Norwich showed what’s possible for Premier League underdogs who want to play daring soccer

Norwich City beat reigning Premier League champions Manchester City, 3-2, over the weekend, and they did it with eight first-team players unavailable. The result is impressive in and of itself, but Norwich is drawing even more praise for its style of play.

Against arguably the best team in the world, Norwich stuck to their play out of the back principles, refusing to clear the ball long even when under considerable pressure.

This is hardly a new concept in 2019, but we’ve yet to see a newly promoted Premier League team execute this style of play successfully over the course of a season. Some other recently promoted teams have stayed up while playing a brand of ambitious attacking football — think Swansea and Bournemouth — but none have been so dogmatically committed to playing out of pressure on the ground and avoiding long clearances at all costs.

Blackpool was the first team to make a really serious attempt at playing this way on a limited budget, and it almost worked — the Tangerines were relegated on the final day of the 2010-11 season, just one point from safety. They scored an impressive 55 goals, the same number as fifth-placed Tottenham.

Unfortunately, Blackpool also conceded a league-high 78 goals during that campaign. If Ian Holloway had taken a more pragmatic approach in some of his team’s toughest games, it probably would have stayed in the Premier League. But he was committed to his principles, and now Blackpool is down in League One, thanks to post-relegation mismanagement by the Oyston family.

Last season, Fulham came up to the Premier League with similar intentions, but their attempt went worse than Blackpool’s despite significant financial investment. Slaviša Jokanović couldn’t get his existing team to jell with the seven senior signings his front office made over the summer, and he was fired by November.

But Norwich seems different than those teams. The Canaries bossed the Championship last year, finishing on 94 points, unlike Fulham and Blackpool, who scraped their way through the playoffs. Norwich also has continuity. Manager Daniel Farke and the team’s owners made just two permanent senior signings, Josip Drmić and Sam Byram, who both started the season as backups and look unlikely to unseat incumbent starters Teemu Pukki and Max Aarons.

English football has been gradually building up to a time when newly promoted teams can stay in the Premier League without making a ton of big signings and still be committed to a play out of the back, possession-based game. Gus Poyet, who had success implementing this style at Brighton in the Championship (and much less success in the Premier League with Sunderland), talked about English football evolving technically to suit his preferred system back in 2011.

“I’m fed up with people talking about a lack of technical ability. People were talking about this when I arrived in England in 1997. If we stop talking and start doing something about it then maybe in 2025 we will have 100 better players in the Premier League. I’m very critical of what has been happening in England. And if you are critical and have the chance to do something, then you have to do it.”

A lot has changed in England since then. In 2011, Football League clubs passed the Elite Player Performance Plan, which drastically overhauled the way top-level youth football was structured. In 2017, England — historic underacheivers at youth international level — won both the Under-17 World Cup and the Under-19 European Championship. Norwich has taken advantage of the youth movement, currently giving significant minutes to four players with England youth caps. Jamal Lewis, a 21-year-old Northern Irishman, also came up through its academy.

At the same time, the English second tier has been dramatically altered by ambitious owners looking to do more than earn a one-time Premier League payday. The Championship was once defined by experienced, physical players and a direct, ugly style of play. In recent years, more young and foreign managers have been given more chances in the league, and as a result, more teams are deploying young and foreign players, and doing away with the league’s former caveman style of play.

It’s still unclear whether Norwich will fare any better than Holloway’s Blackpool did nearly a decade ago. The Canaries have lost three matches, and conceded more goals than anyone else in the Premier League. Future opposing managers will have more relevant game tape to analyze than Pep Guardiola did.

But Norwich’s result against City is nonetheless an encouraging sign that tactically ambitious, possession-oriented newcomers can prosper in the Premier League. If Norwich can prove that their style of play is viable for a low-budget, low-experience Premier League team, it could have a massive influence on the future of the English game.