Article in The Athletic about us/Ismael

https://theathletic.co.uk/2374435/2021/02/10/barnsley-valerien-ismael-pressing/

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Even from a distance, you could make out Valerien Ismael.

Over on their two training pitches beside Oakwell, Barnsley’s players were being drilled by this tall, thin man in the middle, dressed all in black.

Every now and then, Ismael would yell: “Trigger!” At this signal, the attackers in red hurtled to chase down defenders in green. There was a blur of bodies and activity – pressing. When chances were created and converted, there was a chant of “Shearer!” as the ball hit the net. It was fast, furious and a word Ismael uses over and over: intense.

A few minutes later, he has a tactics board out on the pitch. Ismael is showing his squad what he wants next. After 15 weeks of his drilled coaching, Barnsley’s players already know. The 45-year-old former Bayern Munich – and Crystal Palace – defender wants to make the experience of facing Barnsley “unpleasant”. Not through intimidation but through energy and movement. He wants his team to “work together, as a swarm”.

Whether repeated practice of this theory means Barnsley can impose themselves on visitors Chelsea in the FA Cup’s last 16 on Thursday is another matter. On paper, this is an old-fashioned David versus Goliath tie, little Barnsley against big-time Chelsea, but Ismael’s presence is indicative of change in this part of South Yorkshire.

Yes, Oakwell remains Oakwell, the seats in its main stand are still wooden, the painted brick perimeter wall on Grove Street is still a deep, blood-red. This has been Barnsley’s home since the club’s formation as Barnsley St Peter’s by the Reverend Tiverton Preedy in 1887. Barnsley, the place, is what the French would call L’Angleterre profonde — real England.

But since December 2017, when Chien Lee, Billy Beane and the Pacific Media Group (PMG) first invested in the club, Barnsley FC have been a very 21st-century club: multi-national, driven by analytics and data. Beane, a pivotal figure in sport – and how today we analyse it – remains a shareholder.

It is why Ismael calls Barnsley “modern”. PMG, moreover, last week acquired Danish second-tier club Esbjerg for around $5 million, having already added France’s Nancy, Thun in Switzerland and Ostend in Belgium to their stable. The group ownership of Red Bull is an example for PMG. At Barnsley, they know the club cannot challenge others in the Championship and above in terms of budget, so the aim is to recruit smarter, increase value and sell on. It is Beane’s Moneyball ethos transplanted from baseball.

Part of that is to have a set method of play and recruit to fit that method. Another part is to hire a coach who will also fit. As Barnsley chief executive Dane Murphy explained last year: “We feel if it’s club-driven, the way we want to play, the type of players we recruit, type of coaches we bring in, then if there’s turnover you don’t have to change the infrastructure. You’re just shifting out parts.”

Murphy is 34, a former DC United player whose MLS contacts saw 20-year-old striker Daryl Dike arrive on loan from Orlando City in the last minutes of the winter transfer window, hours after making his USA international debut (more on that later). It was the club-driven approach that saw Barnsley employ Gerhard Struber as coach in November 2019 after analysing the pressing statistics of his Austrian club, Wolfsberger, and it was also in Austria where Barnsley noted Ismael implementing a similar approach at LASK – “the second-best pressing team in the world,” according to Murphy. It took LASK into Champions League qualifiers and then the Europa League’s knockout phase. They were eliminated in the last 16 by Manchester United last August in the pandemic-extended season.

Just over two months later, Ismael was at home in Munich when his telephone buzzed. “I can remember,” he says, “I was with my wife in the kitchen and we had just spoken about another offer. My wife wasn’t excited about that. Then I received the text from Dane Murphy. I went into my office and I came back out and said to my wife, ‘What do you think about England?’ She said straight away, ‘This is for you, this is always your dream.’

“England was, always, and after that I spoke with Dane. They knew all about my philosophy, how I play. It was a good feeling for me that the club wants to play like this. And it’s in England.

“I’d heard about Barnsley because of Daniel Stendel, the German manager before me (Struber’s predecessor). I’d worked with him in Hannover. I was under-23s coach, he was under-19s. I knew his way and about Barnsley.

“The project is first to play a high press and to stay that way. Second, to develop young players. It was a topic of our conversation: can I work and play with young players?, because it’s a philosophy of the board to sell players. I accept that. I have worked with young players and this suited me. We are on the same page.”

On the same page is a phrase Ismael repeats during the conversation. He likes this, the unity of vision from the boardroom to the training ground. He uses the word “vertical” in another context but it applies here, too.

