FOOTBALL | JAMES GHEERBRANT
Time to stamp out tactical fouls as ‘anarchy’ becomes part of the big clubs’ system
Friday June 26 2020, 5.00pm BST, The Times
I once watched a documentary about Riverdance in which the dancers immersed their battered feet in buckets of iced aloe water, emitting guttural moans of relief as they did so. I’m not sure what emollient Jack Grealish favours, but I like to imagine he dunked his shins in a vat of it after Aston Villa’s defeat by Chelsea on Sunday.
By the time N’golo Kanté fouled him in the 90th minute, Grealish had absorbed nine fouls, taking to 144 the number of times he has been buffeted by illegal challenges this season. Grealish is a skilful, quick-footed player who will always draw the odd mistimed tackle, but what happened at Villa Park was more concerted: he was fouled once for every four touches that he took. Usually, Grealish pulls the strings; Chelsea turned him into a percussion instrument.
What Grealish had to withstand is known as tactical fouling: challenges made with the intention of stopping the attacker and scant regard to actually winning the ball. And what’s interesting about tactical fouling is that it is basically an accepted part of the game.
In January, Álvaro Morata was running clear, about to give Atletico Madrid a deserved lead in the Spanish Super Cup final, when he was cleaned out from behind by Federico Valverde. You might have expected the Atletico manager to be outraged, but Diego Simeone could scarcely conceal his admiration. “I told Valverde that he did what he had to,” he said. “The [man of the match] award makes sense because he won the game.”
Why is tactical fouling not regarded as a scourge in the same way that, say, diving is? Perhaps because it is such an intrinsic part of the game that it goes almost unnoticed. There is a more interesting philosophical reason though.
As a sport, football is particularly good at satisfying the anarchic streak in all of us. For the most part, we want to see deserved outcomes that make sense — good teams fairly overcoming weaker teams — but not quite all the time. Occasionally, we crave the piquant thrill of outcomes that defy karma: lesser teams winning, or nefarious acts paying off handsomely.
Most sports take a much harder line on fouling as a calculated tactic: in basketball or rugby, fouls are punished by a free shot at points; in American football by a chunk of yardage. Like it not, one thing that makes football uniquely compelling is that it encompasses, and sometimes rewards, a gamut of strategic philosophies, including extreme cynicism.
Nobody represents this better than Simeone, whose Atletico team have been one of the leading purveyors of legitimised skulduggery, using this approach to overcome more vaunted sides. Atletico’s success has been an example of tactical fouling as a great leveller, a way for less skilled teams to bring superior teams down to their level.
You might not have enjoyed watching Atletico over 90 minutes, nor José Mourinho’s Inter Milan or Bert van Marwijk’s Holland, but you’d be hard pushed to deny that their presence in major finals has made football a more diverse, interesting sport. At a time when the deck has never been more loaded in favour of the bigger, better teams, the rugged tactics of Simeone and Co have been a force for the resistance. Cholismo, the name given to Atletico’s philosophy after Simeone’s nickname, Cholo, has even entered the Spanish language as a word with much wider connotations of rebellion and anti-elitism.
Perhaps that is why, for so long, tactical fouling has been tolerated: to preserve football’s anarchic edge. But that logic no longer holds. The dynamic has shifted. Valverde, the player who fouled Morata, was wearing the white shirt of Real Madrid. Grealish was playing for a team in the relegation zone against a denizen of the Champions League. And if you take a closer look at this season’s statistics, a very striking pattern emerges.
By adjusting the Premier League table of fouls committed for the amount of possession a team has (because after all, you can only foul when you don’t have the ball), we get a much more sophisticated picture of how prone to fouling teams are in the defensive phase. The team who commit the most fouls per minute out of possession are Manchester City, by a distance, with 0.32. Second are Chelsea, with 0.28. Manchester United, Leicester and Arsenal round out the top five.
In other words, tactical fouling is just another thing that the big teams do better and more systematically than anyone else. Like crossing, an aspect of the game more associated with unsophisticated football played by second-class teams has been weaponised and honed by the elite.
Conversely, the most fouled players in the league are not Raheem Sterling and Sadio Mané, but Grealish and Wilfried Zaha: players who are the principal creative threat on smaller teams; who can be targeted with a view to nullifying their entire attack. Of the 11 players fouled 50 or more times this season, seven play for teams tenth or lower in the table. Only one (James Maddison) plays for a team occupying the Champions League places.
A part of the game that once held the football ecosystem in balance now widens the sport’s inequalities. A rule change feels urgent. On Sunday, Kanté was the only player booked for Chelsea’s demolition job on Grealish; the disincentive for teams to engage in targeted fouling is too small.
Lowering the yellow-card threshold for persistent fouling of a single player, as suggested by my colleague Matthew Syed, would be a start; a more radical suggestion would be an automatic red for any foul where no attempt is made to play the ball. Cracking down on tactical fouling would not only result in a cleaner spectacle, but also a more equitable sport.
