The renaissance of the No 9 - why is it happening and is it here to stay? (2024)

Take a look at the list of leading goalscorers at this World Cup and you will see a mix of playing styles and roles: Kylian Mbappe, Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka, the inverted wingers; Alvaro Morata, Olivier Giroud and Enner Valencia, the classic No 9s; Richarlison, the winger turned centre-forward.

During World Cups, we tend to look for trends — a tournament every four years viewed by millions is a chance to gauge where the global game is at. In Qatar over the past two weeks, we have seen all sorts of forward play, but the renaissance of strikers being used in what might be considered a classic No 9 role has been one theme to emerge.

Raphael Honigstein, James Horncastle and Jack Pitt-Brooke joined Adam Leventhal for a special edition of The Athletic Football Podcast to discuss the evolution of the No 9 role.

Let’s start with the basics. What makes a No 9?

Jack Pitt-Brooke: For me, it’s a striker who plays down the middle of the pitch rather than out wide. Traditionally, that’s where most goals were scored from. The reason I think it’s most interesting now is that increasingly you find both the pace in the team and also the goals in the team coming from positions either side of the No 9. That’s one of the big developments we’ve seen over the past 10 to 15 years — your central striker will no longer be your main goal threat. But the No 9 is still the player who plays through the centre, even though maybe they’re not the main threat anymore.

James Horncastle: Brazil manager Tite says Richarlison “smells of goals”. That’s a No 9 for me. He does everything you want from a No 9. He makes those runs in behind that can stretch defences but he can do a bit of everything, even in the air. He has shown he can be an orthodox No 9.

Why are so many teams suddenly playing with a traditional No 9?

Pitt-Brooke: Playing without a conventional No 9 is really difficult. Perhaps it’s easier at club level, where not having a focal point means you have to get your synchronicity and your timing absolutely perfect because all your players are going to be making clever little runs in behind, particularly if you’re up against a low block. So you have to be exceptionally good to get the patterns right.

Admittedly, Spain showed in Euro 2012 it can work…

Horncastle: Spain were the team of short, intricate passing and yet they still had Fernando Llorente to bring off the bench and score diving headers. They still had that as an option, so it wasn’t as though they completely renounced it.

Pitt-Brooke: But, generally speaking in international football, when you don’t have that time to coach the players properly, it is just very difficult. Playing a conventional No 9 is a bit of a shortcut, really — it allows you to make simpler plans, which are probably the more effective ones because you don’t have the time to do the complex stuff.

In theory, Germany bringing on Niclas Fullkrug gave them the opportunity to play a more direct game, cutting out the more talented Kai Havertz and Jamal Musiala to put the ball into the box for Fullkrug to win.

Raphael Honigstein: I don’t think Germany played like that. I don’t think most teams would have a No 9 at this World Cup play like that. I don’t see many long balls from Brazil towards Richarlison being launched to the big guy — it is more having that guy for the last touch of the move.

If we go back to previous years, teams would try to find more intricate ways through the defence. But somebody made a really good point on Twitter that maybe in international football — less time to prepare, less time to gel — it’s even more important to have somebody who can just do the basics really well. And the strikers tend to do that.

Football is often cyclical and I think we’re going back into a No 9 era for many different reasons but I think mostly because people follow trends and they see the impact of a No 9. And from a German perspective, it’s a discussion we’ve been having for a long time.

Those little cameos from Fullkrug — scoring against Spain and Costa Rica — have been enough for people to say it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the best striker in the system, it is still better to have someone in the middle rather than no one at all.

Niclas Fullkrug stepping up to the plate for Germany! 👊#BBCFootball #BBCWorldCup pic.twitter.com/iFq5Stj2tv

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) November 27, 2022

And the same has happened at Bayern Munich, who often determine the debate in Germany. After Robert Lewandowski left, there was this feeling that they had so many forwards that it didn’t matter. You could put Sadio Mane or Serge Gnabry through the middle and you don’t need to have a centre-forward. But now they’ve actually found that 32-year-old Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting is the answer, even though he wouldn’t have been high on the list of pivotal players at the beginning of the season.

The use of No 9s is also a challenge for defenders now. Quite quickly, a lot of centre-backs have become used to not marking anyone because they’d be having three or four players in front of them who would go in and out and you’d have to be really switched on and not get dragged out of position too much. Of course, you have to sometimes come out and win the challenge, but it’s almost more important to keep the line and to make sure no one’s behind you. And then suddenly, to have that No 9 up against you again — in your face, elbows — maybe some of these centre-backs are not used to it. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to have that. And that’s another reason why perhaps it’s become a lot more effective again.

