Shadowing Practice: How Luis Enrique Transformed PSG - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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6th of December 2022, the Spanish national team, ranked 7th in the world, are dumped out of the World Cup by Morocco, ranked 22nd.
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Despite dominating the ball with 77% possession, Spain managed just one shot on target the entire game.
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The Spanish media condemned this possession machine, which for all its order and efficiency, offers very little creative spark.
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Fast forward three years, to 31st of May, 2025.
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PSG win the Champions League final by demolishing Inter Milan 5-0.
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It's the biggest final win in history and PSG are lauded for their spontaneity and creative liberty.
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PSG were everything that Spain had failed to be at the World Cup, but who was the mastermind of this refreshing team?
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It was none other than Luis Enrique, the very same man who had been in charge of Spain three years before.
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Somehow, in the span of 29 months, Luis Enrique had gone from coaching one of the most dull
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and predictable teams in recent memory to one lauded for its fluidity and unpredictability.
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So what had changed?
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Clearly, that defeat to Morocco had hurt Luis Enrique more than anyone realised
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because it triggered one of the most fascinating shifts in approach that I can remember.
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One that not only forced Luis Enrique to challenge his beliefs as a football coach, but attempt to solve one of the most fundamental problems in any team competition.
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To find the fine and elusive balance between the forces of order and chaos.
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Because the fact that having a player that could move where he wanted, it means that there are situations of games that I don't control.
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The next year I'll control all of them.
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All of them, without exception.
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it would have been fair to label Luis Enrique as a control freak.
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His team was full of excellent technicians, but he kept a tight leash on their operation.
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In each phase of the game, his players conformed to a precise structure of his design, creating perfectly symmetrical shapes in possession.
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Each player had a set of predefined rotations, and all of that meant they could zip the wall around quickly and automatically.
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But in the end, it was very possibly that precise coordination that was their downfall.
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The players were so heavily constrained, they were effectively stuck repeating the same patterns over and over.
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Match reports noted how they aimlessly shuttled the ball from side to side, as Morocco closed down the spaces they wanted to attack.
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To use systems theory, Spain were an example of a system with high levels of order.
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For example, take the molecular structure of a diamond.
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Components are arranged in stable and predictable patterns, but that stability comes at a cost.
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The system has little room to change.
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It can repeat what it already knows, but struggles to create something new when the situation demands it.
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And that aptly describes his Spanish performance.
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Highly ordered, but unable to adapt.
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Ironically, following the World Cup, Luis Enrique landed possibly the most interesting job possible as he became the coach of PSG,
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a team who for years had been suffering with the exact opposite problem that Spain had had.
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This was a team of superstars who were often very uncoordinated, where players arguably had too many degrees of freedom resourcing in a lack of cohesion.
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Unlike the Spanish Diamond, PSG could be likened more to a gas cloud,
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full of movement and variation but where interactions are fleeting and organisation quickly breaks down.
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So Luis Enrique had a fascinating and daunting job to establish a more orderly team
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while avoiding going too far and repeating the biggest failure of his career.
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Of course we know how this story ends.
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PSG won the Champions League while appearing to strike the perfect balance between order and chaos.
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But the question is, how?
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The answer may have come from a man who Luis Enrique had known for many years
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but whose breakthrough idea was about to change their coaching trajectory.
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The man's name was Rafael Pol.
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He'd been assistant coach to Luis Enrique for the majority of his career, following him from Roma to Barcelona, Spain to PSG.
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Strangely, Pol seemed to have understood the potential issues with Luis Enrique's approach long before they came to fruition.
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Two years before the World Cup, he co-authored a paper on coaching and systems theory,
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which weirdly would describe the exact problem that Luis Enrique would have to deal with at PSG.
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need for some degree of order, he called it in-group predictability, while still being able to adapt and become sufficiently unpredictable to the opponent.
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Polls writing around this problem almost certainly informed the solution that the duo would eventually land on at PSG.
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If Spain's major problem were the constraints that Luis Enrique had put on his players, then the obvious answer was to simply remove those constraints.
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But of course, that risks introducing chaos.
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So instead the balance that they achieved was not found by removing constraints on the players, but changing the nature of them.
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Critically, that meant shifting away from strict rules and towards guiding principles and concepts.
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For example, the major constraint in the Spain team was the need to occupy specific zones at all times.
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Look at PSG and this clearly is no longer the case.
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You can pause a game and no longer see those perfectly symmetrical shapes.
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through the lens of individual players and this becomes more dramatic.
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If you take Butinia, the holding midfielder, the sheer range of his movement is striking.
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His heatmap appears to suggest that he's just going wherever he wants, and yet the team around him somehow remains consistently organised.
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And that's because players are being guided by some key underlying principles.
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Now obviously I don't work at PSG, I don't know for sure what Luis Enrique is telling his players.
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But considering his background as a positional play coach, we can have a very good guess.
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So here are three of the essential concepts behind PSG's football.
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Number 1.
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Width and Depth In the absence of rigid positioning, the players still retain the principles of width and depth at all times.
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That is, there will always be players wide and also players threatening in behind.
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This means that even if the forwards move around, the team will continually stretch the opponent and without demanding who attacks these spaces, you end up with players in unexpected positions,
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such as fullbacks at centre forward.
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The second principle I like to call personal space.
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This guides players to spread out so that no two players are occupying the same space at the same time.
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This is another way the team responds to spontaneous movement.
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For example, if Vitinia goes towards the ball, entering another player's space, that player will then vacate that space.
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In this example, the right back Hakimi also attacks the depth.
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And finally, and arguably the most important principle, the free man.
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Once the opponent is stretched and moved around, players are encouraged to constantly look for the free player.
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This is the unmarked player with time and space who can turn possession into threat.
