For Moritz Kossmann, pressing is the primary defensive action in soccer.

It is, in his words, “an attempt at putting pressure on an opponent who has the ball so that they can’t progress the ball up the field easily".

Moritz - who has now moved on from his role at Ubuntu Football Academy to become DStv Diski Challenge coach and head of youth at Cape Town City - sat down with Steph Fairbairn to discuss collective pressing strategies, individual pressing principles and how to coach it all...

SCW: What are some strategies teams might use to press? What different types of press might they use?

MK: The most simple way to differentiate pressing strategies is to divide them into a high press, a mid-block or medium block and a low block, which some will call ’parking the bus’.

In a high press, the front line closes the opposition down very high up the pitch, probably in their own half. 

In a medium block - which we could differentiate [further] between a high medium block and a low medium block - the closing down is done somewhere around the middle of the field.

In a low block, the front line closes down the opposition somewhere in our own half.

Each one of these has a place in the game and is usually done by every team at certain moments in a 90-minute game. But there might well be preferences for what you would want to do more and less of. 

A Jose Mourinho team is perhaps more associated with defending in their own half, whereas a RB Leipzig or RB Salzburg team, or perhaps a Jurgen Klopp team, is more associated with a high press and closing the opposition down in their own half.

A high press has the benefit that we are playing more in the opposition half. If we win the ball back, it’s a relatively short distance towards goal, so there is a very strong attacking intent behind using a high press.

At the same time, if we can stress the opponent in their own half, then we are keeping them far away from areas of the pitch where they might be able to take shots at our goal. So there is obviously also a defensive element to this tactic.

"A high press has the benefit that we are playing more in the opposition half..."

The disadvantage is that in order for it to be a collectively coherent strategy, the back line has to push very high up the field - so there is a lot of space between the back line and the goalkeeper. We might become vulnerable to runs in behind or balls being played into that space.

Obviously, in a low block it Is the other way around. The disadvantage is that if we win the ball back deep in our own half, we have a relatively long distance to counter-attack towards the opponents’ goal. At the same time, if we are defending with a lot of numbers in our own half, we are limiting, particularly, the space behind our back line.

[This is] taking away a very important attacking element for the other team - playing the ball in behind the back line - purely because we have limited that space.

This, to a degree, makes the opponent’s attack more predictable because they can only play around us or in between us - and because we are low in our half, the spaces are limited for that so we’re able to anticipate better on an individual level, as well. 

The other differentiation I would make is between a press that guides the opponent towards the inside [of the field] and a press that guides the opponent towards the outside.

The role of the forwards is crucial because they are the ones who will initiate the direction of the press by how they close down the ball carrier.