Capello, the Sideways Passes, and the Blind Spot of the Man in the Middle

Minute thirty-seven. The ball sits at the feet of a centre-back in blue. He glances left, then right, then plays it sideways — six metres, no more. The ball reaches the teammate beside him. That man performs exactly one action: controls it, lifts his head, plays it back sideways. Nobody runs. Nobody asks for the ball behind the defensive line. The stadium isn't loud — they are used to this rhythm. And from the vantage point of a man who once stood in the middle of the pitch, I know exactly what the next ten seconds will look like: another sideways pass, or one back to the goalkeeper.

Fabio Capello saw that exact moment. He summed it up in one short sentence published in Gazzetta dello Sport: Italy have had enough of the little sideways passes, they need far more verticality if they are to hurt opponents in the final third.

I sat in front of a screen in Liverpool, recording notes, and realised Capello wasn't saying anything new. He was restating an old truth with the weight of his reputation behind it. And precisely because of that, the sentence deserves to be taken apart to the bone: a man who has managed Milan, Roma, Juventus and Real Madrid, then England and Russia, is prescribing a remedy for a disease he may not have diagnosed correctly. Legends tell stories with their reputations; I tell stories with the match report.

Context: one match, one nation, and an argument with no end

To place Capello's words correctly, we need the backdrop against which they appeared. This was Roberto Mancini's Italy — a cycle running from May 2026 to August 2026, a period Italians describe with two contradictory words: glory and trauma. Glory, because of the European Championship title in 2026 at Wembley, a tournament in which Italy played an attractive, controlling brand of football. Trauma, because of two consecutive World Cup absences — something a four-time world champion nation never gets used to.

Against that backdrop, every sideways pass becomes a criminal charge. Every backward ball becomes a symbol of missing instinct. And Italy's commentariat — the harshest in Europe, where every match is dissected through what they call the "processo", a post-whistle media inquest — immediately called Capello into the case.

I followed a great many Italy matches during that period. What I recorded was not how many sideways passes they played, but the state in which they played them. There are two kinds of sideways pass. The first is the sideways pass that searches for space — the ball moving back and forth to stretch the opposition's defensive line, waiting for it to open a gap for a midfielder to attack. The second is the sideways pass that dodges responsibility — the ball moving back and forth because nobody dares risk losing it. The two look identical on television, identical in the possession stats, and yet completely different in nature.

Capello is attacking the second. And he is right to attack it.

Core analysis: the referee is the first man to see where the ball is going

This is something very few tactical analysts mention, but every referee knows: the referee's position directly reflects the direction of the ball. The man in the middle is not permitted to stand still. Law 5 requires the referee to move continuously to monitor play, and the way he moves is the heat map of the match.

When a team passes sideways, the referee merely drifts with the ball lazily — two steps left, two steps right. I remember matches at Anfield that I observed in a consultancy role, where the away side played this way, and I realised I had walked almost an entire first half. The heart rate never rose. No acceleration was required. That is the first sign that a team is killing itself with safety.

When a team passes vertically, the referee has to run. He has to anticipate. He has to put himself in position before the ball arrives, because if he doesn't, he will miss the contact in the final third. I once calculated that a Premier League referee covers roughly eleven to thirteen kilometres per match, and that figure changes markedly depending on the styles of both teams. On days when the ball travels vertically, I run more. On days when it travels sideways, I can just stand in the centre circle and watch.

This leads to a conclusion I believe is correct: when a team passes sideways continuously, the first victim is not the audience, but the team's own players. They lose the reflex to move. They forget the feeling of attacking space. They build a habit — the habit of waiting for the ball to arrive at their feet rather than running to where the ball will travel. And that habit is only broken when somebody on the pitch dares to break it.

Capello calls that somebody by a single word: verticality. He wants the ball played through the lines, between the lines, behind the lines. He wants the kind of passes that force the referee to run, not the kind he can watch standing still.

But here lies a problem the sentence does not address.

The internal flaw: two halves of the prescription in conflict

Reading Capello's words closely, he offers two remedies at once: vertical passes and crosses. He says Italy need to find alternatives to moves out wide, they need vertical passes and crosses.

These two tools are not the same. Vertical passing exploits space between and behind the defensive line — it requires intelligent runners and a midfielder with vision. Crossing attacks space in front of the defensive line — it requires a centre-forward who can head the ball, occupy position, and turn a floated ball into a goal.

Italy's problem throughout the Mancini era was not a shortage of men who could pass vertically. It was a shortage of men who could receive at the end of those vertical passes. For years, Italy cycled through centre-forward options without any of them becoming a stable elite No.9. Ciro Immobile performed well in Serie A but could not convert that form to international level. Andrea Belotti was a fighter, not a finisher. Other names came and went.

A coach can teach a team to pass vertically. No coach can teach a team to produce a world-class centre-forward in a single training session.

