year contract at the Etihad Stadium, and his first match action comes with Wednesday’s return to his old club at the Allianz Arena.

As excitement builds about how Guardiola might transform City, we look at the top five innovations of his glittering coaching career – and wonder how they might be applied in the Premier League…

The six second rule

Guardiola’s Barcelona were famed for their devastating, possession-based attacking football, but his most significant innovation at the Nou Camp actually concerned their approach without the ball.

Guardiola wanted to increase the speed at which his players regained possession after losing it. He saw it as a way of snuffing out counter-attacks and catching Barcelona’s opponents out of position, and his solution was to introduce the six second rule.

The idea was to recover the ball with a six second burst of high-intensity pressing. The nearest Barcelona players were instructed to rush towards the individual in possession, with the rest of the team moving closer together to form a tightly-organised defensive shape.

The technique was designed to close down passing options and force an immediate mistake from the opposition, and in the event that Barcelona failed to win the ball back in six seconds, their compact positioning would make it difficult for the opposition to break them down.

Guardiola used the same approach at Bayern Munich – where he once described defensive organisation as “the cornerstone” of his philosophy – while Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have employed similar tactics in the Premier League. Expect Manchester City to do the same this season.

Messi as a false nine

No player was more important to Guardiola’s extraordinary success at Barcelona than Lionel Messi. The Argentine was already an established first-teamer when Guardiola took over from Frank Rijkaard in 2008, but Guardiola unlocked his true potential with a simple positional shift.

Guardiola struck upon the idea the night before Barcelona’s title-deciding Clasico against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in May 2009. “Pep noticed how much pressure the Madrid midfielders Guti, Fernando Gago and Royston Drenthe put on his own players, Xavi and Yaya Toure,” wrote Marti …

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