Kovac: 'Today, the fast eat the slow'
The new Bayern coach, Niko Kovac, sees pace as the most important quality in today's football and feels 'tiki-taka' is outdated.
| Niko Kovac. | Photo: IFCS - Lucas Kundigraber/CC BY 2.0 |
Kovac states that possession football is nothing without speed and that it will leave your team vulnerable to counter-attacks if you try to control the game too far up the pitch.
"Without speed, possession doesn't do much nowadays. And if the players move far up the pitch in endless combinations, possession football is dangerous, because it opens up space for the opponent to counter-attack if the ball is lost," Kovac writes in his column for FAZ.
"You used to say that the big ones eat the little ones. Today, the fast eat the slow. The trend is clearly towards players who can combine speed with technical ability. They make the difference, because they can still create something in extremely tight spaces. And switching the play, both offensively and defensively, is obviously very dependent on pace," Kovac writes.
Kovac led Eintracht Frankfurt to an eighth place in the Bundesliga as well as the DFB-Pokal title after a 3-1 win against Bayern München in the final.
