Per la serie delle interviste tattiche offriamo di seguito una intervista con il tecnico brasiliano Bruno Pivetti, in passato assistente di Fernando Diniz. L’intervista viene mantenuta in inglese per favorirne una più larga diffusione.

Bruno, your coaching career has started with you not previously being a pro football player. How did you approach coaching?

I’ve always been a football fan. Reflecting about my history, I have certainty nowadays that since my childhood I decided to become a Football Coach besides the fact that I had never tried to be a pro football player. When I was a child, I used to go to the stadium with my dad, brother, other relatives, and friends. In my childhood I developed a true love for this game, and when I was 17 years old, I decided that I wanted to be a professional football coach. I used to follow all the things about Brazilian football and there were not so many media about European football at that time in Brazil. I remembered that when I watched a match of UEFA Champions League, I decided to be part of this world in any professional position regarding this game.

At the time, I also needed to decide what to study in university. So, I had the conviction to apply to the graduation of Sports Bachelor in University of São Paulo in 2002/03. Since the beginning of my graduation, I focused on my studies to prepare for my football career. When I started the graduation, I thought that I could work in physical coaching and physiology of football. But everything changed, when I did an Erasmus program in the city of Porto, Portugal in 2006.

I studied in the Faculty of Sports in Porto’s University and one of my teachers was Vitor Frade, the creator of a football training methodology named Tactical Periodization. I dedicated all my efforts to understanding this methodology that puts tactics as the center of the football training program, focused on the highest level of performance. I became an enthusiast of Tactical Periodization and I started to go deep in the study of the theory that supports the methodology. Parallel to my academic studies I did an internship in Porto FC with the U20 Head Coach, José Guilherme Oliveira.

Thus, I had contact with both theoretical and practical issues of Tactical Periodization. With the influence of the success of all Portuguese Coaches at that time, like José Mourinho, Rui Faria, André Villas-Boas and Carlos Carvalhal, for instance, I’ve decided to be a Football’s Head Coach. When I came back to Brazil in 2007, I started an internship in a club named Pão de Açúcar Esporte Clube. I was there for 8 years, in which I went through different roles, like intern, physical coach of the youth academy, physiologist, and assistant coach. I always tried to drive my career to the coaching area.

In 2013, I was promoted to be the assistant coach of the Professional Team to work with Fernando Diniz. At that time, I had decided to become a Head Coach and I could learn a lot being an assistant coach. In 2015 I was invited by Atletico Paranaense to be the Head Coach of the U20 team. So, I started my coaching career effectively. After that, the club promoted me to the first team in 2016 as an Assistant Coach.

At that time, I had the opportunity to work with Paulo Autuori, a world reference in the coaching area. After Athletico, I accumulated experience as an assistant coach in a lot of clubs, and I had an opportunity to learn with a lot of coaches. In one of these clubs, I had international experience in Europe as Assistant Coach of Ludogorets of Bulgaria in 2018-19, working with Paulo Autuori.

In 2020, I had my first opportunity as a Head Coach in the pro level in a traditional club of Brazil named Esporte Clube Vitória. And now, I’m working a lot as Head Coach in Brazilian’s Professionals clubs with an interesting diversity of practice, always open to evolving myself personally and professionally. I tried to gather football knowledge from many schools, as I said before, I have a strong Portuguese influence in my career. Furthermore, I got my coaching licenses in Argentina (ATFA – AFA) and in Brazil (CBF ACADEMY), both are homologated by CONMEBOL. I focused all my career to be a global professional, and one thing that helps me is the fact that I have both Brazilian and Italian Citizenship.

You worked with some well-known managers such as Cristóvão Borges, Paulo César de Oliveira and Paulo Autuori…what you learn from these experiences?

All the coaches that I had the opportunity to work with in my career, before I had started to be a professional head coach, taught me something. I believe that all the coaches must be open to learning with other coaches in three main areas that define the competence in coaching.
The first of them is the ability to manage people, because leadership is essential to build good teamwork. This is common in any professional area that depends on human labor to reach a specific target. A productive group of people for a specific goal is made of the strength of the relationships between the members of this team.

And this strengthening of relations is a responsibility of the main leader. It’s important to say that the way a leader will lead a group toward a common goal, will be related to his personality and his life history. There is no cake recipe. For this reason, in this specific issue, as an Assistant Coach I always tried to watch how the coaches solved the ordinary conflicts that exist in any football team. I would observe how the coaches demanded, collectively and individually, of the players, how they made a criticism or a compliment for the players.

