The tactical trends of Marcelo Bielsa

Barcelona's system and style is being emulated all over the world by teams at all levels. As accomplished as Barcelona's fluidity and control on both sides of the ball can be, it also appears that they have copied a page out of Marcelo Bielsa's playbook in regards to his high pressing and back 3.
Keen tactician Jonathan Wilson writes of Bielsa's growing influence on Barcelona.

The philosophy of this Barcelona, of course, is rooted in Total Football and the ideas implanted by Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff in the early 70s. What has become increasingly clear, though, is that their style is Total Football viewed through a bielsista prism. The central tenets of Marcelo Bielsa's style – the hard pressing, the high defensive line – are very much of the Dutch tradition, but in their use of a back three, which admittedly echoes the 3-1-3-3 Cruyff sometimes employed in the early 90s, Barcelona have taken on a bielsista aspect. The use of a central midfielder, Sergio Busquets, to initiate attacks from the back is classic Bielsa, as is the desire to fight battles high up the pitch in opposition territory – as in the use of Dani Alves to negate Marcelo in El Clásico and so cut off the support to Cristiano Ronaldo.

It is not just Barcelona, though. Guardiola famously drove through the night to meet Bielsa in Argentina; another Argentinian, Jorge Sampaoli, a self-confessed disciple of Bielsa, has used his methods to great effect at Universidad de Chile, who won the Chilean Apertura and the Copa Sudamericana and are in the semi-finals of the play-offs for the Clausura. They are astonishingly tactically flexible in terms of shape, but the basic style remains bielsista, something exemplified by the use of a 3-1-4-2 in their Copa Sudamericana semi-final against Liga de Quito, engaging the opposition wing-backs deep in their own half.

Bielsa himself, perhaps too fundamentalist for one of the world's biggest clubs, works away at Athletic Bilbao, where he has tempered his idealism with pragmatism, abandoning the back three for a back four, and playing to the strengths of his target-man centre-forward Fernando Llorente.

Everything is relative. What is right for one group of players in one set of circumstances will not necessarily be so for another group of players in a different set of circumstances. In the summer, both Chelsea and Internazionale appointed new managers. Both their new managers prefer a high line and a hard press. Both squads they inherited were ill-suited to their style of play, the defences in particular too slow to play high up the pitch and risk balls being played in behind them. In both cases the incongruity of managerial philosophy and squad was clear.

St_Nick09_of_Goal wrote:
The bit about the use of Alves to tactically limit us was an example of how Mourinho was tactically outplayed by Guardiola.