There are only 24 hours in a day, but the days seem to go by very, very slowly, also because you can’t sleep. At night, you can hear everything (the sound of explosions from the battle),” Roberto De Zerbi told Radio 105 when recalling the scary days when there was war in Ukraine. If you remember that gloomy period, De Zerbi feels like living in a long nightmare. However, the wheel of life is supposed to turn around for anyone who wants to fight and rise up for their life. This also happened to De Zerbi. He is criticized, doubted, and underestimated which has become food during his career coaching football.
However, he did not give up on his career and playing philosophy. After a dark night in Ukraine, he is finally experiencing a beautiful, sunny morning in the beach town of Brighton & Hove, in east Sussex. While he led Brighton & Hove Albion F.C to compete and showcased his attractive game.
Brighton managed to put in a fantastic performance during the 2022/23 season, despite losing a coach who had made this team grow, namely Graham Potter in September 2022 and selling many key players such as Neal Maupay, Marc Cucurella and Yves Bissouma in the summer. Then followed their star Leandro Trossard to Arsenal in winter 22/23.
All of this did not necessarily destroy Brighton. Not a few also think that Brighton will experience a transition period after Potter’s departure to Chelsea. But on the contrary, it actually made Brighton even stronger because he got the right coach and was an upgrade from Potter in De Zerbi.
At first, Brighton was considered to be taking a lot of risks because they appointed a coach with little experience in the EPL, but De Zerbi was able to overcome all the criticism and doubts directed at him. However, all the judgments about De Zerbi at the beginning were indeed considered reasonable because that was the fact.
Before soaring with Brighton, both as a player and coach, De Zerbi did not have any achievements to be proud of. He is also very far from the conversation. However, he started his coaching career well at Serie C club, Foggia Calcio. It was also at this club that De Zerbi began to try to play his attractive football philosophy, dominate possession and build attacks from the bottom.
Unmitigated, he managed to bring Foggia to win Serie C in the 2015/16 season. During De Zerbi’s coaching, Foggia’s average goal managed to reach 1.89 goals per game. Perhaps this achievement also made him interested in Palermo and he was recruited in September 2016.
But the poor performance he showed made him only last as long as corn in Palermo. Of the 13 matches he led, this club won only 1 and lost 10 times. He also suffered a series of consecutive defeats which eventually led to his dismissal in November 2016. After this dismissal, De Zerbi was unemployed for almost a year before finally promoted Serie A club, Benevento, asked for his hand in 2017.
After 29 matches he played with Benevento with a poor record of 6 wins, 3 draws and 20 defeats, he accepted an offer to coach Sassuolo in July 2018. Unlike the bad results at the three previous clubs, he stayed longer at Sassuolo because his philosophy of play is starting to pay off. In his first season, De Zerbi brought the club nicknamed I Neroverdi to finish in 11th place in the Serie A standings.
Then he brought Sassuolo quite stable in his last two seasons, namely finishing in 8th place in the Serie A standings. Despite bringing good results for Sassuolo, De Zerbi has received a lot of criticism because his playing philosophy is considered very reckless. Sure enough, even though they are stable in the top 10 with their attractive games, Sassuolo’s goals and conceded statistics are very thin.
In the 2019/20 season they scored 69 goals but conceded 63 goals. Meanwhile, in his last season, De Zerbi’s team scored 64 goals and conceded 56 goals. However, regarding the idea of De Zerbi’s game, which tends to be reckless, it makes sense when he says that his idea was inspired by the figure of Pep Guardiola. He was open about this when he visited Pep while still coaching Bayern Munich.
“A very interesting experience. The Bayern and Barcelona teams are models that inspire me,” De Zerbi was quoted as saying by La Repubblica. “But since I was a player, I have memorized various concepts and adopted them as my own. I have my own football ideas,” he continued.
