Pressing Did Not Kill Football: A Ten-Year Revisit and Those Labelled Obsolete

In 2026, when I was an 18-year-old former swimmer learning to write football analysis, I chose a gender-neutral pen name. Not because I wanted to hide, but because I knew that the moment readers discovered the author was a woman, every number I offered would be read through a different lens. That year's AFC Champions League semi-final between SIPG and Urawa Red Diamonds was the first lesson. Hulk completed eight successful dribbles but produced only two key passes. Wu Lei, who barely touched the ball inside the box, finished with 0.4 xG. It took me five days to finish the piece, rewriting it again and again, afraid that a single data error would be enough to make people dismiss everything.

That article taught me a formula I still keep today: provocative headline, evidential body. But it also taught me something deeper about how football is perceived — that the majority tends to judge players by the most flashy traits, while the system actually operates in places nobody notices.

Ten years later, revisiting a full decade of football, I see a paradox far larger than Hulk's story. It is the story of how we named a tactical revolution, then forgot that the revolution was never one-sided.

Context: When pressing became a new religion

Fifteen years ago, when Barcelona's tiki-taka was still the benchmark and Pep Guardiola was still experimenting with things nobody had tried, a keyword began spreading across tactical forums: gegenpressing. Jürgen Klopp turned it into a faith at Dortmund, then carried it to Liverpool. Then a generation of young coaches followed, from Germany to Austria, from Austria to England, and finally everywhere.

The curious thing is that mainstream media's reception of pressing diverged entirely from its technical essence. People called pressing "modern football" and opposed it to "negative defensive football." They built a moral scale: teams that press are beautiful, teams that defend in a low block are ugly. And so a tactical tool was transformed into an aesthetic judgment.

I once wrote about this after the 2026 World Cup, when Didier Deschamps' France won while averaging only 42% possession in several key matches. In the 4-3 win over Argentina, Deschamps' side had fifteen shots, eight on target, and Mbappé scored twice not from random inspiration but from a deliberate plan: cede the pitch, leave space behind Argentina's defensive line, then unleash pace at the right moment. That article reached two hundred thousand reads and drew hundreds of comments like "what does a woman know about tactics." I answered none of them. I spent two weeks reviewing footage of four France matches, then wrote a longer, more data-heavy piece.

What I learned from that period was not about pressing itself. It was about this: when a tactical tool becomes a moral standard, people start judging players by whether they participate in that tool, instead of by the value they actually create for the system.

Core analysis: Did the traditional number 9 die because of pressing, or because we misread its role?

Let me start with a number.

In the 2026-2026 season, across Europe's top five leagues, average goals per match hovered between 2.7 and 3.1 — roughly 10-15% higher than a decade earlier. That sounds like attacking football won. But digging deeper into the structure of those goals reveals a very different picture.

The share of goals from set pieces has risen steadily. The share of goals scored within six seconds of winning the ball in the opponent's third — what analysts call "high turnover goals" — has also risen. And the share of goals from moves involving more than five consecutive passes inside the box has fallen.

In other words, football did not become more "attacking" in the sense of control and combination. It became more efficient at converting opponent mistakes into goals, rather than at creating chances from nothing. Pressing does not produce more attacking football. It produces more transition football.

And this is where the traditional number 9 gets unfairly blamed.

When I read mainstream analyses of the "extinction" of the classic centre-forward, I always see the same argument: pressing forces teams to need strikers who press, who move widely, who participate in link-up play. A striker who only stands in the box waiting for the ball becomes useless. It sounds very reasonable. But it ignores one detail: precisely because pressing forces defences to sit deeper and play low blocks more often, the demand for a striker capable of finishing in tight spaces actually increases.

Look at Dortmund's 2026-2026 data with Niclas Füllkrug. He is not a typical pressing striker. His average speed is significantly lower than that of top strikers. But his conversion rate inside the box is among Europe's leaders, and his expected goals per shot is higher than that of strikers praised for their wide movement.

What does this say? That in a league where every team presses, space behind the defensive line becomes scarce. Low-block teams force opponents to attack into a densely packed area. And in that densely packed area, the most valuable thing is not the ability to run, but the ability to read the drop of the ball and finish with one touch.

I once analysed this while watching Inter Milan under Simone Inzaghi. Lautaro Martínez is not a classic number 9 in the traditional sense, but he is also not a pure pressing forward. He is a hybrid product of two eras. And it is precisely that hybrid nature that makes him hard to slot into a predefined box.

The problem lies here: we build analytical models based on labels. When a striker does not press much, we call him obsolete. But his heat map may show he is doing something else — occupying positions, holding the ball, creating space for the second line. And the heat map, as I have written many times, has become a new form of fortune-telling. It shows us where a player is, but not what he is doing there, within the context of an entire structure.

Meanwhile, the traditional winger has been wrongly erased.

Over the past decade, the number of natural-footed wingers hugging the touchline and crossing has dropped sharply. In their place are inverted wingers, playing on their weaker foot, more involved in finishing than in creating from wide. This is celebrated as evolution. But it also creates a worrying homogenisation: when every winger inverts, teams lose genuine width, and opposing defences only need to protect a narrower area.

I once analysed Roberto Mancini's Italy at Euro 2026 (held in 2026) and discovered an interesting pattern: Leonardo Spinazzola advanced but cut inside — an underlap — rather than crossing from wide. He made eleven underlapping runs but completed only three successful crosses. That led many to conclude crossing was dead. But as Italy progressed and won the title, I realised the opposite: precisely because Italy rarely crossed, when they did, opposing defences were unprepared. The scarcity of a skill does not mean the skill is useless. It means the skill becomes more valuable when used at the right moment.

