Jon Mackenzie

speaker

464 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jon Mackenzie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Athletic FC Podcast · Where next for Iraola? · 27 May 2026 podcast

but then having the ability to retain enough structure that if the press is broken, you can drop into a block no problem.

That's the sort of fundamentals of the out-of-possession approach.

But in time, I think we've seen his in-possession approach develop increasingly through, I suppose, introduction of different types of profiles of players.

But I think it's been very clear to me that he has constantly tried to innovate his in-possession approach because I guess the difficulty is that his approach, as I've said, is based around

creating chaos to an extent and we've just come out of a period of you know maybe 15 years in European football where possession control has been the dominant approach if you can control the game with the ball and to an extent without the ball then you're very likely to come out on top.

what we've started seeing actually is coaches like Iraola destabilizing that for the elite sides and creating more chaotic games.

Which means on the one hand, yeah, it's great because you're pulling other teams down to your level.

But on the other hand, it does become harder to control the ball yourself.

And the big question with someone like Iraola is,

how do you start flipping or changing the needle the other direction where you're like, now we have to start trying to control the games with the ball at some points as well.

So we've definitely seen that happening.

I think they play a very, often a very direct style of football, but they have introduced elements of more possession control as time has gone on.

They've got different kinds of profiles of players who've helped them do that.

So it's been a really fascinating few years just watching Arreola develop.

And I think I'm really excited to see where that next step takes him because he'll probably have to

do that again, because he'll probably arrive at a more elite side where they'll be expected to dominate possession and games more.

Yeah, it's an interesting question.

I mean, Marco Rosa is from the Red Bull school.

And to an extent, it makes sense why they would have gone in that direction, I think, because there are elements of similarity between that Red Bull approach and what Iriola is doing.

So again, that approach is about destabilizing opponents and having...

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