This is the gap Capello leaves blank. He prescribes for an illness without naming its true cause. The sideways passes he criticises are not the essence of the Italian team — they are the symptom. Italian players pass sideways because there is nobody ahead to pass to. They keep the ball because keeping it is safer than risking a pass into space that nobody occupies.

When a centre-back looks up and sees three midfielders standing level with each other, none of them running into the space behind the defensive line, he has two choices: a sideways ball back, or a desperate long ball. Neither is good. But sideways is less punished. In professional football, a player is criticised more heavily for losing the ball in a dangerous position than for a harmless sideways pass. It is a perverse incentive system embedded in every dressing room.

The contrarian angle: the authority halo and its trap

Here I have to say something many colleagues avoid. Capello is a legend. His reputation is real. But reputation is not evidence. The Belgium match he references has no stated date, no accompanying data, no specific analysis of which position, which player, which minute. It is a qualitative remark — the kind anyone could make after watching a match.

Try asking the reverse question: if an unknown commentator in Liverpool said Italy needed to pass more vertically and cross more, would anyone report it? The answer is no. The news value of this remark lies in the name of the speaker, not the content.

That does not mean Capello is wrong. It means we are witnessing what I call the authority halo: when a man with a decorated past says something, we tend to rate it above the evidence a neutral observer would allow. I have fallen into this trap. In 2026, when I argued with Collina in Moscow about Umtiti's handball in the France–Belgium semi-final, I had to use Law 12 and data from fourteen qualifying matches to win the point. If I had relied only on having been a referee, I would have lost.

Capello has offered a judgement. But that judgement needs testing against data. And the data we have from this source is thin: no final-third entries, no xG, no PPDA, no progressive passes. We have one match, one praised second half, and one complaint about sideways passes.

One sample. One half. One opinion.

The problem with crossing when there is nobody to head the ball

Back to the second half of the prescription. Capello wants more crosses. I want to argue with this, and to argue it with evidence.

In modern football, crossing is one of the least efficient tools on a per-attempt basis. Open-data studies across Europe's top leagues over successive seasons put the conversion rate of crosses into goals in single digits. That does not make crossing useless — it means crossing is only effective when there is a centre-forward who makes it effective, or when the opposing defence is weak in the air.

Italy suffers both problems at once: no internationally elite centre-forward, and frequent opponents with well-organised defences. Crossing into a box with nobody to attack it is like playing a vertical pass into a place where nobody runs. Both are investments in nothing.

There is a detail Capello doesn't mention: crosses are most effective from short, live-ball situations when the defensive line hasn't reorganised, or from corners and set pieces. Meanwhile the very possession game Capello criticises tends to generate few such situations, because it gives opponents time to set. It is a closed loop: to cross effectively you need to play faster, but playing in control means you are not fast.

Italians have a proverb: "Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano." He who goes slowly, goes safely and goes far. In modern football, going slowly only takes you to the knockout rounds of a tournament where you cannot score.

A question of timing and the trap of reading a match

There is one thing I must warn the reader about. The match referenced in this story contains a contradiction that needs clearing up. If Mancini-era Italy were recorded as losing a match, that may not be the match Capello's name is attached to. During Mancini's tenure, Italy met Belgium several times, and the results were not always the same.

I raise this for a professional reason. In refereeing, I learned a lesson I try to apply to writing too: never deliver a verdict before the record is clear. A small error of timing can reverse the entire meaning of an analysis. The same Capello sentence, if it came after a defeat at a major tournament, reads as an attack on the whole technical project. If it came after a victory, it reads as a refinement note.

That is exactly what I want to tell Vietnamese readers. When you read international sports news, always ask two questions: when did this happen, and in what context. Football is a sport with enough context that a true statement can become false if placed in the wrong frame.

What is genuinely notable in Capello's remark

Once the noise is stripped away, one thing is worth thinking about: Capello is reflecting a major trend in modern European football, and he does it honestly with himself.

Capello's football in the past was a football of compactness and efficiency. His Milan of 2026 destroyed Barcelona in the Champions League final with a direct, unglamorous brand of play. He is not a man of positional possession. He is a man of football that goes straight to the goal. When he says Italy need verticality, he is saying what he genuinely believes, not chasing fashion.

That is what I respect about Capello. A man who can hold his position for twenty years, regardless of the world changing around him, deserves to be heard. But respect does not mean agreement. I disagree with him on the point that Italy's problem is a problem of ball direction. I think their problem is a problem of people.

Italy has a generation of midfielders who can pass. They have players who understand space. They lack the man who turns space into goals. No coach can fix that in one tactical session. Only a football culture can fix it with ten years of youth investment.

