How Nottingham Forest & Bournemouth are blazing a tactical trail for the Premier League in 2025

Over the last few years, the Premier League has become something of a tactical monolith. Whether teams played 4-3-3 or 3-4-3, the fundamental theories were much the same – high lines, high presses and a focus on specific passing and pressing systems designed to compact the field in defence and find width in attack.

The successful philosophies of Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, in particular, had been copied to the point of homogenisation. Thank heavens, then, for the two great overachievers of the 2024/25 season so far, who are finally finding ways to break the shackles. Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth may do more than exceed their wildest ambitions – they may change the game entirely.

Not that Nuno Espirito Santo and Andoni Iraola are doing it the same way, but they are both succeeding in ways that exploit weak points in the systems that emerged from the cocoon of Klopp’s high-tempo gegenpressing and Guardiola’s possession-based juego de posición.

What’s behind Bournemouth & Forest’s success?

Other clubs have tried to attack the high press and high defensive line combination, largely in the same ways. There are more direct passes than there used to be and more quick counter-attacks which look to attack the space in behind a high line, and as such we’ve generally seen defences get shifted slightly deeper this season as managers respond, while some teams are shifting away from a 2-3-5 formation in possession to a 3-2-5 to provide extra cover at the back at the cost of numbers in midfield.

Both Bournemouth and Forest have attacked the dominant tactical structure from different angles, with immense effect. The Cherries sit just outside the top four and can reasonably hope to push for their first ever European placing. Santo’s Forest, meanwhile, are flying as high as third on the back of a five-game winning streak and look like serious contenders to reach the Champions League. The way that the two clubs’ coaches have set their teams up aren’t the only factors behind their successes, but they are making a significant contribution.

For Forest, the more successful of the two clubs at the halfway point of the season, moving forward tactically has meant going back to the past in many regards. They run the deepest defensive line of any team in the Premier League by some distance and their full-backs, typically Neco Williams and Ola Aina, play the game more conservatively than most of their positional counterparts across the league.

Combined with a solid defensive shield in midfield, Forest set up to deny the space in behind that teams are designed to exploit against other opponents, and when in possession they are looking to play the ball in front of and around the slightly deeper defences rather than trying to go over the top of the teams who are working to counteract direct passing attacks.

Forest have earned a reputation as a direct attacking team, but they aren’t looking to hit the ball long – only five other Premier League sides have attempted fewer long passes, according to data from FBREF. Instead, they are using the movement and ball-carrying skills of their attacking players to work gaps or draw fouls to score from set pieces, where Chris Wood’s experience and physicality comes into play. Excluding penalties, only two teams have scored more set-piece goals in the Premier League.

In drawing their defence so much deeper than any other team in the top flight, Santo’s Forest are simultaneously somewhat radical while really adopting defensive concepts from the Nineties, a period when the role of the full-back was to defend first and attack only when free to do so. As other teams gear up to exploit the gaps left in defence by ultra-aggressive wing-backs, they find themselves confounded by a Forest team who don’t offer that vulnerability up in the first place. It’s possible to play in front of Forest’s defence, but that’s an art that teams aren’t dedicating themselves to any more.

Bournemouth, meanwhile, adopt almost the opposite approach towards attacking the predominance of the compact press. Where Forest set themselves up in a way that opponents must adopt uncomfortable and unfamiliar forms of football in order to attack them effectively, Bournemouth attack the space everyone else leaves in behind with greater directness and intensity than other sides.

Since replacing Gary O’Neil at the start of last season, Iraola has developed his team such that they now play more long passes and cross into the box more often than any other team. They have pace to burn up front, wingers who stick to the flanks like glue and keep it simple - the ball goes wide, the ball gets into the box, and teams who leave space in behind their full-backs find it being exploited time and again with a gusto and directness which other teams, perhaps weighed down by a generation of Guardiola-inspired possession football, are loathe to do.

There are certain similarities between Forest and Bournemouth. They both use a relatively deep, defensive central midfield core whose primary function is to protect the defence and to feed the ball forward without getting heavily involved in the final third. Bournemouth tend to leave one full-back back, with only Milos Kerkez given license to get up and support the attack with regularity. They both recognise that some teams struggle to break through a deep defence when width isn’t readily available.

But what they really have in common is a recognition that there is life beyond the high press and short passing structure that has come to completely dominate the game at the elite level – and that for a team with lesser resources to compete with the mega-money sides at the top of the game, they have to push their response to extremes.

For Iraola’s Bournemouth, that means playing as direct as possible, attacking wide and getting crosses into the box like they’re playing 4-4-2 in the early days of the Premier League. For Forest, it means a total rejection of the high line and hard pressing which became normal for almost everyone else.

Will other teams follow suit in 2025?

In a sense, both teams are succeeding by rejecting the last 10-15 years of tactical development, although it’s more accurate to say that Iraola and Santo have both separately recognised that there are ways to exploit the overarching tactical structure of the top flight which happen to have a lot in common with the most popular strategies of the Nineties and 2000s.

The question is how quickly other teams might follow. Forest and Bournemouth have provided a blueprint for the less pecunious teams to compete with their wealthier opponents – if you can’t compete with the best on a technical level, then the relative simplicity of the two sides’ set-ups should be appealing - but the superclubs have mostly spent years dedicating themselves to a narrow technical and tactical vision, recruiting and training players to play a compact passing game. Now, an alternative tactical methodology is being developed, and one wonders how quickly such teams will be able to adapt.

Ultimately, whenever a manager or team succeeds with a new tactical direction, others follow suit, sometimes very swiftly. After all, we got to our current situation because Guardiola, Klopp and others showed a path towards a form of the game which was more aesthetically pleasing, more technically impressive and, eventually, more swashbuckling and successful – but now Iraola and Santo are showing us a simpler path forward, but one which could be even better at actually winning football matches. If Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest sustain their remarkable early success in 2025, other teams will surely follow in their footsteps.