Communication is an essential tool of interaction for any leader with his group, so I tried to observe and create my own style of communication with a lot of reflection. The second area of competence is the quality of the Game Ideas of any coach. In this way, I was influenced by a lot of schools of football. I did my studies and practices in Portugal, I worked in different levels of performance in Brazil, I had my experience in Bulgaria, and I’ve gotten my Coaching license in Argentina and in Brazil, for instance. This diversity of practice as all the coaches that I worked with in my career influenced my Game Ideas and drove me to create my own Game Model. And now, to apply this model in the best way possible, I always try to adapt my ideas with the characteristics of the players I lead. So, I learned, and I was influenced by all the coaches that I’ve worked with regarding my game model in all the moments of the game. I try to absorb the best ideas of each coach that I worked with regarding the defensive and offensive organization, the defensive and offensive transitions, and the set pieces.

And for me, the third area of competence is the methodology of training. Since the beginning of my career, I have followed the principles of Tactical Periodization to build my teams and to put my game ideas to practice. So, the main influence in this area for me is the Professor Vitor Frade, who created this training methodology.

With Autuori you also worked with the Bulgarian side of Ludogorets. Can you tell us something about this experience overseas? What about the confrontation with European football?

When Paulo Autuori invited me to go with him to Bulgaria, I was in Ferroviária as an interim Head Coach of the professional team. In Ludogorets we were champions of Bulgarian Super Cup in 2018, Champions of Bulgarian First Division (PARVA League) in 2018-19 (8th Title in a row of Ludogorets) and we qualified the team for the group stage of Europa League.

I can affirm that this was an enriching experience, both in the professional point of view as the personal one. We had a multiethnic team with players from a lot of nationalities, like: Brazilians, Bulgarians, Poles, Romanians, Argentinians, Dutch, South Africans, and Madagascan. Furthermore, the technical staff was also globalized, formed by Paulo Autuori (Head Coach – Brazil); Bruno Pivetti (Assistant Coach – Brazil); Antoni Zdravkov (Assistant Coach – Bulgaria); Ivan Díaz (Physical Coach – Spain); Ian Coll (Sports Scientists – Scotland); Berndt Dreher (Goalkeeper’s Coach – Germany); Rafael Ferreira (Performance Analyst – Brazil); Lucas Oliveira (Performance Analyst – Brazil); Dr. Radu (Physician – Romania); Stella Simeonova (Translator – Bulgaria); Nikolay Kirchev (Team Manager – Bulgaria).

This experience with professionals from different cultures and nationalities contributed a lot for my evolution as a coach. We communicated in English for the most part of the time because it was the common language for everyone. Even though we had ten Brazilians players in our squad, we avoided speaking in Portuguese in the collective communication to not give any sensation that we were giving any privilege to our compatriots. This small action was important to give us good acceptance and respect from the whole group.

Training in another language contributed to my ability of communication, because I needed to prepare a good strategy to be well understood by everyone. To facilitate our interaction, we invested a lot in preparing qualified videos of individual and collective feedback for the players. I had to optimize my synthesis capacity and the clarity of my explanations to transmit my message to the receptors of a great number of nationalities and football cultures.

It was the first time in my career that I needed to defend a hegemony of a lot of years of winning in a local context. As Ludogorets is in a small city in Bulgaria, there is no income collections with fans in the stadium or sale of licensed products. The main resource of revenue is the quotes of UEFA for playing the European Championships. Thus, Ludogorets must always be the champion of Bulgaria to guarantee its participation in the European Championships and plan its budget with the quotes received by UEFA. So, second place is not allowed in this club’s context.
When we started to speak about our hiring to Ludogorets, I studied all the context, and I was glad to defend a team so hegemonic in its country. But by the experience itself I realized how big of a challenge it was. We were the team that all opponents wanted to beat, this was one more challenge we had to deal with. And for any Federation or football market, it’s not so convenient for the same team to win the championship over the years.

Thus, the club didn’t have any easy matches, but we had the advantage to work with some players that were playing together for a long period. Our game ideas were incorporated by the players, and this provided more tactical balance for the team, without losing the ability of improvisation and combination on the game.

In October of 2018, Paulo Autuori decided to leave the club. Even so, he oriented me to stay at Ludogorets and finish the whole season. The management of the club wanted to keep me in Ludogorets to continue the process that We had started. We’ve finished the season with the Bulgarian Trophy.

