COLUMN: Real Madrid’s Fling with Rock ‘n’ Roll | OneFootball

I believe it is true that the concept of ‘tempo’ with regards to football analysis walks the tightrope between being tangible, and a (dreaded) intangible. It is a visible, obvious characteristic, yet it is free from the optimistic tangibility that a numerical statistic brings. Very well then, there’s still time for a good-old discussion that overdetermines and complicates this concept, rather than reducing and simplifying the scope of its meaning.

Here lies an attempt to generalise and broaden our understanding of tempo in a football match, but with contextualised observations from Real Madrid’s 2024-25 season so far. Indeed, Carlo Ancelotti has made no secret of the fact that a changing relationship with tempo is the ongoing battle within the ranks.

Pacing Yourself

Simply put, the tempo that a side brings to a football match is the speed at which it builds up its attacks. Tempo, however isn’t just an inert fact of the football match, but a constitutive one, etching the narrative of the match as it goes by. Here are two hypothetical (but common) scenarios on a football pitch, to illustrate how tempo-choice primarily defines the contours of how the football match presents itself to the observer.

Game 1

Team A builds up slowly, not rushing attacks. Focus on security, structure, and often, a rest defence ready to pounce.

Team B in response sits compact and tight, waiting for an opportunity to launch a high-tempo counter attack.

This results in a football match that is more static than transitional, and which gains speed in bursts when Team B recovers the ball.

Game 2

Team A builds up fast, rushing attacks and committing players, combining it with an aggressive high press.

Team B in response does much the same themselves upon ball recovery, resulting in a game that’s more transitional than static.

Unless either team commits to slowing the game down through instruction or some form of player intervention, end-to-end football is more or less guaranteed.

The tempo of the game is not a variable, metric, or statistic like any other that arrives after-the-fact; it plays a far more constitutive role in a football match, determining the shape of its course while it is happening. The choice of tempo is then, no doubt one of the most crucial decisions a manager has to make while setting up the baseline tactical concepts for the season.

Let There Be Rock

“We can improve and play better, but I believe that Real Madrid’s fans are used to seeing rock ‘n’ roll football, not a lot of touches. I really like to see my team defend well, to come out from the back with the ball, not to waste time in possession, to be vertical.”

– Carlo Ancelotti, after a tricky 3-1 Champions League win over Stuttgart on the 17th of September.

Losing Toni Kroos to retirement implies losing the element that asserted control of the tempo – a single point speeding up and slowing down the game as his incredible judgement saw fit. It was the early phases of build-up that Kroos not only dominated, but monopolised, to set the overall tempo of the team from the start.

But rock bands don’t often bother playing to a metronome. So, while Real Madrid fans picked their favorites among the midfield elects to replace the German in function, Ancelotti had planned to flip the playbook altogether. It was no longer about which of the group would perform their interpretation of the Kroos’ role; it was about switching to another plan in his absence – more vertical, ideally focused on quick counterpress, and thus, playing at much faster tempos. The build-up circuits were now all pointing directly at the forwards, whose pace was to be exploited, catching opponents out early.

Allegro – Fast Tempos (120-168 BPM)

If the tempo of a team constitutes how it presents itself on the big screen, early 2024-25 Real Madrid presented itself as chaotic, overly direct, and poorly organised in the counterpress. Something analogous to losing control altogether because of speeding is what played out in the first few months. A band without a metronome, slowly starting to lose the pulse.

Antonio Rudiger and Thibaut Courtois/Andriy Lunin often bypassed the midfield altogether, priming themselves to look for the direct, over the top ball to the forwards. Fede Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni, as the initial choices for a double pivot, shirked from taking adequate responsibility on the ball in deep areas, further enabling the direct behaviour. Lacking a target man or any sort of aerial presence up front, the forwards lost aerial duels by the dozens while pressing inefficiently and with minimal impact in reducing transition threat. Perhaps, persistent pressure with all hands on deck in an organised fashion was envisioned, but the lack of consistent effort across the XI meant that once opponents recovered the ball, simple ball circulation led them through the Real Madrid press with ease.

Soon enough, the whole match either descended into Game 2 from our previous hypotheticals, or into a version of Game 1 where Real Madrid would be Team B. The overall nuance in the team was lost – not found, because it was not sought. A brutally idealistic approach, one that has logical grounds on paper but looks unsure of itself many times in evidence; not something one associates with Ancelotti.

Andante – “Walking Pace” (76-108 BPM)

A crucial game from Eduardo Camavinga against Villarreal in late October is worth focusing on, for his return from injury brought much needed balance to the side’s build up. Dropping in consistently between the centre-backs to facilitate more meaningful progression channels, Camavinga was the most important architect of Real Madrid’s 2-0 win vs Villarreal. Facing a Marcelino Garcia Toral side guarantees fluid transition threat; a consistent reliance on the previous strategy would surely have harmed Madrid more on the scoreboard, with the Yellow Submarine showing their high-scoring offensive prowess this season. Camavinga was arguably the first midfielder to offer a shimmer of balance amidst the directness of this season, pulling back the reins on a carriage that’s been prone to tilting.

And after two disastrous results against Barcelona and Milan – both games he missed – Camavinga soon returned to the XI in La Liga against Osasuna and Leganes.  While the games ended 4-0 and 3-0 respectively, the crucial point to note was the return of balance and responsibility in the middle of the pitch, and an increased care with regards to tempo. Dani Ceballos joined in on the act against Leganes, and his alternating with Camavinga as the deep-lying ball progressor helped the team organise itself better. As the weeks wore on, further injury to Camavinga would mean that Ceballos took up the deep-lying reins with aplomb, thriving as a classic Spanish #6. As of December, he’s benefitting from a level of responsibility that was perhaps never afforded to him at Real Madrid until now.

Moderato – “Moderately” (108-120 BPM)

“You have to choose between building up progressively or playing directly. The responsibility lies with the coach, who chooses to play directly.”

– Carlo Ancelotti, after the Stuttgart win.

To complicate things, let us throw this quote squarely against the discussion in the previous section; were Camavinga and Ceballos pulling back the tempo by instruction or by intuition?  Who is making the choice? What do the managers and players feel about the choices the other is making?

We can only hypothesize that the responsibility for setting the team’s tempo orientation certainly lies with the manager. However, it is perhaps crucial to conclude that a single player can take over responsibility in real time and contribute to more controlled game situations arising on the pitch. At any given moment in a football match, players who exert both responsibility and the required mental and technical tools can bring balance to a match that was destined to shape itself another way.

Tempo, therefore, can be a shared commodity is the biggest conclusion drawn from the opening act of Real Madrid’s season. And to see a team currently leaving the question of tempo in this third space – the boundaries of ownership blurred between the players and the manager – is a curious aberration in our football world. Much like the early linguists learning more about human speech by researching aberrations in oral culture, we can learn a lot about tempo from this period of flux for Real Madrid, where the tempo of the side is contested territory between the manager and the players.