When it comes to assessing his own style, Ismael uses another short phrase: “Direct with purpose.” This is where the unpleasantness comes in. He means unpleasant as in uncomfortable, and it all begins with those pressing drills on the training ground.

But, The Athletic asks, is the term “pressing” not in danger of becoming meaningless due to overuse?

“For sure, pressing is a superficial term now, everybody knows what press means,” Ismael says. “But we have a different approach to pressing. If the opponent has a back four or back three, you have a lot of build-up possibilities and a lot of rotation. We have solutions for this. Whether it’s Press One or Press Two, Three or Four, every player here knows now our press and we just have to say one number. We’re on the same page and everybody knows how to work.”

He points to a poster on the wall.

“You can see on the board there – ‘Principles of Play’, ‘in possession and out of possession’. These are all topics in our way to play. Now you can ask all my players and staff what ‘On the Jump’ means and they all know. If I say ‘Defend forward’, everybody knows. You have to work together a lot for this – explain, repetition, learn, make mistakes, improve, do it again in the next game. You will get better and better and better.

 

“I can’t tell all the secrets. But the first principle is intensity. Without intensity, we’ve no chance. That’s why we need intensity first. If you want to dominate – we don’t have Premier League quality – but we can dominate with our intensity. You have to show the players where we want to win the ball and what happens after. When you win the ball, you have a short time when the opponent is not organised. So you have to stay vertical, play direct with purpose. That’s a big difference from playing direct. Direct with purpose can be in behind, diagonal, quickly – use this short window to hurt the opponent. The other thing it does is keep the opponent away from our goal.

“After three months, I’ve got confirmation that this is right. We can see already the results, the fans and opponents know how we play, that it is difficult and that we are really unpleasant to play. We’ve found a good way.”

Barnsley were fourth-bottom of the Championship with no wins in their first seven league matches when Ismael arrived in late October. They immediately won four of the next five. After Saturday’s rained-off game with Derby County, Barnsley sit mid-table in the Championship, eight points off the relegation zone, nine points off the play-off places. With a bottom-four budget, they are out-performing expectations and Ismael thinks their identity is clear. Barnsley press, Barnsley swarm.

“It was a process,” he says of his coaching philosophy. “When I started, the first thing was to press. But it’s like you say – ‘What is pressing?’ And do you want to press all the time or for the first 15 minutes? Is it when you are 1-0 down? When?

“I tried to find answers and worked with the under-23s at Hannover in my first job. I tried to develop it. In some games it works, and in others not. ‘Why doesn’t it work?’ Then I get my first manager’s job and it’s the same. But you don’t get time (in management) and this is the problem. My thinking was not finished. You have to step back.”

Ismael was approaching 34 when his 16-year playing career ended in 2009 at Hannover in the German Bundesliga. After retiring through injury, Ismael joined the board as a general manager, then coached their reserves. He moved to Wolfsburg in 2013, to the same role, then to Nuremburg for a year and back to Wolfsburg, where in November 2016 he was made manager.

It did not last long. Ismael was dismissed the following February, his penultimate match coming at Borussia Dortmund, who were managed by Thomas Tuchel. It was a 3-0 win for Tuchel, who will, of course, be in the opposition dugout at Oakwell on Thursday. But if that was a bad Saturday in Dortmund for Ismael, it was also a moment of realisation.

“I don’t know him personally,” Ismael says of the new Chelsea head coach, “I just spoke to him shortly before that Wolfsburg game and after. As a coach he is more possession-based, but he’s really creative, adaptable. All his teams play a lot of systems. He can play 3-4-3 and, if it doesn’t work, five minutes later he will change shape to be more effective. It’s a quality of a big manager. It’s good for Chelsea, he can work with the young guys and he can give the team more flexibility. I think it’s a great (manager) transfer for Chelsea.

“With Wolfsburg, we lost 3-0 away. Dortmund were unbelievable that year, he brought Dortmund to another level.”

Ismael looks at the two line-ups from that game nearly four years ago, when Tuchel had Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang leading the attack, Andre Schurrle in midfield and an 18-year-old Christian Pulisic, a potential opponent again on Thursday, came off the bench for the last 20 minutes. “We played 3-5-2,” Ismael says. “We had Mario Gomez up front. I knew we had to change but didn’t get time.” Wolfsburg are on their fourth manager since sacking Ismael, illustrating his point.

