Adam Lallana admits to not knowing much about Roberto De Zerbi when Brighton & Hove Albion owner-chairman Tony Bloom chose the Italian to succeed Graham Potter as head coach last September.
“No, I can’t believe I didn’t,” Lallana says. “Tony Bloom’s a genius, isn’t he? I went and researched him straight away. I saw the way his teams play and I thought ‘Oh, wow, that’s how I see football’.”
Advertisement
De Zerbi’s had a profound impact on Lallana — a Premier League and Champions League winner with previous club Liverpool — since Potter left for Chelsea to replace the sacked Thomas Tuchel.
“He’s just made football (make) so much more sense to me since he’s been here,” the 34-year-old former England midfielder tells The Athletic. “I knew what I enjoyed about football and the feeling I got when I was doing it or was involved in a team doing it, but he’s given me reasons for that.
“He’s just made it all make sense, and that’s the tactical input that he’s taught me.
“He’s given substance to it: ‘This is why you are doing this, so you can have this‘.”
Praising De Zerbi to this extent has meaningful credibility when the words are coming from a player who has worked under an elite cast of other managers and coaches — Mauricio Pochettino at Southampton, Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Roy Hodgson and Gareth Southgate with England.
De Zerbi’s blend of tactical innovation and player motivation has carried Brighton towards qualifying for Europe for the first time via two possible routes; by winning the FA Cup — they face Manchester United in a semi-final at Wembley on April 23 — or by eclipsing the club’s highest-ever Premier League finish of ninth under Potter last season.
All possibilities remain open to Brighton for finishing anywhere between fourth and seventh — the Champions League, Europa League (which is also the prize for winning the FA Cup) or Europa Conference League.
They are in seventh place, above Saturday’s visitors Brentford on goal difference with two games in hand on them. The audacious De Zerbi’s risk-for-reward style that takes playing out from the back to the extreme has yielded 29 points and 35 goals in his 19 matches.
Brighton’s pass completion rate of 87.9 per cent is the best in the league, better even than Manchester City. It’s unheard of for a club outside of the ‘Big Six’ to lead the division in this metric. Liverpool have been beaten in the league and FA Cup, Potter’s Chelsea thrashed 4-1 on his first return to the Amex Stadium, league leaders Arsenal undone 3-1 away in the Carabao Cup.
Advertisement
It sometimes all starts from the back with the ‘sole roll’, a technique introduced to the Brighton players by De Zerbi of the goalkeeper and central defenders standing with their foot on top of the ball, enticing the opposition to launch their press before they pass through or around them in either direction.
Lallana says: “The first time I came across it was (Roberto) Firmino and (Philippe) Coutinho, (team-mates) at Liverpool. They control it like that always and I wish I’d learnt it off them sooner, really.
“It comes from futsal, it comes from Brazil. That’s how the game’s evolving. You look at how we play now. I teach my son. I’m saying to him, ‘Control it with the sole of your foot, it will buy you an extra second’.
“Not every time, but in moments. You need to keep doing it to know when you can do it and when you can’t.
“It’s fun, it’s a different way of using the ball, controlling the ball. It’s not like we’ve invented something new. You look back and people have probably done it before. It kind of goes full circle.
“I look back now and Bobby and Philippe at Liverpool would always control it (like that). No wonder they had so much time on the ball. It felt like they had an extra second in their mind.”
The difference at Brighton is that De Zerbi — a No 10 in a playing career in Italy which never reached the heights of his acumen as a coach — is putting his trust in the goalkeeper and centre-halves, rather than gifted attackers such as Firmino and Coutinho.
“You can’t just do it, you’ve got to be good to be able to do it,” Lallana says.
If it goes wrong, there’s every chance it will lead to your team conceding a goal. This is where De Zerbi’s man-management skills come into play, mixing faith with empathy.
“Roberto makes you feel a million dollars,” Lallana says. “As long you follow him, there’s no problem with you making a mistake. That’s the art of good management. Graham was the same, Jurgen was the same. Mistakes will happen. It isn’t a game without mistakes. It makes the game reactive: how do you react to the mistakes?
“And there’s something about knowing that if you are allowed to make mistakes, you make less mistakes. That’s my view anyway and how I’ve performed at my best. If there’s someone shouting at me every time I make a mistake, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that’, I’ll make more mistakes.
“If you feel like you are allowed to make a mistake — which is human error — then I think, nine times out of 10, you’ll make less of them.”
Lallana was injured when De Zerbi first took over, following three seasons of improving Sassuolo in Serie A until they were on the brink of European qualification and then a curtailed season at Shakhtar Donetsk, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Advertisement
The former England international had been placed in caretaker charge following Potter’s departure, together with Brighton’s under-21s coach Andrew Crofts, who is now part of De Zerbi’s backroom team.
The newcomer embraced Lallana’s experience and pedigree. “I wasn’t fit at the beginning when he first came,” Lallana recalls. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘Lallana, you don’t play like English’.
“That’s my grandfather’s Spanish in me. I felt a warmth straight away.”
It was an awkward start for De Zerbi, inheriting a squad accustomed to Potter’s methods, which had been developed over more than three seasons.
A 3-3 draw away to Liverpool in his opening game hinted at the excitement ahead, but that was followed by only one point in four matches, from a 0-0 draw at home to Nottingham Forest, with one goal scored in defeats by Brentford, Tottenham and Manchester City.
