The Portuguese coach of Botafogo, Luís Castro, said in a SporTV program, without any of his colleagues paying attention: “this concept of a defensive midfielder in Brazil limits a lot”.
And it does limit.
For us Brazilians, midfield players are divided into two groups: midfielders are good, creative, offensive and help with marking. The defensive midfielders are those who are mainly dedicated to destruction and who are valued when they know how to set up and make good passes. Great offensive actions are not expected from them.
Four of the highlights of this Cup, Bellingham, Modric, Tchouaméni and De Paul, do not fit any of these definitions. And there are more than 100 such players in Qatar.
As Tostão said in this Sheet, are players who destroy, arm and support the attack. How did this type of player emerge in Europe?
They always existed. Midfielders have been in football since zero. A midfielder is the one who both attacks and defends (there are exceptions, of course). So when Griezmann, placed in the middle by Didier Deschamps, makes a tackle behind his penalty area line, there should be no surprise.
But Brazil is so attached to the idea of opposition between defending and attacking that it doesn’t even know how it started.
The origin of midfielders in Brazilian football has its origins in the implementation of the 4-2-4 in the 50s. The previous system was the 2-3-5 and its variations, such as the WM. There were two in defense, three in the middle and five in attack (right winger, right midfielder, center forward, left midfielder, like Pelé, and left winger).
To set up the 4-2-4, two midfielders, the wingers, became defenders, and an attacker retreated to midfield. The midfielder was born. Classic cases were Didi, Gérson and Rivelino (he would only win the second “l” 20 years after retirement).
The remaining midfielder received an exhaustive role. He needed to run from one side to the other trying to block opponents: he became a midfielder. The word steering wheel was already used in the 1930s with squads of police officers without a fixed base, such as those who went to fight cangaço, and soon it was adopted to designate the wheel that controls the car.
Over time, the midfielder became a defensive midfielder and the playmaker became a midfielder (which led a coach to say decades later that Pelé was a midfield player).
As football reduced the number of attackers and increased the number of midfielders, teams began to have two and even three defensive midfielders, along with one or two midfielders. And since Brazil prioritizes the attack, the prestige of a coach in the country is inverse to the number of defensive midfielders he hires.
With specialists in the middle, Brazilian teams have fewer players qualified in the two phases of the game, the offensive and the defensive. And midfield players, no matter how technical they are, when they are very strong in marking they are called defensive midfielders, never midfielders.
Meanwhile, in Europe, whoever plays midfield, unless there is a genius, needs to defend in equal doses.
Brazilian football needs to return to the great conceptual flux. While football had very different “schools” and individual moves managed to decide many games, it was possible to have specialists in the midfield.
This Cup showed that that period is over.
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