“After Wolfsburg, I started to ask myself better questions. ‘What do I need to play like this?’ ‘What is important for me?’ ‘What do you need to improve to relax?’ Because there was a lot of frustration, not just around football. I started to get different answers, found more solutions. The next step was to play 3-4-3 and my big breakthrough was with LASK last season. The club wanted to play this football. All my work over 10 years paid off and I’m sure about this principle. Now, can I bring this philosophy to another country? After three months, I can say, yes, it’s possible.

“I’m flexible with 3-4-3 — it can be 4-3-3, for example. Formations can be brief; in, out. You are in permanent movement playing this football. In 3-4-3, I know exactly which player I need for each position. In the transfer market, an agent will say: ‘I have an excellent No 10,’ and I agree. He may have very good quality. But it’s not for us. This is a good thing and it’s a bad thing. You have to be ruthless.

“Here, I had to ask if I had the players to play like that and, if not, how can I change that? I love the Championship. So variable, so intense.

“So, on one side, Wolfsburg was a pity because I lost my job. On the other, it was a breakthrough. I knew exactly what I need to be successful.”

In Barnsley — twinned with Schwabisch Gmund, an hour or so drive north from Tuchel’s birthplace of Krumbach — Ismael is discussing the recent trend of pressing.

“I don’t think it’s German, I think it’s modern,” he tells The Athletic. “Yes, maybe it started there in Germany, to create a new way. It’s really intense, for sure. I demand a lot but the players know that if we invest our time and work together as a swarm on the pitch, we get results. We have a work ethic. You have to be able to count on your team-mates. If not, we’re in trouble.”

Ismael is French and played for them in the age-group levels, with Thierry Henry among others. His hometown Strasbourg is on the border with Germany, and he also has German citizenship having both played and managed there. Those two countries shaped him considerably more than the 13 Premiership games for Crystal Palace he played in 1998. At £2.7 million, Ismael was Palace’s record signing – at Strasbourg, he had played with Frank Leboeuf and was inspired by the defender’s move to London two years earlier. But Leboeuf came at 28, Ismael was 22. “He went to Chelsea and that’s why I made the step from Strasbourg to Crystal Palace,” Ismael says of Leboeuf. “But I was too young, I was not prepared for this big step.”

In the current era of Bayern Munich’s numbing monopoly, it can be forgotten that other clubs used to win the Bundesliga.

Ismael went back to Strasbourg, via four years with Lens, after his short spell at Palace and in 2003 joined Werder Bremen. They promptly won the league and cup double under Thomas Schaaf. Two seasons later, Bayern recruited Ismael and he instantly won the domestic double again. It was the same combination of trophies but the two clubs gave Ismael differing experiences.

“Thomas Schaaf at Werder Bremen was really great. He was hard but I learned how to be closer to players. It was the best balance. We did simple things, played with a 4-4-2 diamond. We played beautiful football, won 6-0, 6-1, won the title with a 3-1 win (over Bayern) in Munich. Away from the pitch, we were very close. The togetherness was incredible. At Werder Bremen, everyone was on the same page. This is a result.”

 

At Bayern, Ismael witnessed a contrast. Here was expectation, outlined graphically by the hierarchy – “In the changing room on the first day, Rummenigge, Beckenbauer and Hoeness walked in and said: ‘OK, we want to win the league, win the cup and reach the last four in the Champions League.’ The first day. So you know where you stand.

“It was a mindset. (Goalkeeper) Oliver Kahn, he was a big personality who didn’t speak too much. But he was, is, really clever. When he said something, it was, how you say, an electric shock? But it was right. It was in him. No doubts. For 10 months he’d say nothing – ‘I’ll smile when I win the title.’ But he was right. If you want to play for this club, you have to have this mindset. Michael Ballack was the same.”

Ismael was not some bit-part player in these German doubles, he played a minimum of 30 league games, of 34, in each season.

Another trophy he won brought a memory of another distinctive goalkeeper. At Strasbourg in 2001, they won the French Cup on penalties. Ismael scored their penultimate spot kick, a certain Jose Luis Chilavert the winning one.

“Yeah, I played with a lot of personalities!” Ismael laughs. “Chilavert spoke about himself in the third person. He sat beside me in the changing room. I’d ask him how he was doing and normally someone would reply: ‘I’m fine.’ He would say: ‘Chilavert is good today’ or ‘Chilavert is tired today.’ Such a personality, big ego. But what a left foot.

“It was great to play with such guys and see why they made big careers. It’s not a surprise that Kahn, Chilavert had these careers. It’s a mindset: Dedication, prepare yourself every day, every week, every year to do it all over again. It looks easy but it’s daily work, really hard.”