At the end of the 2018-19 season, I came back to Brazil and brought in my luggage an amazing international professional experience, and a lot of friends provided by a healthy multiethnic environment. The most important aspects that I evolved in this period were the knowledge and the ability of adaptation to an international context.

You also spent two-and-a-half years with Fernando Diniz at Audax and that has been the main focus of your recent interview with Sky Sports. I would like to go deep on the topics you talked about. In one of the excerpts of this interview, you referred to Diniz as a coach that ‹‹from the first phase of the build-up, wants this very intensive rotation of his players. He tries to get the most technical players involved in that first phase to help the goalkeeper keep the ball and then progress up the field from there››. What kind of build-up Diniz likes? There are specific ways to move up the ball from the back or is it all related to the players’ ability to find the gaps where to move the ball through?

Diniz is a coach that has much appreciation for the ball. He seeks protagonism, control and dominance of the game through ball possession. Then, regarding the first phase of building up, and it’s not a rigid rule, he used to put technically privileged players as closer to the ball as possible. For instance, in São Paulo, he used to bring Daniel Alves and in Fluminense he used to bring PH Ganso, besides other players as well.

Eccomi 🙂 Lo andai a trovare quando allenava a Osasco, ma già si faceva notare. Dopo l’allenamento, una lunga chiacchierata con lui e Bruno Pivetti, oggi allenatore del Nautico, per parlare della loro idea di calcio. Ci avevamo visto bene, ET inserto di grande qualità. https://t.co/2He2SCj8ba

— Alfredo Spalla (@AlfredoSpalla) October 5, 2023

In Audax, in many matches we didn’t have any actual fullbacks in the lineup, we had midfielders who played as fullbacks, as a strategy to improve our build-up technically. In addition, the goalkeeper sometimes must be very bold in his participation in the first phase of building up, giving inner passes, taking the ball out of the pressure, seeking the weak side of the pitch, and making a long ball with a high opponent pressure. He uses a lot of complex movement to give the best options to the ball carrier and to attract the opponent to his own field like a trap. The aim is to provide some gaps that will be important to progress in the field with a trend to create numerical superiority. All the rotation moves, and dynamics between the players are prepared to provide the ball carrier many options of short passes and combinations to facilitate the decision-making process. Thus, there are a lot of dynamic offensive moves that are trained systematically and exhaustively in both analytical and global ways.

Throughout the years, I’m observing that he has progressively developed many strategies to build-up with long balls as well, depending on the situation. The fact is, when he puts his team together to make the first phase of building up, he can attract the opponent in a high block of defense. This generates a space behind the last line of the opponent’s defense. The main goal is to explore this space, and Diniz’s team can do that with a combined game with a complex dynamic of short passes with tables, triangles, and with long balls as well, with a more direct attack. All these strategies were made to qualify the rhythm of offensive organization and improve the building up ability.

One of the key points about relationism football is time. Controlling the ball is a way to master and dictate tempo. Some of the best Seleção sides from the past (I mainly mean 1970 and 1982) were suited to dictate the tempo of play by slowing down the rhythm of the game just to suddenly accelerate. What is the link between time, space and ball possession in relationism?

I think the management of the time is a vital issue to provide offensive advantages. In my opinion, in football history, the most unpredictable teams on the offensive moment were able to manage the time efficiently. We need to remember that in football the players must make a high amount of decisions in a short period of time. Who’s defending is always reacting to the offensive moves of the one attacking.

So, as much as a team alternates the rhythm of the ball possession, combining keeping or slowing down the possession with a sudden acceleration could promote difficulty in the decision-making process of who’s defending. Over the last decades, in the highest level of football, I have the impression that there was a “frenzy” or a fixed idea to induce only a high speed of ball transmission on the possession, and in street football where the players grow up in Brazilian childhood it’s not quite like that. It’s a common characteristic in street football or in futsal, both parts of the reality in the Brazilian formation, the alternation of rhythm on ball possession to surprise the opponents.