False nines, No 9s and penalty-box poachers

Honigstein:The interesting thing about the false nine is the terminology is sometimes a little bit imprecise because initially it would refer to forwards like Francesco Totti, who dropped deep. We always had those. But then it increasingly came to mean midfielders who were played up front. Strictly speaking, they are not a false nine, they’re not a nine at all. If you’re thinking of the more classical definition, there is one number nine that is really, truly a false nine at this World Cup, and that’s Harry Kane.

Pitt-Brooke: When we look at how the role has evolved, in England it starts with the Revie Plan, which was when Manchester City used to play Don Revie as a sort of nominal centre-forward in the mid-1950s. He would drop into midfield to confuse the opposition and they won the 1956 FA Cup doing this. I’m sure other people would say that, actually, City just stole it off Hungary because they had done this when they smashed England at Wembley in 1953.

Kane is the truest false nine at this World Cup, in the conventional sense of a centre-forward who’s always played as a centre-forward, but who in actual fact comes deep and runners go beyond him and then he plays the pass through to the runners. That is what a false nine has been doing for 70 years of football. Roberto Firmino is not at this World Cup but he’s a player who has done that specific role. For me, that is a false nine. Whereas someone like Eden Hazard being played up front isn’t necessarily a false nine in quite the same way. That’s a different thing.

Honigstein: Football teams used to be a lot more fragmented. You’d have specialist positions with specialist roles. At one moment in a game, your role would no longer be relevant because the ball was on the other side of the pitch and you would just stop. You see in the 1970s, the pitch being so big because the attackers are on one side, the defenders are on the other and you pick up the ball, can dribble a bit and go for 60 metres without meeting anyone in between. That’s obviously changed because teams are a lot more collective and it’s made it harder for pure No 9s to exist because, if you have to do a lot of running and off-the-ball stuff, then you then find yourself in very deep positions when you win the ball back. You need to have very different skills to the guy who is just the poacher.

That’s where this trend towards more complete players — fewer specialists — has come in. But now we’re at the end of that cycle. At least as far as the centre-forward is concerned. I think that cycle seems to be going back, but it probably won’t be for long because the moment you have big No 9s, then the counter-reaction will be big centre-backs and then people will say, ‘Oh, look at these big centre-backs, let’s play these tricky little players who just move around them and they won’t be able to cope’. And then we start again.

Horncastle: I do think it’s interesting that teams in this generation can’t carry the classic penalty-box poacher anymore — the guy who’s just there to finish moves. It is a more collective game where all 11 players have to be involved and perform tasks that aren’t exclusive to traditional perceptions of their role. So you can’t be a striker and just goal-hang. You have to do other things. And so we see fewer and fewer players who are just there essentially to score.

What next?

Horncastle: We’ve got to be careful when we do have these debates about the No 10 dying out or the classic No 9 dying out. They don’t die out. It’s just players with those specific skill sets who do that job really well are actually quite rare. And they don’t come along on a manufacturing line, 10 every year.

Honigstein: It’s not so much a question of whether No 9s have been dying out — a lot of academies didn’t see the need for this type of player. They wanted more complete players. If you can’t run, if you’re not very technical, just scoring goals wasn’t seen as enough. And I think these guys were just pushed aside and you wouldn’t see them at this level.

It’s really quite a recent move back, thanks to the likes of Giroud. Even now, I think a lot of people are only just starting to wake up to his importance and understand it. In the past, I remember people saying, ‘Why is this guy up there? He can’t really play football. He’s not technical enough. He’s very slow’. His style wasn’t seen as being as important as having more complete, trickier, faster players.

Now, I think we’re going back towards the No 9. The interesting thing about the World Cup is, even though there are no real revelations about the players, it still acts as a bellwether for what happens and people take their guidance from that. The fact Spain won in the way they did in 2010 was probably more important than Barcelona winning the Champions League that way. Millions and millions of people see it and think, ‘OK, we can also do that. And look, you can win the World Cup, you can win the Euros’.

So if we see a big No 9, like Richarlison, taking Brazil all the way, people are thinking, ‘OK, Richarlison, I’ve seen him at Spurs, I’ve seen him at Everton, not the most skilful of players, but look at the impact he has’. Same for Giroud. ‘So maybe that is the way to go’.

Because we have seen the renaissance of the No 9s at this World Cup that is going to have, at least in the short to medium term, a knock-on effect on club football as well.

You can listen to this episode of The Athletic Football Podcast and its entire back catalogue on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you get yourpodcasts.

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(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)