Thiago Motta’s Bologna Are The New Rising Giants In Italy

February is usually the signal of the start of the business end of a football season. So, having a perfect record this month can provide a massive boost to any team looking to finish the season on a high. Thiago Motta’s Bologna have taken this mantle by heart after winning all their previous five games.

The Petroniani have now got into the top four and find themselves in an intense title race for the European places. With Motta, the team possesses one of the most innovative minds in the game, and this season has been a true reflection of that.

Motta was born in Brazil and, throughout his career, played in Spain, Italy, and France. The Italian has thus picked various traits from this nation’s footballing philosophy to craft his tactics.

So, how did Motta and Bologna produce a winning combination in the current Serie A season?

Bologna 2023-23 tactics 

Bologna’s tactics are an amalgamation of several philosophies. These are the Gegenpressing, the counterpressing (Germany 2014), Tiki Taka, and Marcelo Bielsa’s tactics at Leeds. For starters, during his time in Spain, he learned that the main objective of any game is the ball. So, the main focus was to keep the ball for as long as possible and, if lost, to recover it as quickly as possible.

However, he has combined this with the Italian tactics of exploiting spaces. And this is reflected in Bologna’s stats. They perform better than the Serie A average on Field Tilt and possession. They also are among the top teams in the league on metrics such as total passes (1st) and accurate passes (3rd).

The stats till now perfectly show us a side that loves to have the ball thus allowing their opponents to have as little ball as possible. However, there is one flaw in this assumption: Bologna does not have the quality of players across the squad that can play this system at the same tempo for the entirety of a game.

This means they lose the ball often and also give the opposition plenty of chances in their half. Motta has, therefore, made a brilliant defensive strategy to counter them. The club have made the most tackles in the league. On top of that, they have also conceded the third least goals per 90 minutes (0.88), the third-best in the league.

The reason behind their impressive defensive stats is Motta’s reverence of the counter-pressing method successfully deployed by Germany at the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Euro under Joachim Loew. In his thesis titled ‘The Value of the Ball – The Instruments…