🏆 Drinking Irn-Bru from the Coppa Italia: How Ferguson became Bologna's lynchpin

On Wednesday, Lewis Ferguson can inspire his club to their first Coppa Italia in half a century

Adam Clery writes about football tactics for Nutmeg every month. But he writes about football tactics ALL THE TIME on 87 Minutes. And his new ACFC channel on football tactics is some of the best football content on the internet.

Of all the slightly surreal occurrences we’ve had to sit through, open-mouthed, this season (we’ve still got a 32-team club tournament to come, the winners of which are to be given what looks like a functioning warp drive as a trophy, and then 100 million quid in an envelope from Donald Trump so, sure, okay… normal) there’s still one to come in Italy that might top everything.

Bologna are on the cusp of a first Coppa Italia in over 50 years — they take on AC Milan in the final on Wednesday, and if they win their captain is going to drink Irn-Bru out of it. Read that back. Take that in. This is your reality and all the best bits are passing you by.

Picked up for the proverbial pittance from Pittodrie back in 2022, Lewis Ferguson has become one of the most important players in a Bologna side that jumped from the bottom half of Serie A before his arrival, to a shock Champions League qualification last season. They’re currently holding off Juventus — or, they’ve got a firm, unyielding hand in The Old Lady’s face, if you want to be both flowery and dramatic about it — for that coveted fourth-place finish. It’s going well, basically.

Ferguson is a completely different player this season. Let’s look at the tactical transformation that has taken him to the brink of history…

While this season’s been disrupted by the cruciate ligament injury that ended the last one, Ferguson has been instrumental to the team when they’ve been able to get him on the pitch. His full return in December was the catalyst for a league run that’s taken points from Roma, Milan, Napoli, Inter, and a 5-0 win over Lazio.

These are simply insane words to be writing about a player whose last season in Scotland ended with a 10th-placed finish and a blood-feud with St Johnstone.

Neither McTominay nor Gilmour can claim to be the tactical lynchpin
that Ferguson has become

You won’t have seen a lot of it, and that’s fine — this is a safe space for people to say “I’m too busy putting the kids down on a Sunday night to catch the token Serie A match that TNT fill a slot with”, but he’s been massive over there. Obviously Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour have had most of the attention with their hit new series Adventures In Naples With Wee Billy And McSauce, but neither can claim to be the tactical lynchpin that Ferguson has become.

Despite the traumatic shift that accompanied Thiago Motta saying he was just popping to the shop for milk and then never coming back, Bologna haven’t gone through the spectacular crumble that pretty much everyone predicted.

Vincenzo Italiano — who, and I’m sorry, still just sounds to me like someone’s dad failing to remember the name of an Italian World Cup winner he met on holiday in the late 80s — took the job, rocked up to training, and was told not to bother saying hello to Joshua Zirkzee and Riccardo Calafiori. Motta’s eyecatching 4-2-3-1 of high possession and clever rotations saw Ferguson deployed as a… and it’s hard to give a name to this that doesn’t sound ridiculous… horizontal, overloading number 10.

To put that in English, he played his football behind the striker, and in front of the double pivot, but wasn’t charged with either pushing forward or dropping back to support either. Instead, he was there to scuttle from left to right, adding a third man overload every time the full-back pushed forward to combine with a forward. Occasionally Motta would switch to a 4-3-3, with Ferguson as one of the 8s, but his job remained largely the same.

Under Italiano however, these rotations are largely out in favour of being the maddest pack of bastards in Serie A. Their press is relentless and, despite a sluggish start to the season while they made the adaptations, now has them as the main characters of Italian football. Ferguson, though restricted in his minutes owing to that injury, has had his role entirely rewritten.

Above are two typical heatmaps comparing last season to this. On the left, a late-season clash with Inter weeks before his ACL injury, and on the right, the aforementioned 5-0 drubbing of Lazio. The difference is staggering, and he’s gone from a player specialising in sideways mobility and neat exchanges of play, to a frothing-at-the-maw ball-winning No.6 whose main task is to move “the mixer” right into the opponent’s face. And he’s really good at it.

Compare his defensive numbers to last season, and those are two entirely different players. He’s now in the very, very top echelon of Serie A for winning the ball in the opposition’s final third, and pushing into the top 20% for just tackles overall.

In possession, he now drops between the two centre-backs to give the team a more stable base from which to push both full-backs on into the midfield; even covering for those same centre-backs when they carry the ball forward themselves.

But out of possession, he’s a vital cog in their frankly insane pressing structure — regularly pushing well out of his position to pounce on loose touches and errant balls to get Bologna charging up the field on a turnover.

Like, genuinely, compare those two images. It’s the same player, in the same game, performing two parts of the same role. There aren’t many, if any, other players in Europe charged with being a key part of the initial build-up, and one of the more aggressive elements of the press. Sandro Tonali at Newcastle, Thomas Partey at Arsenal… I’m struggling now… Warren Zaire-Emery? Lucas Paqueta? Sort of. Jude Bellingham when he’s in a huff? It’s one of the rarer profiles in football at the minute and Bologna (plus Scotland!) have someone excelling at it.

With the end of the season now vividly in view, it remains to be seen what happens with this love triangle of I Rossoblù, European qualification and that craved domestic silverware. They could get both, they could get either, they could get nothing. But regardless, one thing they do have is Lewis Ferguson, and with Inter, Juventus and Napoli all apparently eyeing him keenly, that’s something to be enjoyed while it lasts.