Lallana was a valuable link for De Zerbi to the squad during that initial period of uncertainty.
“We had a couple of conversations, because people don’t like change,” Lallana says. “I could feel that around my team-mates. I could feel it in our performances: the Brentford performance (lost 2-0 away), the Spurs performance at home (0-1), elements of the Forest performance.
“The reason we weren’t scoring goals wasn’t because we needed a fucking striker or weren’t good enough. The reason we weren’t scoring is because the change had happened and people were uncomfortable.
“They didn’t know whether the manager was going to like them. But these are all normal things and this is what I could help with. I could help reassure players — ‘Trust me, the manager’s going to be good’.
“Just because of experience and knowing the game and I knew how his teams played at Shakhtar, because I was researching him and everything. Sometimes it’s just time. Crofty was great with that as well.”
Advertisement
De Zerbi has gradually instilled his ethos in a talented squad, a cocktail including 2022 World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister and other proven performers at the game’s top level combined with emerging forces such as Ecuador midfielder Moises Caicedo, Japan left-winger Kaoru Mitoma and 18-year-old Republic of Ireland striker Evan Ferguson.
Lallana says: “There were probably parts of us mourning at Graham at the beginning, because he’d left us. Not that you can hold grudges because what a fantastic opportunity for Graham (to manage Chelsea) — and he left the football club in a wonderful position, with an amazing squad that he had assembled and was a big part of.
“But I’m really proud of how the lads turned that around; we are where we are and the manager speaks about how everyone is following him. That’s because of the group, the group of people. Forget players — people.
“Mac Allister, Caicedo, wonderful people — and probably the best midfield duo in the league at the moment. Lewis Dunk, the best centre-half in the league at the moment, bar none. Pervis (Estupinan, their Ecuador international left-back), settling in this year. It’s such a good environment for young lads to come into, because the group is a group and standards are set.
“Pascal (Gross). Look at what he does every game. Why is he not in the Germany squad? He’s unbelievable, follows the manager to a tee, plays left-back, right-back, centre-mid, No 10. The best, most versatile player in the Premier League and we’ve got him and we picked him up for four million quid or whatever it was.”
It was actually around £3million from an Ingolstadt side newly relegated to the German second division in the summer of 2017, the type of shrewd business involving unfashionable markets or clubs at which Brighton have excelled.
Gross — who was their first signing for the Premier League after automatic promotion under Chris Hughton — and Mitoma have each scored six league goals from 23 shots this season. Their conversion rate of 26.1 per cent is bettered only by Manchester City’s Erling Haaland (31.1 per cent) among Premier League players with at least 20 attempts on goal.
Brighton were becoming very good under Potter, they’ve got even better under De Zerbi.
“Graham did a fantastic job and he deserves a lot of credit,” says Lallana, who has been out since January because of a hamstring injury which required surgery. “I’ve heard Roberto speak numerous times thanking Graham for the squad he handed over to him.
“Roberto’s humble enough to know and to say it’s not just his doing. Of course, he’s sprinkled his dust on us and has helped us and we keep improving. But the group that we’ve got here is really special. I’ve been in a very special dressing room at Liverpool that won everything and to a man here, you’ve got no one that will let you down, won’t give their best. That’s all you want.
Advertisement
“Honest mistakes can happen and that’s a massive fundamental to achieving good things, if you’ve got a group of leaders, men that will sacrifice themselves for others. And when you have that — beat Liverpool 3-0 at home (in January in the league), played them off the park — things like that can happen.”
Lallana expects to be back to help with Brighton’s twin assault on Europe at some point in these next two months. He signed a new contract earlier this month, which runs until the end of the 2023-24 season.
Whether De Zerbi is still around then or gets snapped up, as Potter was, by one of the game’s heavyweights remains to be seen.
The 43-year-old has been mentioned as a candidate to succeed compatriot Antonio Conte at Tottenham Hotspur, although the messy picture behind the scenes at that club would surely be a dissuading factor.
De Zerbi made it clear when he first spoke to Brighton that he wants to work in a structure with clarity. He has that at the Amex Stadium with Bloom, his chief executive Paul Barber and technical director David Weir.
Lallana, described by De Zerbi as a “teacher” and a natural coach in the making, is unperturbed by the noise about moves away surrounding both the Italian and Brighton’s most gifted players.
He says: “Do I worry? No. I’m not taking any moment for granted with this though, and I don’t think any of us should be, or the fans. Enjoy it while it’s here, because it might not be here next year or the year after. The Premier League is unforgiving. We’re Brighton and we’re trying to put ourselves on the map.
“It would be lovely to be top 10 every year, of course, but it’s the Premier League, teams are bouncing, teams are spending money, (there are) new owners.
“We do things slightly different here, which brings a different challenge, but we’re adapting and finding ways of being successful, slightly differently, and that’s really enjoyable and really rewarding. You think differently.
Advertisement
“Roberto isn’t going to be here for ever, like Graham wasn’t going to be here for ever. But all you can act on is the here and now.
“If we finish the season successfully, we’ve got more chance of Roberto being here and Moises being here, Alexis being here, our best players being here. And then we just try to keep building.”
(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Eamonn Dalton)