On systems and the integrity of the man in the middle

In refereeing, I learned that a systemic error is never the error of an individual. When a referee missed a foul at Anfield in 2026, the problem was not that his eyes were weak. The problem was that his vantage point was limited by the positioning of assistant referees and by the speed of the ball. I had to publish a data report showing that the referee had only four tenths of a second to observe a typical incident — and the Premier League refereeing body had to adjust its process.

Every eye has a blind spot; the only difference is whether we dare to look into it.

Applied to Capello's case, the same holds. Italy's sideways passes are not the fault of individual players. They are the sporting version of a systemic blind spot. Players do not see the space to pass into, not because they lack vision, but because they have never been placed in an environment that taught them to see. Italian football for years prioritised tactical safety over boldness. They taught a centre-back how to keep the ball twenty metres from his own goal, but not how to open a match from there.

An empty stadium still has data; noise is what distorts the verdict. In this case, the noise is Capello's reputation, and it is making us focus on the wrong point.

What is more worrying than a single match

I have spoken with many small coaches in England — men managing lower-league sides, without budgets, without centre-backs worth tens of millions. They see the Italy story differently. They don't have ball-playing centre-backs like Italy's, but they have strikers who run. They tell me their problem is getting the ball to the running man as quickly as possible. It is a philosophy entirely opposite to possession football — and it is simple, easy to implement, and honest.

What is frightening for Italian football is not sideways passes. What is frightening is the possibility that they have forgotten how to run. When you build a generation of players over ten years through tight, controlling matches, you can produce players who move like robots and think like accountants. They will not lose the ball. They will also never create the unexpected.

I once watched a match in which Italy held the ball for sixty percent of the time and finished with two shots on target. Two shots. In ninety minutes. That is a figure any coach should flinch at, whether he leads a national team or an amateur side.

But I do not want to end on a criticism. Capello is part of Italian football's tradition. He is part of the reason this football culture once faced every trend in the world and survived. Now he is growing older, and he is saying what he believes. We should listen, but we should not worship.

Zooming out to the wider picture

Placed in a bigger frame, this story reveals something interesting about modern European football. Verticality is not a new invention. It is how football was played from the moment the sport was born. The great teams of the past played vertically. Puskás's Hungary played vertically. Pelé's Brazil played vertically. Sacchi's Milan played vertically. Cruyff's Ajax played vertically — in a way, the positional football we call "control" is actually an organised form of playing vertically.

What Capello calls "little sideways passes" is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon in the sport's history — and it is bound up with the rise of data and analytics in football in recent years. When every pass is quantified, when every error is counted, players become afraid of being wrong. They choose safety. And individual safety produces collective paralysis.

That is a paradox of the age. We have quantified everything to make football better, and we have inadvertently produced a football of fear.

What I want to see next time I watch Italy

I am not asking Italy to play like Brazil in the seventies. I am not asking them to create ten chances a match. I only want to see one simple thing: passes that force the receiver to run. Passes that make the crowd stand, make the referee move, make opponents look over their shoulders.

That is what Capello wants. That is what anyone who loves beautiful football wants. But wanting is one thing; achieving is another. To have those passes, you need runners. To have runners, you need a development system that teaches players to accept risk from the age of six. And to have that system, you need a football culture willing to admit it has been wrong for twenty years.

No coach can fix that in one match.

The match does not end at the final whistle; it ends when we face our own mistakes

I sit in Liverpool, taking notes on a match I only heard described, and I think of all the matches I have watched. I have watched professional football for forty-two years. I have seen the greatest teams play the most beautiful football. I have seen mediocre teams play football I would rather forget.

What I learned through all those years is this: football is not a sport of passes. It is a sport of spaces. Whoever sees the space first wins. Whoever passes without seeing the space passes sideways. And when a team passes sideways too often, it does not mean they are bad — it means they have not been taught how to see.

Capello says Italy need verticality. I think they need more than that. They need a generation of players willing to look into the space without fear of losing the ball. They need a development philosophy that teaches children risk is part of the game. They need a football culture that accepts that, in the first ten years, they will lose more than they win.

A whistle can change a team's fate, but it must never change the conscience of the man who blows it. And a legend's sentence can shake the media, but it must never replace the real work — the work of those who plant trees they will never see fruit from.

What I want to leave the reader with is not a verdict on Capello, but a question. When your national team next passes sideways ten times in three minutes, who will you blame — the coach, the players, or the football culture that produced them over twenty years? I chose long ago to blame the system. I just wanted to say it once, clearly, before the next whistle sounds.

On the penalty spot, the past has no value; only the moment deserves judgement. But to understand why a player stands on that spot and misses, you have to look ten years back, to when that boy was first taught to pass safely rather than to risk for a goal.

That is the lesson I want to send to every parent and young coach in Vietnam reading this. Don't teach your child to pass sideways. Teach them to run first, then teach them to pass. Football begins with the feet, not with the ball.

And I close the record here. The next match has already begun.