Why is the Kalvin Phillips role so rare and so difficult? - The Athletic 20/8/21

By Phil Hay and Tom Worville

A good week and a bad week for Kalvin Phillips. No place for him in Leeds United’s line-up at Old Trafford last Saturday but Tuesday brought the most coveted endorsement for a European midfielder, from Phillips’ namesake… of sorts.

It was Phillips who came up in conversation when Andrea Pirlo, interviewed by The Athletic, broached the subject of midfield play in England. The English have no playmakers, Pirlo said; no registas, the directors of Italian football who guide everything in front of them as Pirlo once did. Except perhaps one.

“There’s the boy at Leeds who’s a bit of a regista,” Pirlo said, and that in itself was the highest of praise, an acknowledgement of what Phillips has become.

Pirlo’s suggestion that English midfielders are inherently box-to-box is apt because until the summer of 2018, Phillips considered himself to be exactly that: box-to-box, attackingly mobile and minded to chip in with goals. It was only when Marcelo Bielsa sat the squad at Leeds down for the first time and ran them through the shirt numbers they would be given in spirit — Phillips the No 4, even though he wears No 23 — that everything changed. Bielsa’s decision was the genesis of Phillips’s climb from Championship footballer to European Championship finalist and into Pirlo’s line of sight.

The debate about registas versus box-to-box exponents touches on areas of discussion much broader than Phillips or Italian football. Across Europe, lone defensive midfielders and players with the licence to dictate from deep are rare, to the point where no one in the continent’s top five leagues amassed more minutes there than Phillips last season. He has learned and grasped not only a new position for him but a role that few coaches try to accommodate.

Double pivots are common in Europe and England. But a Kalvin Phillips? Not so much.

Pirlo said he and Phillips were “a bit different”, which of course they are; not only because of the gulf between their reputations and lasting influence on the sport but in style and substance too. Leeds rely on Phillips to manipulate the pieces on the board around him with long and short passing, showing a regista’s train of thought, but his responsibilities are heavily weighted with defensive tasks which helps protect a side who need perfect structure at the back. His education in discipline and game management is giving him eyes in the back of his head.

Leeds so often feel the impact of Phillips being absent, as he was for Saturday’s opening Premier League game at Manchester United. Bielsa, in his defence, is rigid in these situations, unwilling to bend or compromise on any of the conditioning or performance benchmarks that dictate his starting line-up, but when Pirlo’s observation of Phillips is considered, it should come as no surprise that deputising for him is a perennial challenge. Only a small number of footballers are groomed to operate exactly as he does and Phillips has the benefit of three years’ schooling.

But why is the defensive “one” in Bielsa’s 4-1-4-1 so specialised and hard to perfect? And why do a very limited number of clubs and coaches build teams around a single defensive midfielder like that when Phillips proves how effective the system can be?

Part of the answer to the second question, as explained by what The Athletic’s tactical expert Michael Cox called “the Bielsa Paradox”, is that the Argentinian has inspired and fascinated aspiring managers without tempting them to mimic his own tactical model. Bielsa’s formation (which switches fluidly from 4-1-4-1 to 3-3-1-3 depending on when his team are in or out of possession) drew attention as far back as his first job at Newell’s Old Boys in the early 1990s and it has been the basis of his work for decades, and also the source of his “El Loco” nickname.

Last weekend, only two other Premier League sides — Brighton and Watford — used a lone pivot in their opening game. The tactics earned promoted Watford a 3-2 home win over Aston Villa but Brighton abandoned their plan after half-time away to Burnley, where they were trailing 1-0. Manchester City and Liverpool also did some variation of this with their common 4-3-3 formation, but the distance between the lines is noticeably larger in a 4-1-4-1.

The trend is identical further afield, to the extent that in Italy’s Serie A itself, no footballer of note played as the midfield “one” in a 4-1-4-1 for any sustained period of time last season.

A coach who spoke to The Athletic anonymously said he saw Bielsa’s system as indicative of his readiness to take risks with overloads and open spaces.

Bielsa has high levels of trust in his defensive scheme and can rely on his players to cover huge distances over 90 minutes, the coach said. Because of that, he does not favour the insurance of a second defensive midfielder. Another deep player would reduce Leeds’ numbers in attack and Phillips has long been in the habit of dropping in and forming a back three whenever the team go forward or Bielsa’s full-backs commit beyond the halfway line.

In Europe, the sheer lack of players with an identical role to Phillips’ is striking.

Since the start of the 2020-21 term, only a handful have spent any meaningful length of time in the zone between the backline and an advanced midfield four. Phillips is far out in front with 21 starts there last season and, according to data from FBref, the most regular exponents behind him were in France’s Ligue 1. A handful of Premier League midfielders featured there and last weekend, the jobs for Brighton and Watford fell to Steven Alzate and Peter Etebo respectively. What is notable here is that no Serie A name features in the top 20 in terms of minutes as a solitary pivot in a 4-1-4-1. Sampdoria’s Albin Ekdal ranks highest with the equivalent of just two matches there.

Aside from basic minutes, there are relevant differences between Phillips and other deep-lying options.

Steven Nzonzi, on loan at Rennes from Roma last season, is 32 and does not have Phillips’ mobility. West Bromwich Albion’s Romaine Sawyers is a good passer of the ball but lacks the defensive tenacity. The complexity of the Phillips role means it is difficult to cover for him internally or externally, either by coaching existing squad members to do what he does at Leeds or to bring in signings with the talent to manage all his duties.