Daryl Dike was explaining himself and, given he had just swapped the Florida holiday-making mecca of Orlando for Yorkshire in February, Dike (pronounced dee-kay) probably needed to.

Having made his United States debut on the Sunday night, here he was on Thursday lunchtime being unveiled as a Barnsley player to the local media via Zoom.

“When you are young in America, all you see is English football every day,” Dike says. “You wake up on Saturday and Sunday morning and it is on TV. It is your DNA. You dream about playing in English football.”

When the conference call finishes, Dike sits in an Oakwell office and tells The Athletic: “I’m super-excited.”

He is 20 and only made his professional debut for Orlando City last July. He has signed on loan until the end of the season. There is an option to buy. Having passed his COVID-19 test, Dike had his first training session. He was part of the attacking press and Ismael will be pleased to hear his new striker say: “You can see the intensity in training, going into tackles, pressing really hard.

“That’s not everywhere. You quickly pick up on the intensity factor. You can already see the culture, the family, the guys are close and willing to work hard for each other. They’re willing to play the model the coach has set up. The staff are super-helpful, trying to make players understand their role. You can see that immediately. I hope they’ll all help me acclimatise quickly.”

Dike played for the University of Virginia before turning pro, as did Barnsley CEO Murphy, and there was further reassurance from a colleague at Orlando City – Nani. The former Manchester United winger moved to the MLS side from Sporting Lisbon two years ago.

“He was always in my ear, giving me advice,” Dike says. “He was telling me to be prepared, that it is going to be difficult. He warned me: ‘It’ll be difficult, just don’t get scared, you know what you can do.’ That was the main thing.”

The rain delayed Dike’s possible debut against Derby on Saturday, but it could now come against Chelsea in a game to be shown live across the UK on BBC TV. He says he will “take it step by step” with regard to his future, but Barnsley’s American connections must think they have nipped in early to secure an up-and-coming talent.

It is a good reputation to have, one the ownership will seek to nurture. John Stones and Mason Holgate left Oakwell for fees totalling £5 million to join Everton in 2013 and 2015 and Ethan Pinnock joined Brentford for £3 million in 2019. At a club with a bigger developmental reputation – such as Brentford – those fees would have been larger.

That is all part of Barnsley’s process. The reality is that the club’s record purchase remains the £1.5 million paid for Georgi Hristov after their 1997 promotion to the Premier League, and on Thursday they encounter a billionaire’s club. Some optimism is taken from the fact that the last time Chelsea came to Oakwell — also in the FA Cup in March 2008, fielding a team that included John Terry, Michael Essien and Ismael’s former Bayern team-mate Ballack – Barnsley won 1-0 with a Kayode Odejayi goal.

It can be done.

And when it is put to Ismael that preparing Barnsley to face Tuchel’s Chelsea is surely harder than preparing Wolfsburg to face Tuchel’s Dortmund was, he disagrees.

“Barnsley is easier. Because everybody is on the same page.”

 

Cracking read, that. Some interesting stuff. Ta for sharing...

 

Thanks for sharing

 

Cheers excellent read.

 

Wooden seats in the main stand!!!??? Let's get ready for the cliches on Thursday!

Apart from that though it's a good article regarding Ismael's training and tactics.

 

Great article. Just to show that we have more than one playing style VI says:

"We have solutions for this. Whether it’s Press One or Press Two, Three or Four, every player here knows now our press and we just have to say one number. We’re on the same page and everybody knows how to work.”

 

Brilliant stuff, cheers for that. Can't wait for Thursday.

 

And only one brief mention of Grove Street.

 

Thanks for giving us a great insight into our club and manager.
Some very positive stuff in there, Onwards and Upwards!!!
COYR

 

No, no, no. That can't possibly be true. All those who know everything about football insist we don't have a plan B. Valerien can't possibly disagree with these oracles!
Thanks for posting such an insightful article. Very interesting and informative.

 

He's a top manager now I've read that article. It explained a lot about his thought process.

 

I enjoyed reading that article, very much. What is more, I still have a lot to learn if I am to understand the whole of Ismael's pressing system. The triggers are still the biggest mystery.

 

I wish the article had been done a month or so ago. I wouldn't have been so vitriolic about some of the results and performances if I'd read something like that sooner.

 

Thanks for sharing; great read.

 

Shame they stopped letting folk in to watch training, it might have made more sense to you then.

 

Does his chewing gum lose its flavour on his bed post overnight?
No mention of it at all. Disappointing.

 

That’s what Del Boy said

 

You obviously didn't read it then