“You’re asking for specialists throughout the team,” Gary Neville said recently of the wing-back system. Which presumably came as news to Daniel Muñoz, who before becoming one of the Premier League’s leading wing-backs had never actually played the position before.
Of course Muñoz – a winger in his youth – always had a strong sense of his true calling. In his first season at Nacional in his native Colombia, he scored seven goals from right-back. In his last full season at Genk in Belgium, he scored 11 as Wouter Vrancken’s side came agonisingly close to the league title. “I always liked being where a striker should be on the pitch,” he told Crystal Palace’s website last year. But it was Palace, and more specifically Oliver Glasner, who gave Muñoz full rein in the role he has now made his own.
Muñoz was actually signed under Roy Hodgson, but it would take the most generous stretch of the imagination to describe him as a Hodgson signing. “I’ve only seen a video of him, but he looks good,” was the verdict of the previous manager. Indeed in hindsight, the decision to recruit Muñoz should have been the clearest warning to Hodgson that the Palace hierarchy were already looking beyond him.
Under Glasner, by contrast, Muñoz has been transformed into a kind of terrifying all-action wing berserker: scrambling back in defence, scrambling forward in attack, a deviant threat at set pieces, snuffing out counters, popping into the kitchen and cooking a delicious meal for your family. He has won more tackles than any other player in the Premier League this season while enjoying, according to Opta, a higher xG than Savinho, Darwin Núñez, Amad Diallo or Martin Ødegaard.
“Up and down, up and down, up and down,” is how Glasner describes his style of play. “If you had to define a profile of player that fits in the Premier League, Daniel Muñoz is the prototype.” And Muñoz really is a kind of prototype player: the most exaggerated example of a more subtle trend washing across the Premier League.
Two seasons ago, the list of defenders with the most shots in the penalty area was dominated by centre-halves with a strong aerial threat: Fabian Schär, James Tarkowski, Virgil van Dijk, Ben Mee, Sven Botman, Gabriel Magalhães. This season, the list is dominated by full-backs and wing-backs: not just Muñoz but Rayan Aït-Nouri of Wolves and Josko Gvardiol of Manchester City, the wide defender unleashed as penalty-box poacher.
Meanwhile a full-back – Antonee Robinson of Fulham – sits second to Mohamed Salah on the list of most assists. Leif Davis, whose Ipswich side go to Selhurst Park on Saturday, has created a third of all Ipswich’s chances this season. Aït- Nouri has the third-highest xG for Wolves. Meanwhile around 14 of the 20 Premier League clubs have experimented with some form of three-man defence this season. Quietly, 2024- 25 may just be becoming the year of the wing-back revival.
Of those 14 clubs only about half a dozen – Palace, West Ham, Southampton, Ipswich, Wolves and Manchester United – have done so on a consistent basis rather than as an occasional variation. You will also have noticed that all six of those clubs are currently in the bottom half of the table. Which speaks to one of the defining characteristics of the system: traditionally it is a style for teams better suited to soaking up pressure than imposing it.
Numerically this stands to reason: three centre-backs trades an extra body in defence for an extra body in midfield. With a two-man midfield inevitably ill-equipped for controlling the central areas, the wing-back becomes an essential outlet, an indispensable part of the buildup. Aït-Nouri, unusually for a wide player, has had more touches than any other Wolves player this season. Davis has more touches in the final third than any other Ipswich player.
What feels novel, however, is the way in certain teams the wing-back has become a bespoke attacking tactic, often through a very calculated asymmetry. At Wolves, Aït-Nouri on the left has had 21 shots for Wolves while Nélson Semedo on the right has taken just 12. At Palace, Muñoz on the right has taken 26 shots while Tyrick Mitchell on the left has taken just 11. Gvardiol, while not a traditional wing-back, clearly performs a very different attacking function to Matheus Nunes on the opposite flank, and has five goals to prove it.
The pressing question here is whether the wing-back can ever work long-term at a more sophisticated level, for clubs who aspire to dominate possession rather than simply counter into space. This is the puzzle that Ruben Amorim is currently trying to solve at Old Trafford and Graham Potter – with a little more joy – at West Ham, where the rapid progress of Aaron Wan- Bissaka and Ollie Scarles have completely transformed the club’s attacking threat.
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The early success of Wan-Bissaka – signed from Manchester United as a conventional right-back – offers a further counterweight against Neville’s assertion that wing-back is by definition a specialist position. On the continent, Jeremie Frimpong at Bayer Leverkusen and Denzel Dumfries at Inter are evidence that it is perfectly possible to convert a conventional full-back into an attacking wing-back if the will and the tactical intelligence are there. Moreover Leverkusen and Inter, along with Atalanta, have won trophies doing so.
So far in his four months in charge, Amorim has deployed an entire rotating cast at wing-back – Diallo, Noussair Mazraoui, Patrick Dorgu, Tyrell Malacia, Antony, Diogo Dalot on the right, Diogo Dalot on the left – without remotely threatening to settle upon a favoured pairing.
Naturally because this is United, and United runs on a microeconomy of ex-players adopting maximalist opinions for maximum attention on a bare minimum of observable evidence, the general consensus is that this is an experiment that needs to be shelved at once, replaced with one of the more English formations.
Perhaps in the long run the sceptics will be proven right. But if the non-biblical parable of the resurgent wing-back teaches us anything, it is that this is a tactic that requires not positional specialists but time on the training pitch, drilling and dedication, a commitment verging on the ideological. It is not something you can simply pick up on the hoof, as the likes of Unai Emery and Ange Postecoglou have discovered to their cost this season.
You need centre-halves who can judge when to track wide to offer cover for the wing-back, and when to step up to press. You need wing-backs with an inexhaustible engine and a nose for goal. You need forwards who are versatile enough to combine, decoy and operate anywhere across the front line. One of Palace’s unsung heroes this season has been Ismaïla Sarr, whose clever out-to-in runs have created so much of the space in which Muñoz has wreaked havoc.
United are, of course, a different club with more exacting demands and higher standards. But when Amorim talks of “no other way”, of sticking to his principles until the bitter end, this is not just personal stubbornness. It is because he knows from experience that it is the only way this can possibly work.
Source: theguardian.com
