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Catenaccio describes a tactical system in football with an emphasis on defence and tactical fouls. In Italian catenaccio means "door-bolt" and it effectively means a highly organized backline defense which is intended to prevent goals. It was made famous by Argentinian trainer Helenio Herrera of Inter Milan in the 1960s who used it to grind out 1-0 wins over opponents in their league games.
Catenaccio could have originated from the verrou or "chain" system invented by Austrian coach Karl Rappan. As coach of Switzerland, Rappan played a defensive sweeper just ahead of his goalkeeper in the 1930s and 1940s. Nereo Rocco's Padova, in the 1950s, pioneered the system in Italy where it would be used again by the AC Milan team of the early 1960s.
Rappan's "verrou" system, proposed in 1932 when coach of Servette, was implemented with 4 fixed defenders, who were charged to apply a strict man-to-man marking, plus a playmaker in the middle of the field who plays the ball together with two midfield wings.
Rocco's tactic, often referred to as the "real" catenaccio, was shown first in 1947 with Triestina: the most common mode of operation was a 1-3-3-3 with a strictly defensive team approach. With catenaccio, Triestina finished the Serie A tournament in a surprising second place. Some variations proposed instead to apply different schemas, such as 1-4-4-1 and 1-4-3-2.
The key innovation of catenaccio was the introduction of the role of libero or sweeper, a player positioned behind the line of the three defenders, and charged to recover the lost balls, contrast the opponent striker and redouble the marking when necessary. Another important innovation was the counter-attack, mainly based on long throws from the defence.
In Herrera's version in the 1960s, four man-marking defenders are tightly assigned to each opposing attacker while an extra sweeper would pick up any loose ball that escaped the coverage of the defenders.
With the years, the original catenaccio has been slowly abandoned for other, more balanced tactical approaches; in particular, the increasing popularity gained by an attacking-based approach like Total Football has contributed to make catenaccio just yet another football tactic.
Catenaccio today
Nowadays, catenaccio is used mainly by weaker teams, in order to reduce any technical gap against stronger ones by showing a more physical approach to football. The slow disappearance of the role of sweepers in modern football has also contributed to the decline in its use.
The catenaccio system is often criticized for reducing the quality of football games as a spectacle. In certain parts of Europe it became synonymous with negative football since the attacking aspect of the game is neglected.
One frequent mistake is to define catenaccio as any defensive tactical system used by a football team. This is actually untrue, because catenaccio is just one of the possible defensive tactics to be used. Nowadays catenaccio is used less and less by top teams, and often limited solely to particular circumstances, such as numerical inferiority following a sending off, or needing to defend a marginal scoreline until the end of the match. Thus, today catenaccio is also frequently referred to as any extremely defensive mental approach to a football match by a team.
Catenaccio is often thought to be commonplace in Italian football, however, it is actually used infrequently by Italian Serie A teams, which instead prefer to apply some other, more modern, tactical systems, like 4-4-2 and others.
Catenaccio in football history
This is a list of teams who gained some triumphs by playing catenaccio:
Competing philosophies
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