Any coach must be prepared to attack and to defend, then we know how hard it is to defend a team that has a lot of variation of the ball possession, combining short passes with a sudden long pass in the back of the defensive line. Or that makes combinations with 3-5 players together on one side of the pitch and a sudden change of the game orientation for the other side of the pitch. And in other examples, when in the second phase of building up a team combines horizontal passes exchanges with a fast inner pass in the space between lines of the opponent to reach the last third of the pitch. Or when a player carries or steps on the ball to attract some opponent to the pressure and after making a fast pass for the free player in a pocket space. And We could speak about the most specific characteristic of the Brazilian player, the dribbling ability. I like to say that the Brazilian player learns how to dribble before playing football. And dribbling is one of the best ways to break any defensive strategy. Unfortunately, dribbling is little stimulated nowadays, in my opinion. I’ve heard of some coaches that allow dribbling on the last third of the pitch only, when there is no defensive coverage.

And I believe that if a player is well trained, he can use the resource of dribbling to promote defensive disbalance in the opponent. I think that this rhythm alternation of the possession is part of the essence of the Brazilians players since the formation context. Another topic is width. In relationism, full width is not so important as in positional play. Tilting with many players around the ball carrier is more important than building symmetrical, wide opened structures.

For me personally, width, together with the depth, is one of the most important offensive tactical principles. It is essential to open offensive gaps to progress, mainly increasing the horizontal distances between the players on the opponent’s defensive line. Another important advantage of the width is providing more time and space to the player that receives the ball from the opposite side of the pitch. I believe in the importance of the associating playing through the short pass combination between players that were together in one side of the pitch, but the resource or the possibility of changing sides to explore the weak side is very effective to create time and space to attack.

For me the best way to attack is surprising the opponent, so I try to create unpredictable offensive actions combining the freedom of short combinations in one side with the possibility to change the orientation of the game by exploring the width of the pitch on the other. It is very difficult to keep the defensive balance when an opponent changes the game orientation. Then, in my opinion the best way to provide this unpredictability is creating an offensive build-up that combines this relationism like you said in the question with some players positioned in width on the other side of the pitch to take advantage of the width in attack.

Now, the players that will provide width or will combine in a part of the pitch relies on the offensive game ideas of each coach. I believe in both ways to create an effective attack. The most important thing is creating some degrees in attack movements to manifest the player’s talents. I think that the coaches’ responsibility is to create the contexts and the conditions for the players’ talents to emerge in attack. According to their convictions, the coaches must create the offensive dynamics focused as well on the players characteristics and facilitate the making-decisions process inside the pitch with some space for improvisation.

Positionism vs relationism is currently a debate in Brazilian football circles. Brazil has seen a sort of Positionism invasion with a lot of European coaches, mainly Portuguese, coming from abroad. The National Team too embraced this European approach under Tite and it didn’t work. What is your opinion about and at what stage is this debate?

I think both styles of playing are efficient. I believe that good results are more related to the talent of the players, the ability of communication and on managing people, the quality of the game ideas, the quality of the training methodology to transfer the ideas to the pitch, the respect of the management with the process, the facilities and structure of the clubs, and the four aspects of the performance of the players, like: tactical, technical, physical and mental. It’s a nonsense affirmation that Tite’s process didn’t work. He created a lot of professional processes in CBF, and has an incredible performance in terms of results.

Unfortunately, Brazil didn’t win the World Championship by details. But I think the work process of Tite was good, with a high level of quality. It’s a consensus in Brazil that the Brazilian Player can adapt to any type of Game Model because of their quality and talent. The most important thing is for the coach to be able to transfer his ideas on practice through his methodology and the players believe in the tactical principles that they will fight for.

Do you think the fact players such as Ganso or Gabriel Barbosa didn’t enjoy European success was due to the difference between the South American relationism and the positional play they faced in Europe?

I don’t think so. The ability to adapt to a foreign country depends on the context of each person. There are a lot of variables that influence the adaptation, we cannot reduce the lack of performance of some Brazilian players in Europe only for the game style in each continent. Many Brazilians players played in different countries of European Continent, despite the game models that they were defending. For me, this is more related to individuals’ contexts than to tactical aspects.

Some of the issues Diniz is facing with Seleção could be caused by the fact many national team players are suited to play an European style, positional play with their clubs?

I don’t think so. Brazilian National Players that are suited in Europe usually have a high level of quality and talent, so they can well adapt to any kind of Game Model. The difficulty for them is the same as for the players that are suited in Brazil: the lack of training time in the “Seleção”. In a scenario of any National Team around the world the coaches usually don’t have enough time for training. In the Game Model of Diniz, having time for training is essential due the particularity of his tactical principles. It is different to most types of Game Models applied by other coaches. There is a breaking of a lot of paradigms in his Game Style, and the players must have time to adapt to these ideas. In the National team they don’t have time for training like in clubs, so this could damage the whole adaptation process. Furthermore, Brazil is making a reformulation of the National Players and suffering with a lot of injuries. Then the process to adapt to an uncommon game idea in this transition context is still more challenging.