Andrew Hughes, the former Leeds midfielder, is a UEFA Pro Licence coach who worked at Huddersfield Town with David Wagner during the club’s 2016-17 Premier League promotion season. He has since held coaching jobs with both Sheffield clubs, Wednesday and United. Hughes says the incline of Phillips’s progression has been so steep that the discussion about him is shifting from the subject of how best to deputise for him to an acceptance that he is almost too proficient to replicate.

“In his position, you’ve got to have harmony around you and a perfect understanding of his area of the pitch,” Hughes says. “Footballing intelligence is so important, because you’re trying to control everything and be a step ahead.

“If Kalvin goes short to take the ball from his centre-backs, he might try to entice the opposition to press. They come with you and then he plays around them. It sounds simple, but if they do decide to press he needs to know exactly where the opposition are, which pass he’s looking for before he plays it and where he’s moving once he lets the ball go, ready to take it again. If any of that goes wrong, you’re under pressure and you’ve got a problem. And that happens so many times in one game.

“He’s been educated in a way which is pretty incredible considering his age. I found that I got better in defensive-mid as I got older. Over time, I learned more about when to hold if the full-backs bomb on and what to look out for in front of you and behind you. He’s (Phillips) still pretty young but he’s got it worked out. When I watch him, it sometimes looks to me like he’s moving in slow motion, like it’s totally natural.

“I feel like he could almost play in any position in a Bielsa team because, after three years of this, he knows what he (Bielsa) wants every player in every position to be doing for him. He knows where he wants (striker Patrick) Bamford to run and even if nine times out of 10 the defenders beat Bamford to the ball, it’s usually the right ball and it gives the opposition problems. Players he comes up against now will automatically respect his passing and respect his defensive ability. That makes a difference too.”

Phillips is not without his off-days, or ones when Bielsa feels the need to change tack by substituting him early but they tend to be scarce. His impact is extremely reliable and comparing what he does to other midfielders creates a stark picture of how different his game has become.

The right choice of data metrics can be subjective in these instances but there are three main parts to Phillips’ game: being busy defensively, dropping between the centre-backs and getting on the ball in his own defensive third, and a willingness to play long.

In this piece of analysis, the cut-off has been set at the top 20 per cent of players for each given statistic — the things that define Phillips — in an attempt to answer the question of how unique he really is.

Looking at his true tackles (a calculation taking into account tackles, interceptions and fouls when attempting a tackle) and true interceptions (interceptions plus blocked passes) per 90 minutes, Phillips racks up 5.6 of the former and 3.1 of the latter. Combined, this puts him in the top 15 per cent of all players in the Premier League who have amassed 900 minutes or more in central or defensive midfield. He is joined there by the likes of Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante, Yves Bissouma of Brighton and Manchester City’s Fernandinho; elite midfielders in their own right.

To reflect his positional versatility and the time he spends either in the back line or dictating build-up play, it is necessary to look at the share of his total touches which come within Leeds’ defensive third. Overall, 30 per cent of Phillips’ touches are made here, putting him in the top five per cent. This puts him alongside Arsenal’s Mohamed Elneny and Tom Davies of Everton, who also drop deep to help their teams construct attacks.

Lastly, his volume of long passes — 7.8 per 90, to be precise — puts him in the top 10 per cent of midfielders, a range he shares with Jonjo Shelvey of Newcastle, Burnley’s Ashley Westwood and Youri Tielemans of Leicester.

Current data shows that it is unusual for anyone to rate highly in even two of these three areas.

For example, Leicester’s Wilfred Ndidi, Allan of Everton and Crystal Palace’s James McArthur are the only others to put up the requisite defensive numbers while also getting on the ball a lot in their defensive third. Chelsea’s Jorginho, Thiago of Liverpool and Wolves’ Ruben Neves are the only three who are very active defensively and have a penchant for a long pass too.

In fact, he is the only player to appear in the top 20 per cent across all three categories.

“The way Kalvin plays helps to make the pitch bigger, and Leeds are dangerous when space opens up,” Hughes says. “He’s one-paced but he’s made that work for him and, in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’ve been lucky enough to watch training at Leeds and you see it with the midfielders — out early before the main sessions and making sure whichever team they’re going to be playing, they know where to take the ball and where to pass the ball. It’s about intelligence.”

So how do you compensate for Phillips when he is unavailable or on the bench? Bielsa has been asked that question many times. “The only way to get someone who can cover and do the same job perfectly is to spend £50 million, at least,” Hughes says. “That’s what a player like him costs. Rather than talking about how other players match up, you just have to accept he’s very special.”

The remarkable aspects of Phillips’ evolution in recent years are Bielsa’s ability to spot the niche ability in him and the player’s success in making an unconventional job his own.

In an interview with The Athletic last year, Phillips said the passing side of it came naturally to him “but the defensive side was harder. Defensively, it took me four or five months to get it. I was doing well but I could be doing better, helping the team more. You can’t get that side wrong.”

Leeds do not need telling that they are sitting on a very big asset. They knew that when they signed Phillips to a new contract in 2019, agreeing with him that if one more shot at promotion from the Championship came to nothing then they would listen to offers for him and let him leave for the Premier League.

What Bielsa noticed first, everyone is seeing now.

Not least Pirlo, from many miles away.