The 3-Diamond-3

Sacrificing Profiles for Structures

Jan 08, 2025

📝 A Game of Distances

Okay, let’s assume football is a game of distances. Then formations are a means of structuring the team in order to minimise distances between your own players, while maximising the distance between opposing players.

So, put aside those fancy little blobs (which took me far too long to edit), and consider the shape itself. I’ll get to the means of the shape in the next section.

A back three in rest defence.
A lone pivot, but with enough room for either of the two WCBs to step up (we’ve seen City do this in the past, often leaving Ruben Dias as the lone CB).
Two CMs, often shuttling between the lines, but dragging out wide in transition.
Two wingers, high and wide, holding the width and allowing the AM to have all the fun.
The AM: Trequartista, the “have fun!” guy. Attacking freedom, enough defensive support behind, room to roam, room to dribble into pockets that even a pickpocket couldn’t enter, room to shoot, room to win a Ballon D’Or.
The CF: Well, a plain old CF. Your old-school, “tough-guy” physical 9s would probably be ideal here, because of the leeway you give the AM.

🪓 Forming the Diamond

I was going to make a terrible joke involving the cliché of “diamonds are made under pressure,” but that’s ironically my answer. Basically, getting to the shape is difficult, and you need certain circumstances that are just. so. volatile.

Okay, the above graphic shows probably the most common way of reaching the diamond. There are more ways, of course, but this article will consider only the above, given it’s what the Citys and Arsenals of this world have been aiming towards.

One fullback inverts to the CBs, forming your back three. The other fullback (the RB in the above graphic) inverts into midfield, occupying the space one of the CMs (now AM) would have taken.

The other players simply shuttle around to occupy empty spaces. The basics.

⚖️ Strengths? Weaknesses?

Okay, let’s be positive and start with the strengths. I’m going to assume you’re a team that dominates possession here, because otherwise it’s a recipe to get cooked in transition (oops, that’s a weakness).

Strengths

Well, with the diamond, you naturally control the centre of the pitch. And controlling the centre is rather important.

Take it from Magnus Carlsen (bet that was a name you didn’t expect to read here):

And moreover from just controlling the center of the pitch, every single player (except the two wingers) has multiple passing options at each and every moment.

As can be seen by those geometrically proportional arrows, there are an infinite number of direct passing lanes available to players. Combine this with enough, and more, room to run into, and you have a foundation to maximise your best players:

Easy passing options create an outlet for an instinctive (hence quick) pass, followed by a darting run into space for your players to roam.

Good ball retention, and you pin the opponent back simply because they have no space to counter-press, as you have, quite literally, taken over the centre of the pitch.

Neat, eh?

And now for phase 2. Bring out the Carlsen (find someone who looks at you the way Pep’s looking at Magnus):

Okay, I’m going to assume the opponent is in a 4-4-2 OOP, because that’s a pretty solid structure to have.

Now, they have a lot of width, compared to your… lack of it. But naturally, they’ll somewhat capsize inwards because of the pressure the diamond is exerting centrally. Players run inwards, and the opportunity arises.

One cross. One switch. That’s all it takes to get your winger 1v1 against the opposing fullback. From there, you just run with some chaos, and bing-bang-boom, ball in the net.

If only it were that simple.

Weaknesses

This 3-4-3 diamond lacks width. And a lot of it. You’re very dependent on near-perfect ball retention and quick enough players to track back into a 4-4-2 shape OOP.

Now, this sounds doable, but the world isn’t idyllic, and players aren’t always putting out 10/10 performances and staying injury-free.

So, well, most teams would get absolutely ripped apart in transition (unless you’re the cream of the crop, in which case your players are good enough to live in the aforementioned idyllic world), and that is not good.

Next, while having your fullbacks THIS narrow, you’re sort of pulling the opposing wingers closer to goal. If they’re man-marking your fullbacks (which makes sense, as an easy way to distort wide build-up play), you want them to be as far away from goal as possible. Not quite literally at the edge of the box.

