Is De Zerbi shifting football’s tactics with possession tightrope at Brighton?

‘I was a pain in the ass as a footballer,” Roberto De Zerbi once said. And, in a way, he was a player hopelessly out of his time: a pure No 10 coming through at the turn of the century, just as they were disappearing from the game.

A maverick and a thrill-seeker in a sport tending increasingly towards regimentation. Good enough to be at Milan without ever being good enough to play for them. Even when he dropped down to third-division Lecco on loan, he fell out with manager Roberto Donadoni. His ability with a ball was never in doubt; his ability to adapt always was. “I am a dreamer,” he would later tell La Gazzetta dello Sport. “Very ambitious, honest but unstable, impatient and fiercely volcanic.” For De Zerbi, football had to be played his way if it was worth doing at all. Fortunately, there was a career that would allow him to do just that.

It was while seeing out his playing days at CFR Cluj that the idea of becoming a coach began to gestate into something more. Unimpressed with the cultural charms of Romania’s second city, he spent his evenings watching football exhaustively – Guardiola’s Barcelona, Mourinho’s Internazionale, Van Gaal’s Bayern – but with a critical eye. Every grinning wannabe who rolls off the Uefa Pro Licence course wants to be Pep Guardiola. De Zerbi was more interested in bolting on his own ideas, fusing Spanish passing football with German pressing with Italian tactical strength to create something distinctive and fresh. His final thesis at Coverciano, the Italian national coaching academy, was entitled “Il mio modello di gioco”. My model of the game.

This is the rich blueprint that De Zerbi is beginning to implement at Brighton. And there are times when watching them – as with his