I can’t unsee how effective a midfielder dropping and maintaining six or more yards of separation is to help break up a compact defense. I wish more teams rotated midfielders back like this to unlock space for easier central progression.

When a midfielder drops and gets six or more yards of space, watch how simple it is for the next pass to be played forward. You won’t unsee it Pedri and De Jong demonstrated how effective it is for Barcelona against Newcastle, and here is an example from Manchester City against Burnley.

The three players to focus on in these examples are the defensive midfielder Nico Gonzalez and attacking midfielders Phil Foden and Tijjani Reijnders.

There’s normally a third player in the left half-space, either an inverted winger like Jeremy Doku or a fullback like Nico O’Reilly, but they aren’t important for this example.

Nico Gonzalez will often drop back to offer up a safe progressive pass when they are having trouble getting the ball past the opposition’s defense.

When he achieves five or fewer yards of separation from the man marking him, the Burnley defender in the second line doesn’t have enough incentive to follow him and jump when he drops. That forces Nico to play the ball wide to keep circulating play. The central space stays clogged, and Burnley remains compact.

When Nico gets six or more yards of separation, his marker has incentive to jump. If they don’t jump, he can continue to circulate the ball, but if the defender jumps, notice now the space for Foden and Reijnders increases. They gain separation from their markers, and space opens centrally.

Now you play the pass central to Foden or Reijnders. Burnley starts compact; they expand when Nico gets the ball, they contract on the ball when Foden or Reijnders receives the pass, and then there’s space in the channels or out wide. That exposes Burnley’s back line and offers avenues into the box.

The defense is compact; they expand, they contract, they expand, they contract, and then you score a goal. But you need them to expand or contract.

I wish teams like Manchester City would constantly rotate their midfielders back and forth, rather than have their attacking midfielders simply watch the ball circulate.

Why not have a combination of Reijnders, Foden, and/or Nico drop and achieve the six or more yards of space to force Burnley to expand? A never-ending pull and push.

Pass to that midfielder, and then force the opposition’s defense to jump. Then when they jump, keep rotating and dropping to open space in the middle to break up the compactness of the defense. To crumple them like a tin can and then expose their jagged edges once they contract or jump to the ball.

Then you should have at least one pass open centrally and a free man on the wing because defenders are getting dragged inside.

And it doesn’t have to be a massive amount of movement, or speed in movement, but it should be constant and vary. Vary who drops; one can drop, two can drop, or all three can drop. Surprise them and always achieve six or more yards of space with at least one midfielder, and then play through the middle.

It should, in theory, tire the team chasing the ball more than the team passing because it doesn’t have to be fast rotations, and this is mentally exhausting to follow for the defense.

Pep Guardiola in particular is a proponent of dribbling to force defenders to jump, but off-the-ball movement is something that I feel is not utilized enough in these scenarios. The same goes for most positional managers who face a compact, hard-to-break-down defense.

Those more positional attacking teams do this; you will see midfielders drop to offer an extra option for the back line, but they don’t do it frequently enough. I feel teams should constantly be looking to always have at least one midfielder open with six yards or more of space to keep the center of the pitch open.