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This concept is foundational to player decision making and guides how the team collectively uses the ball.
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However, an important detail is that PSG don't only look to pass to the free player, Luis Enrique seems to have made the decision to invest in
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and platform a lot of good dribblers who can take a player on and effectively make themselves the free man without passing.
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The power of these concepts is that they direct each player's attention to the same information within a game.
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They are constantly moving to create and find a free man.
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They are collectively looking to attack the width and depth.
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In Pohl's writing, he described this as players having shared affordances.
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When that's the case, players can be said to have developed synergies.
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Of course, Spain's players also had synergies but the information they were seeing was very limited.
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Mostly all they could see were short passes to the players in their vicinity.
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The great success at PSG was not just to increase the amount of information
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that players were looking at but to ensure they were still looking at the same things.
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Their third goal against Inter is a perfect example of this
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because it starts with what looks like a a spontaneous dribble from Vitinha, but is kept alive by these shared affordances.
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Fabian Ruiz drops to respect his personal space, which opens up the passing lane for Dembele to become the free man,
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and Vettinia then continues his run into the depth which Dembele has vacated.
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If Spain were an orchestra playing precisely written music, PSG are closer to a jazz band.
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They still have guiding concepts like an established key, rhythm and tempo, but a much wider range with which to improvise.
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And in the end, it appears that they did find that elusive zone between Order and Chaos, the sweet spot known in systems theory as the Edge of Chaos.
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For those who'd been following Luis Enrique during his career, this was a pretty monumental shift.
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Even after his first year at PSG, he was still very much a control freak.
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He said, and quote, If a player moves however he wants, that implies that there are game situations that I don't control.
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Next year, I want to control them all.
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All of them, without exception.
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And yet, one year later, after winning the Champions League, he had to concede the value of giving up some degrees of control.
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The less I control, the more chances the opponent doesn't know what will do.
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Giving up part of that control has made the team more unpredictable.
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PSG then are a very useful case study, particularly in the modern game,
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where it has become common for coaches to paralyse their teams with too much order, limiting synergies and becoming predictable.
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However, the solution offered by Luis Enrique and Rafael Pohl is not necessarily the only way.
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The principles they've used to guide their players' behaviour, like width, depth and the free man, are far from universal ones.
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In theory, using different concepts would produce different types of synergies and an entirely different style of football.
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I'm sure some of you have already guessed, but this is where the blossoming ideas of relationism come in.
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Which proposes an alternative set of concepts which are less positional and more relational.
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Concepts like pass and move or shadow play, which no longer direct players attention to spaces but to potential combinations with their teammates.
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I expect to analyse more teams who use these ideas soon, so make sure you subscribe if you'd like to see that.
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If you'd like to dive deeper into football tactics and systems theory, I have a more in-depth video on these ideas, and how they could be taken even further to produce self-organising football teams.
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The link to that will be in the description, as well as Raphael Pohl's paper if you want to check that out.
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If you enjoyed this video, consider leaving a like, thanks to all my members over on Patreon for your continued support, and I'll see you all in the next one.
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Take care.
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you
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 119 sentences and 1883 words to shadow. The speech runs for 11:11. The speaker talks at a natural 168 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- principle /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ (noun) — A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief.
- chaos /ˈkeɪˌɑs/ (noun) — The unordered state of matter in classical accounts of cosmogony.
- possession /pəˈzɛʃn̩/ (noun) — A control or occupancy of something for which one does not necessarily have private property rights.
- opponent /əˈpəʊ.nənt/ (noun) — One who opposes another; one who works or takes a position against someone or something; one who attempts to stop the progress of someone or something.
- width /ˈwɪtθ/ (noun) — The state of being wide.
- predictable /pɹəˈdɪktəbləl/ (adjective) — Able to be predicted.
- rank /ˈɹæŋk/ (noun) — A row of people or things organized in a grid pattern, often soldiers.
- diamond /ˈdaɪ.ə.mənd/ (noun) — A glimmering glass-like mineral that is an allotrope of carbon in which each atom is surrounded by four others in the form of a tetrahedron.
- exception /əkˈsɛpʃən/ (noun) — The act of excepting or excluding; exclusion; restriction by taking out something which would otherwise be included, as in a class, statement, rule.
- stretch /stɹɛt͡ʃ/ (verb) — To lengthen by pulling.
- precise /pɹɪˈsaɪs/ (adjective) — Both exact and accurate.
- adapt /əˈdæpt/ (verb) — To make suitable; to make to correspond; to fit or suit.
- occupy /ˈɑkjəpaɪ/ (verb) — To fill.
- arguably /ˈɑɹɡjuəbli/ (adverb) — As can be supported or proven by sound logical deduction, evidence, and precedent, but without absolute certainty.
- collectively (adverb) — In a collective manner; viewed together as a whole; to be treated as a single unit, rather than the items that make up the collection separately.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- look at (verb) — To observe or watch.
- give up (verb) — To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
- move around (verb) — To relocate to new homes repeatedly; to not live in any one place for long.
- break down (verb) — To stop functioning.
- close down /kləʊzˈdaʊn/ (verb) — To stop trading as a business.
- come at (verb) — To get to, especially with effort or difficulty.
- come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
- come in /ˌkʌm ˈɪn/ (verb) — To enter.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 14 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'll, you'd. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: width /ˈwɪtθ/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, breakthrough /ˈbɹeɪk.θɹuː/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: possession /pəˈzɛʃn̩/, exception /əkˈsɛpʃən/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/
- Long words — get the stress right: predictable /pɹəˈdɪktəbləl/, spontaneous /spɑnˈteɪ.ni.əs/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like principle, chaos, possession.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are dumped · are lauded · are arranged |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has vacated · has made · has become |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | man who had · man who Luis · concepts which are |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.