BfB

Theories of Relationalism animated football discourse in 2023, as Relationalism originators Fluminense arrived on the World stage in the Club World Cup final of December that year. As an approach to playing football, relationalism promised a Europe ground down by teams built for the unspectacular a fresh breeze of summer.

And for a summer Fluminense, under manager Fernando Diniz, captivated discourse with a way of thinking about possession play in football that seemed to provide a reinvention when compared to the increasingly dour Manchester City under Pep Guardiola. Diniz created an expressive football, a football for people who wanted to see the game played for joy rather than efficiency, and that manager’s elevation to the Brazil national job represented a calcification of his approach.

The dawn that was promised failed to break, Manchester City beat Fluminense 4-0, and the world of football returned to its previous business.

Malmö

In July 2025 Sweden Allsvenskan Champions Malmö FF trundle through the first rounds of the UEFA Champions League under manager Henrik Rydström and his evolution of Relationalism. Rydström is one of football’s more interesting managers and Malmö a fascinating club. Their start to this season sees them also running behind Mjällby who seem to have cribbed a number of Rydström’s ideas as they search for their first Allsvenskan.

Watching Malmö FF in the Champions League Group stages is an interesting and sobering idea when one recalls the roughing up of Fluminense. Rydström’s approach to relationalism is a more rational and conscious evolution of the style Diniz popularised, aware of the pitfalls of the Brazilian’s approach and covering those with a more robust rest defence. Mjällby under manager Anders Torstensson are a variation on a theme.

All three seem to try to solve the pressing problem for football in the age of pressing, namely, what is one to do with all these attacking midfielders.

Peters

English football has always had a curious relationship with the attacking midfielder, viewing the player with a justified suspicion that the term rationalised a fault in a player’s make-up. There is a need for all players to get into defensive positions when out of possession, and the linguistics of this word does not excuse Frank Lampard for looking back at his teammates hoping they win the ball.

Given the country’s love of, and debt to, Martin Peters for his role in the 1966 World Cup it is curious how this Peters model of the player did not stick, but it did not and for large swathes of the last six decades there has been a nervousness about a team which one player opting out of defensive duties. This seemed to change with the acceptance of 4231 as a way of playing, and the plethora of Number Tens which Academy Football in the UK, and football throughout the world, spits out.

While obviously more defensively minded than the players inferred above, the modern Number Ten has become the characterising feature of most teams, and balancing those Number Tens the problem that defines most managers.

Summer

Summers of football are about collecting players, and each new arrival is scanned for a sense of where they will play. The exciting 18 Shirt, snaffled from a divisional rival, can we are told “play anywhere across the front” which is to say, they are a Number Ten.

This need not only be true where players are less well known, either. Arsenal’s fine Number Six Declan Rice seems to be campaigning to be considered a more forward player, while João Pedro’s arrival at Chelsea heard Enzo Maresca talk about how the signing from Brighton and Hove Albion could play anywhere across the front.

And this is not to suggest that João Pedro will not be “mastering the flick on” or “giving as good as he gets” with defenders but rather that as a centre forward Maresca positions him as somewhat withdrawn, behind the usual position of a Number Nine…

Solution

Relationalism then, with its lack of rigid position, and strings of players to interplay between them, seems to represent something of a solution to the question of how to fit all the Number Tens into a side by making everyone a Number Ten. Your role as a player is to be in relation to the ball, pointing at the goal, and so it is that those who have yet to specialise anywhere else are given a place in football.

The temptations of this are obvious to clubs, and in Rydström there seems to be a solid attempt at making something like relationalism work, but one worries about a football which produces so many players of a type that new ways of playing emerge as a function of their availability. The game twenty years ago could never have produced a system so devoted to ball players, because it did not produce enough ball players.

Malmö face FC Iberia 1999 in the first leg of the Champions League as this article is published. Their progress, or lack of, will have some say in the return of relationalism.