Catenaccio Explained (A Brief Thread)

{Tactical Analysis / Brief History of it}

In this thread I will be explaining the tactic or play-style if you will, known as ‘Catenaccio’. Catenaccio in Italian simply means ‘door-bolt’. Now if you’ve seen a door bolt you’d understand this thread very well. It is called ‘door-bolt’ because of how organised the ...

backline is if the tactic is used effectively.

This tactic was made to improve defensive organisation and improve the back line. If I told you guys that at the time 4-3-3 was considered a defensive formation, you’d all laugh at me. Well this is in fact true, at the time the ...

main formations mainly consisted of 2 defenders. In basic formation terms, it was 2-3-5. This is what it looked like if you want a visual understanding...

Now this is clearly a very attacking formation so I’d imagine you understand what I mean when I say people thought 4-3-3 was defensive at the time. Catenaccio was created during the 1950’s by a man called Karl Rappan. He found many defensive frailties in his team Servette FC.

This is where I think the back 4 idea came from. His philosophy for this tactic consisted of a couple of things. One was to keep the lines tight and stay compact as a defensive unit, the other was to maximise the use of counter attacks.

This is how the formation changed over time. Here we can see the 2 out of the 3 midfielders drop back to create a back 4 and become full backs (black line). The 2 out of the 5 attackers dropped deep to create a midfield 3 (Red Middle) and only the top 3 was left over (Blue Line).

This is what it looks like on paper. 4 -( 3/4)- (2/3). The defender that's just in front of the keeper is known as the verrouilleur (sweeper) which is a type of defender and I'll tell you what a sweeper is in my next thread. The wide full backs were deployed to nullify the...

wide attackers (wingers). So if the wingers were going forward, the full back would be in a 1v1 situation which is far better than only 2 in the whole line. The other CB could cover which made it very hard to break down. Even if the attacker got through both full back and CB...

there would still be an extra CB as there were 2. This spare man was known as the bolt thus door bolt. The formation was primarily a man-to-marking system. With the ball Catenaccio is 1-3-3-3 with the sweeper being the 1 in front of the keeper. This was essentially the idea of..

how it worked.

End of Thread Likes and Retweets appreciated

This was just a very very brief thread I felt like making, I tried to keep it as simple as possible so I hope you enjoyed giving it a quick read.