After three glorious seasons and gaining valuable experience at Palermo and Benevento, De Zerbi left Sassuolo to test his playing philosophy in other countries, moving away from Italy to coach Shakhtar Donetsk in 2021. At Shakhtar, his success was even more visible when he won the Ukrainian Super Cup in the 2021/22 season. But his time with Shakhtar had to end sooner because of the war in Ukraine. At that time, he couldn’t think about football at all. “Some slept in bunkers, some slept in their own rooms. I slept in my room to understand what was happening outside the hotel, but when I heard the explosions I ran to the bunker,” De Zerbi recalled.
Time passed, the nightmare is now just a memory, but what he experienced will always be an unforgettable experience. Then, after all the nightmares and leaving Ukraine in 2022, De Zerbi, who was initially thought to be returning to Italy, chose England as his new home. In September 2022, De Zerbi finally accepted an offer to fill the vacant Brighton coach position after Potter left for Chelsea.
At the start of his arrival, he received a snide from Liverpool legend Graeme Souness who said that had De Zerbi been a good coach he would not have coached seven different teams in the last nine years. He also said that De Zerbi did not know anything about the EPL.
“I think it’s a risk. You appoint someone who doesn’t know our football,” the Liverpool legend told talkSPORT. “If you search on Google, you will find him coaching seven different teams in nine years. If you are a good coach, the team should want to keep you,” he continued.
However, after seven months of training Brighton, all the criticism, doubts and fears about him were finally suppressed because his ideas and philosophies were increasingly perfecting Brighton. De Zerbi also thanked Potter for leaving him a great team. “I have to thank Graham Potter because I found a very great and strong team and now I try to convey my idea,” De Zerbi said after beating Chelsea 1-2 at Stamford Bridge on (15/4) then.
After escaping relegation in the 2020/21 season by finishing in 16th place, the club nicknamed The Seagulls exploded the following season with Potter. In previous seasons Brighton only competed to avoid relegation, in the 2021/22 season they were no longer worried about relegation and finished ninth in the Premier League standings.
This is also Brighton’s highest ranking record when appearing in the English Premier League’s highest caste. Previously, their best record was in the 1982/82 season, finishing 13th. Before Potter moved to Chelsea in the middle of the 2022/23 season, they had reached fourth place in the Premier League standings in week six.
In the 2021/22 season under Potter, Brighton managed to adopt an aggressive attacking style of play and often had possession of the ball, and focused on building attacks from the bottom. Three defender formations such as 3-4-2-1 or 3-5-2 became Potter’s favorite standard during his coaching period at Brighton. He considered this formation to be able to provide more options in building attacks and creating creativity in the midfield. In addition, this formation is also considered to provide extra protection in terms of defense and balance from both attack and defense.
Alexis Mac Allister is a player who has a crucial role in the Potter game system. Mac Allister, who was originally a ‘player no 10’, changed his role to ‘number 6’, who operated smoothly in possession, along with Moises Caicedo as a box-to-box midfielder who had a more defensive role. This role gives Pascal Gross the freedom to play in several roles with Trossard who plays as a second striker behind Danny Welbeck.
In this system, Trossard thrives when given space to run and carry the ball forward whenever possible. In the full-back position, Potter usually uses Solly March and Pervis Estupinan. They both play on the flanks to keep the width of the team.
Meanwhile, in the defender position, the trio of Lewis Dunk, Joel Veltman and Adam Webster were irreplaceable. The position of goalkeeper Robert Sanchez is also very influential by participating in the process of building attacks. Their contribution cannot be missed in Brighton’s Potter game system.
In the build-up phase, Potter considered Sanchez to be the first striker on the team from behind. The 3 defender formation also helps in creating more passing options for the goalkeeper. Even Guardiola had praised how quality Sanchez is in building attacks. “They (Brighton) know exactly what to do. They did a build-up with a good goalkeeper,” Guardiola was quoted as saying by The Athletic.
In contrast to Potter, from the beginning of his career De Zerbi patented the 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 formations as shown at Sassuolo. Under the leadership of De Zerbi, Sassuolo adopted an attacking style of play and pressed opponents with high intensity. They tend to control the ball and try to create chances by making quick moves and dribbling the ball at high speed.
ASL
