Five substitutions made the high press affordable again

A rule change dressed up as player welfare quietly rescued the most physically expensive way to play football.

There was a stretch, before the substitution limit changed, when hard pressing sides had a recognisable arc. Brilliant for two seasons, then a year of injuries, then a rebuild. The pattern was so consistent that people started treating it as a law of nature. Press hard, burn out, decline. Someone always described it as a system with a shelf life.

I think a large part of it was arithmetic, and the arithmetic changed.

Pressing after losing the ball is paid for by three or four players in a fifteen metre radius, repeatedly, at maximum output, for as long as they are on the pitch. With three substitutions, a manager needed those players to last roughly eighty minutes, because the changes were being saved for tactical emergencies and injuries. With five, he can take off two of them on the hour with nothing wrong, and the intensity of the press barely dips because the replacements are fresh and the instruction is simple enough to execute cold.

That is a different sport for a certain kind of player. A wide forward whose value is in his first three seconds after a turnover no longer has to ration himself across ninety minutes. He empties the tank for sixty and walks off. His accumulated load across a season is lower and his output while on the pitch is higher, which is the combination that used to be impossible.

The distributional effect is where it gets uncomfortable. Deep squads benefit most, because five changes are only useful if the sixteenth best player in your squad can execute the plan. A club with eleven good players and a thin bench gains almost nothing and now faces opponents who refresh their press twice a game. So a rule introduced with congestion and welfare arguments has ended up widening the gap between rich and poor squads, which is roughly what happens every time football adjusts a rule without asking who has the resources to exploit it.

I am not against the change. Players are asked to play too much and the fixture calendar keeps growing. Just call it what it is. The five substitution rule is the biggest tactical intervention of the decade and it was not sold as a tactical intervention at all.