The mid-block is harder to coach than the high press

Pressing high is mostly courage and repetition; holding a compact shape thirty metres from your own goal is a decision problem.

A high press has one instruction at its heart. Go. There are triggers and angles and cover shadows to learn, and it takes a preseason to install, but the underlying behaviour is aggressive and human, and players enjoy it. Tell a front three to hunt a goalkeeper and they will do it enthusiastically the first day.

Now try teaching a mid-block. The instruction is do not go, until a moment that has no obvious signal, and then everybody goes together. That is far harder, because the natural instinct of a competitive footballer standing eight metres from an opponent in possession is to close him down, and you are asking him to stand still while the crowd behind him gets restless. The discipline required is not physical. It is the discipline of not doing the thing you want to do.

The compact part is misunderstood as well. Compactness is not about being close to your teammates in the abstract. It is about the distance between your defensive line and your midfield line, and that distance is controlled almost entirely by whether the back four steps up when the ball goes backwards. If the line does not step, the block stretches, and no amount of midfield running will close a twenty-metre gap. One player, usually a centre back, decides whether the shape exists.

I would argue this is why mid-blocks look bad on television and get criticised unfairly. When a high press fails, it fails spectacularly, a goalkeeper chips it over and everyone applauds the bravery. When a mid-block fails, it just leaks. A pass finds a player between the lines, then another, and it looks passive rather than mistaken, and the manager gets accused of negativity when the actual problem was that his defensive line was five metres too deep for ten minutes.

There is one more reason it is unpopular. It does not photograph well. Nobody makes a highlights package of a shape holding its position for eleven minutes and forcing a sideways pass.

Do it properly and it is the most economical defending in the game. Do it slightly wrong and it is indistinguishable from being scared.