I sent that article to a male editor and it was rejected with the reason: "Don't teach coaches how to play football." I sent more detailed data. As Italy progressed, the article was republished with a "female perspective" tag. I objected with a second piece, pure logic, demanding the tag be removed. That was when I learned to separate gender from authority: if a man wrote this sentence, would he be questioned? Data became my defensive wall, and I never invoke emotion to defend my views.

Back to the central question: did pressing kill the traditional number 9?

My answer is no. Pressing did not kill the traditional number 9. It only changed the environment the traditional number 9 must exist within. The real death lies elsewhere: in academies. When youth academies uniformly shifted to teaching running and pressing instead of teaching the skill of finishing in tight spaces, we are producing a generation of players missing a specific skill. And when football needs that skill back — as it always does, cyclically — we will realise we lost it.

This is where I want to anchor a system concept to a specific action. In the 2026 Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool, there was a moment in the 60th minute I have watched at least twenty times. Liverpool pressed high, won the ball in midfield, and played a through ball. Karim Benzema, considered an "obsolete" striker because his pace was no longer elite, did not chase. He moved in the opposite direction, dragging a centre-back with him, creating space that Vinícius Júnior exploited. That is not pressing. That is counter-pressing through intelligence.

And I will repeat: Don't ask how good a player is, ask how the system shields him. Benzema that year did not run the most, did not press the most, but he was the centre of a system that knew how to turn stillness into a weapon.

Contrarian angle: What if we misread "obsolescence" all along?

This is the section where I always want to check myself, because I know every data-driven analysis has a blind spot: data only answers the questions we know how to ask.

Suppose I am wrong. Suppose the traditional number 9 really is dead, and examples like Füllkrug or Benzema are mere exceptions to a tightening rule. Then what explains their existence?

There is one explanation I find most convincing: they are not remnants of a past era, but products of a cycle. Football operates in tactical cycles. When every team presses, the team that does not press wins in the short term by defending in a low block. When every team defends in a low block, the team with a striker good at headers and finishing in tight spaces wins. And when every team hunts for a centre-forward, the market inflates the price of such players, and academies teach finishing again.

But there is another explanation, more cautionary: perhaps we overvalue the role of systems and undervalue the role of exceptional individuals. Cristiano Ronaldo's 91st-minute header against Atletico Madrid in 2026 did not come from a system. It came from a player jumping higher than everyone else.

I lean toward the first explanation, but I am not certain. And I think that uncertainty is precisely what matters. Because football, after all, is a game played by humans, not a self-operating system. All our models — heat maps, xG, progressive metrics — are approximations. They help us ask better questions, but they cannot replace looking into a player's eyes in the 90th minute and understanding whether he is afraid or confident.

That is also why I always return to the lesson from the 2026 season without crowds.

When the pandemic halted every league, I worked with a CSL statistician to build a dataset comparing 76 matches without spectators in the Dalian and Suzhou bubbles with 76 matches of the same teams in the 2026 season with crowds. The result: home-team possession rose from 51.2% to 54.1%, but expected goals per shot fell from 0.11 to 0.08. I wrote a piece hypothesising that home advantage did not disappear — it moved into referees' brains, as referees felt less pressure from the stands and biased less. The article was cited by a graduate student in a thesis on Chinese football.

But what I remember most from that dataset is not the number. It is the line I wrote in the conclusion: An empty stadium gives us data, but takes away what data cannot measure: noise. And noise — the presence of a crowd, the invisible pressure of ten thousand eyes — is a variable no model captures. If we build analysis only on what is measurable, we will always undervalue what is not. That is the blind spot of every analyst, including me.

And speaking of blind spots, I must admit something about how I once wrote. For years, I was proud of "defending with data." I treated data as a fortress wall. But every fortress wall has a door its builder did not notice. Sometimes I selected data to defend a point I already loved, rather than letting data lead. That is a dangerous habit, and I recognised it later than I wanted.

What I consider a verifiable prediction

So what will we see in the next three to five years?

I believe there will be a return of natural-footed wingers hugging the touchline and crossing. Not because it is "better" or "more traditional," but because whatever is scarce in tactics becomes valuable. In a world where every winger inverts, a winger who creates genuine width becomes a strategic weapon, because he produces something no defence trains to counter.

I also believe academies will recognise the finishing-skill gap and begin reintroducing it into their curricula. This will take a decade to bear fruit, because you cannot teach a 22-year-old skills he should have learned at twelve.

And I think we will keep confusing tools with ethics. We will again call a team "obsolete," then years later discover they were merely ahead of the cycle.

That is exactly what I learned from the Deschamps story. Deschamps was not wrong that year — what was wrong was the majority's view of ugliness. He did not play defensive football out of fear. He played the way his team needed to win. And when a coach does exactly what his team needs, calling it "ugly" or "beautiful" stops being analysis. It becomes aesthetics. And aesthetics, however important to viewers, does not measure goals on the scoreboard.

Pressing did not kill football; it only changed how we see art. And art, as always, exists on both sides of a confrontation — in the one who presses and in the one who silently waits for the moment.

I still keep the habit of rewatching match footage many times before writing anything. Not to find more data, but to find the moments data misses. A glance between two players. A run without the ball. A silent decision. Those things are in no model, but they are why I still write. For the rest, let football answer for itself.