Think of what Mohamed Salah could do from those positions. He wouldn’t even have to cut in; he’s already between the lines. Whew.

Your DM could also be left completely unsupported. Assume the WCBs stay back to avoid getting caught in transition. Both wingers cut in to help the CF, so your CMs move wide. Your DM now has acres of space to manage on his own.

A recipe for shin-kicking, tactical fouls, and a pulled hamstring if you ask me.

My biggest qualm with this whole structure, though, deserves its own section. Because not every team has the facilities for it. And it can be incredibly (terrible grammar warning, but I need to drive my point home) suboptimal.

🐻‍❄️ WHY is the fullback THERE?

Fullbacks in the half-spaces is a great idea until you see a fullback actually sit in the half-spaces.

This isn’t to say that no fullback could thrive in these spaces, I just find the number of players who can do so to be very… limited. And when you account for the limited number of players this includes, and then factor in how limiting it is to restrict these fullbacks to the half-spaces, thus wasting half their skillset, you get down to a very small number of players for whom it should be deemed acceptable to see invert (hyperbole, huge hyperbole).

* I find this issue to be especially relevant when playing your fullbacks in THIS structure – more of an 8/10, as opposed to a partner of a lone pivot to form a double pivot. *

Okay, if you’ve grown up playing as a fullback, or were shoehorned into that position as a punishment and decided to stick with it, you’ll naturally develop an angle bias to the side you grew up playing on. With some simple maths, that’ll mean you won’t necessarily be comfortable in a 360-degree turning radius, simply because that’s not what you grew up with.

And that’s okay. But why would you, as a manager, want that?

Anyway, back to your childhood playground. As a winger, you learn to cut inside, dribble, and score. As a fullback, you learn to cross. If you’re stuck in the middle of the pitch, there isn’t much room to cross. A diagonal switch? Sure. You’d be excellent. But so would the CM next to you.

And when you learn to cross, you learn to do so by overlapping. You COULD overlap here, but that’ll involve a lot of running back if you turn the ball over. And doing that week in, week out?

Next, you may well limit the space your CMs get. You could avoid this with frequent rotations, but you’re already suffering in transition—why make those matters worse?

So yeah. Big issues. But certain profiles make it work, and when it works, this structure can be beautiful. But who are these mystery men?

🤝 Players = Skillsets = Profiles

So, you want someone who can play both fullback and midfield. Both aren’t mutually exclusive, nor do they have to be, but it’s just a niche sort of combination.

Two names immediately sprang to mind, and for reasons entirely different to those I’ll cover later:

Jack Hinshelwood and Ferdi Kadioğlu.

Okay, we’re assuming that in a hypothetical Venn diagram, there is an intersection of fullbacks and midfielders. So, the skillsets are translatable.

This is far too vague to mean anything, but you get the point.

Okay, so, according to Transfermarkt, Jack Hinshelwood has played 62 games in a midfield position and 19 out wide. Both De Zerbi and Hürzeler used him as a wingback/fullback (barring a couple of injury-ridden games under Hürzeler).

Ferdi Kadioğlu has played 73 games in the centre of the park and 220 out wide. (and out wide in all of his appearances for Brighton).

At this point, I don’t think the pair of them are exclusively fullbacks anymore. They’re quintessentially the shared part of that Venn diagram. This is exactly why they’d excel at inverting—you attack as a CM (a role with which both have familiarity) and defend out wide (consider that both players can operate on either flank, adding ambipedality into the mix).

Sure, you miss out on their overlapping runs, but you’re maximising essentially half of their skillset (an already broad one) while still optimising a good 60% of the other half.

You’d be laying the platform for your players to succeed BECAUSE you are catering to their skillset, not necessarily the other way around.

Anyway, I think this *could* be interesting for Brighton:

It’s far from ideal (you’re making too many sacrifices), and I think Hürzeler’s current set-up is near perfect. Still, I have dreams about maximising João Pedro, and this is how you do that.

But moving on—Mr Jurrien Timber, let’s talk about you.