Some people around think that relationism is just sending the players on the pitch and letting them run the show as they want. That’s not the case. What can you say to us about this?

In high-level football, everything that happens on the pitch regarding the players performance, depends on the patterns previously established. No matter how the coach puts his team on the pitch, the functionality of the game is related to the connection between the players and the influence of the opponent. The pattern of organization and the dynamic is acquired both in the training sessions as in the matches. Then, to reach a high level of collective performance, the patterns of organization are essential. When a team has a strong pattern in all moments of the game (offensive, defensive and transitions), the individuality is easier to appear, because there is a collective pattern that supports the individual talent. It is important to use the training sessions to create this collective organization to facilitate the decision-making process of the players through the tactical principles. This isn’t related to the game style; each coach has their own game model and methodology to put his ideas and the collective organization in practice. It isn’t a matter of positional or relational style of play.

Until now, we talked about relationism from an ideological point of view. But I’m also interested in the pragmatic aspects of this play style. How do you teach players to play this way? Which are the drills you and Diniz utilized to install this play on your team?

I think that the most important issue is the Game Idea, and it’s related to the beliefs and the personality of the coach. To optimize the transfer of these Game Ideas into the pitch, it’s essential the ability of managing people by the coach to lead the whole process. Furthermore, the methodology of training is very important to put the tactical principles in practice. When I worked with Diniz, he tried to use the knowledge of many trainings’ methodologies and some exercises that he experienced as a player, adapted to the demands of his Game Model. He used to combine some analytical exercises without opposition to focus on the technical skills contextualized with the offensive dynamics of the team. After he used to put the opposition to create a situation closer to the game reality. Mainly in the offensive first and second phase of building-up he used to repeat systematically some offensive patterns, without and with opposition, to build habits and behavior in the players to facilitate the decisions during the matches. In the defensive moment, Diniz used to train and to provide defined tactical principles so his team could defend in high, intermediate, and low blocks of defense.

Regarding the demand of fast reactions in the transitions, moments of loss and the recovery of the ball, he used to create this behavior in different kinds of small-sided games. And he has a lot of specific moves in the offensive set pieces to promote surprise on the opponent. The most part of his training is focused in the collective tactical using the whole field with a discontinuous stimulus to pass the feedback information during the intervals.

Having so many players around the ball makes it easier to press the ball once it is lost. But what happens in relationism when the rivals are able to bypass your first line of counterpressing?

I think this is one of the biggest challenges of this specific game style. The counter press is very aggressive, and it has been made with a lot of players because they are usually together around the ball during the possession. But when they lose the ball possession, if the opponent can take the ball out of the pressure, there is a lot of space for the opponent to progress on the pitch, mainly on the opposite side of the ball. When this situation happens, the team must drop back to the defensive shape to increase the number of the players behind the ball and to form the defensive lines. The intention must be defending the central and lateral corridors to protect the goal in the best way possible. The speed of this collective reconstitution is very important to inhibit the progression of the opponent. Another strategy to counter the progression of the opponent is to stop the game with some tactical faults. It’s not ideal, but this can be a resource to break an opponent’s counterattack.

You’re currently coaching at Clube Água Santa in São Paulo. Which are your goals for this season?

Agua Santa is a club of the first division of Sao Paulo State that had an uncredible ascension over the last ten years. This team got 3 promotions in a row until the first division of Sao Paulo and in 2023 won the second place of “Paulistao”, the most competitive Championship of Brazil, losing the big final to Palmeiras. For the next season the team has, in the first semester, the “Paulistao” and the Brazilian Cup, and in the second semester the Brazilian D Serie, it will be the first time that the club will play a national Championship. The goals of the club are to make another big performance in “Paulistao”, be competitive in the Brazilian Cup, because of the importance of this Championship in Brazil, and to get a promotion in the Brazilian D Serie to the C Serie. The same ascension that the club had regionally in Sao Paulo, is now the goal, to get a fast promotion in the national scenario. For this reason, the club is investing a lot in human and in structure resources. We had a big challenge in the next season, but we are planning well to get the results that the club deserves.