Jurrien Timber’s youth coaches spoke about how comfortable he was playing in midfield (via The New York Times):

It’s similar to Matthijs de Ligt, who we asked to play in the midfield for a long time, and that’s why he’s comfortable on the ball. The same happened with Jurrien. He played a lot as a No 6, as a controlling midfielder, and also as a right wing-back, as well as central defence.
If it had been solely up to us, he would have also played No 10 — but he wanted to stay in the defensive positions. The maximum he wanted to advance was No 6 — his brother, though, loved playing No 10, playing striker, playing on both wings, he played all the positions. I think it was a character difference between the two. But Jurrien was always convinced he was a defender.

When Mikel Arteta was asked whether Timber can play in midfield:

“Yeah he is [an option there],” he said. “He can play in various positions. His versatility is one of his biggest strengths. We missed him for 11 months. It’s great to have him back.”

So what sets Timber apart in this regard?

Well, youth coaching, for one. They saw Timber excel in the middle of the pitch and let him play there. Compare this with Malo Gusto, who experienced the opposite, and well…

Next, his physicality. He isn’t tall, but his youth coach, Ronald de Boer, labelled him “strong and fast.” This automatically raises his floor in any position, really, because it gives him a simple way to win the ball back, or, if inverting, to get back to his OOP zone. It also helps reduce some variance within the football team, as you now have a bit of a rock in midfield, up against a likelier small attacking midfielder.

Good with either foot, positions himself well, good at passing in tight spaces (and surprisingly agile, so reduced angle biases), extremely calm (been known for this since his youth days), and he works hard.

It just works.

But the thing is, LOOK at the qualities needed for it to work. That’s rare. Very rare. And then, on the complete other end of this physicality spectrum, you have Rico Lewis.

Rico Lewis is a GOOD footballer. He just may not be the best RB for a Premier League side. He’s not very tall, nor very physical, but dribbles well, positions himself well (a Guardiola side will do that to you), and works hard.

I really don’t think he’d get the minutes at RB he did if not for injuries elsewhere. And this is not a slight on him at all—I think he’d make for a pretty good CM. We’ve seen Pep start him as an out-and-out CM in the UCL, and I think this is a precursor for an alternate world where Kyle Walker finds his old self in a book of introspection.

So here, I suppose you are maximising a decent chunk of Rico Lewis, but you’re making yourself a lot more fragile defensively, in a system that requires some brutalist defending to avoid counters (like a CB in Jurrien Timber).

If you have nine other brutalists to make up for your Rico Lewis’s, sure, go out there and have fun. But it just makes more sense for your “have fun!” player to be someone like Phil Foden. Or João Pedro, as in the example above. Your difference-makers.

I don’t think Gvardiol should necessarily invert into attacking midfield either—you want him overlapping. He’s ridiculously good at overlapping.

🔚 Conclusion

So, is the 3-Diamond-3 nothing more than a football marketing gimmick? Well, no, of course not. I just find the profiles needed to sustain it over a league season to be incredibly niche and requiring (captain obvious alert):

boatloads of money
incredibly smart/efficient recruitment

And no club has both, with most not having even one.

(The above image is definitely unrelated to the point I was making earlier. For sure.)

You then go into further detail, like CBs jumping their own defensive line in an already high line, take a second to step back and blink, and bam! You’ve just conceded a goal.

So, ultimately, my conclusion comes down to two things:

It’s not a sustainable shape for the large majority of teams in the world.
The focus should not be on achieving this exact shape but rather on catering to the profiles in your squad.

I suppose it should be viewed as a blueprint, even in post-analysis. “Oh, look how versatile Maresca is, Chelsea are playing in a 3-Diamond-3!” Yes, but why? Does it suit the players? Does it counter the opponents’ strengths? What’s the benefit of having this player here, that player there, and are my players fast and strong enough to handle that quick counter? And what can all of this lead to, and how can it lead to that?

Formations aren’t the end. They’re the means to one. The means to reducing distances. A tool, even. There is no perfect build-up pattern, and if one were created, it would be countered the next day.

You can’t do that to individual quality, though. So maximise that.

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