Ask any football fan over 30 about the player they dreamed of becoming, and they will describe the same person. He wore the No. 10 jersey. He stood slightly apart from the chaos around him, found the ball in tight spaces, looked up slowly while everyone else was panicking, and played the pass that only he could see. He was the reason you stayed awake past bedtime to watch games.
He was the reason you spent Saturday mornings doing step-overs on a patch of concrete, pretending you were him.
That player no longer exists at the highest level. Not exactly. Not in the form that made him so special. The position is still numbered. The shirt still gets handed out. But the job description has been quietly rewritten, and the man who used to hold the role has been replaced by someone who covers more ground, tracks more runners, and presses more relentlessly than his predecessor ever did or was ever asked to do.
Understanding why that happened means understanding one of the most significant tactical shifts in the history of the game. It was not a single decision. Nobody sat in a boardroom and voted the No. 10 out.
Instead, a series of coaching philosophies gradually made the position harder and harder to justify, until the managers who still wanted to play a pure playmaker in central areas found themselves getting beaten tactically by opponents who had replaced that luxury with something more demanding, more efficient, and ultimately more successful.
The Original Blueprint
The traditional No. 10 had one core job and enormous freedom to carry it out. He operated in the space between the opposition’s midfield and defensive lines, the pocket of real estate that defenders argued about who should own, and he lived there rent-free. He received the ball facing goal or sideways, with enough time to think, and then he either played someone through with a perfectly weighted pass or drove at the defence himself. Goals came from his work.
Attacks started and ended with him. Teams were built in service of his gifts.
Some of the names who filled that role read like a history of football’s finest decades. Diego Maradona, who essentially invented the modern version of the position at Napoli and with Argentina in the 1980s, was so instinctively dangerous between the lines that defending teams had to fundamentally reorganize around him. Zinedine Zidane brought control to it, that famous stillness in chaos, the ability to receive under pressure and make the right decision look effortless.
Okocha added joy to the blueprint, dribbles that felt improvised even when they were not, assists that left teammates laughing at the audacity of what he had just done.
Further down the timeline came players like Riquelme and Kaká, then Mesut Özil, players who carried the torch of the position into an era that was slowly preparing to extinguish it. Kaká at his peak was perhaps the last No. 10 to win the biggest prizes in football while functioning primarily in that traditional way. He was quick enough to survive what was coming, but the players who followed him were not given the same grace period.
The golden age of the No. 10 ran roughly from the mid-1970s through to the late 2000s.
Teams in that era were often arranged specifically to protect and feed their creative midfielder. If he needed a defensive shield behind him, the team provided one. If he needed runners ahead of him to exploit his passes, strikers were chosen for their movement off the ball as much as their finishing. The No. 10 was the sun, and everyone else arranged themselves around the light it gave off.
That arrangement depended on one thing above all else: space. And that is precisely what the modern game took away.
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Klopp Made It Loud
In the years when Jürgen Klopp was at Borussia Dortmund, he said something that did not get nearly enough attention at the time. He explained his pressing philosophy by pointing out that winning the ball back immediately after losing it was, in effect, a better playmaker than any individual could be. His exact words were something close to this:
No playmaker in the world is better than a counter-pressing system
Think about all the passes you need to make to get a No. 10 into a position where he can play the killer ball. Gegenpressing lets you win it back right there and attack instantly.
He was right, and that one insight contains most of what you need to understand about what happened to the position.
If pressing hard and immediately after losing the ball puts your team in a better attacking position than patiently building through a creative midfielder, then the creative midfielder becomes optional. And in football, optional very quickly becomes expensive and then redundant.
Klopp took Dortmund to consecutive Bundesliga titles and a Champions League final with a midfield built almost entirely on energy, athleticism and collective aggression rather than individual creativity. His players covered distances that felt inhuman. They hunted the ball in packs. They won it back in dangerous areas and attacked before defences could organise.
At Liverpool, he refined the approach further. The midfield trio that won the Champions League in 2018 and the Premier League title in 2020 contained Fabinho, Jordan Henderson and Georginio Wijnaldum. None of them were No. 10s in any traditional sense.
Henderson and Wijnaldum were box-to-box workers who could arrive late into attacking positions and occasionally find a final pass, but their defining qualities were their defensive contributions, their ability to press without switching off, and their stamina to run for ninety minutes at an intensity that wore opponents down. Fabinho was the defensive pivot who anchored everything behind them.
The most creative player in that Liverpool team, by a significant margin, was Trent Alexander-Arnold. He played right-back. The traditional No. 10’s job had not disappeared from the team. It had been redistributed to the right side of the back four, and the space where the No. 10 would have operated in midfield was given over entirely to industry and pressing pressure.
Guardiola Killed It In a Different Way
Pep Guardiola arrived at a similar conclusion through a completely different tactical philosophy. Where Klopp’s pressing system suffocated the No. 10 by removing time and space from his operating zone, Guardiola’s positional play made the position structurally incompatible with how he wanted his team to function.
Positional play, at its core, is about players occupying specific areas of the pitch at specific moments to guarantee numerical and positional superiority across all zones simultaneously. It requires every player to understand not just where to be but why, how their position creates options for teammates and closes options for opponents. Players move in relation to each other according to principles that take years to fully absorb.
Into this system, now try to place a player whose defining quality is that he plays by instinct, roaming freely, appearing where the game needs him rather than where the tactical structure prescribes. That player is not an asset in positional play. He is a fault line. Every time he drifts where his instinct takes him rather than where the structure requires, he creates an imbalance somewhere else on the pitch, an overloaded zone here, an empty corridor there.
Guardiola’s midfielders needed to be able to do what a classical No. 10 could do with the ball, finding passes through lines, arriving in advanced positions to score, creating from tight spaces, but they needed to do all of it while also maintaining the structural discipline that made the system work without the ball.
Andrés Iniesta was the closest thing to a classical No. 10 who thrived under Guardiola, but Iniesta worked within the structure rather than outside it. He pressed opponents when required, tracked defensive runs, and covered the half-spaces when Barcelona were without the ball. He was not given the freedom to simply stand between the lines and wait. His creativity was deployed within a framework rather than licensed to operate beyond it.
The result was a generation of players who thought and moved like No. 10s but who carried the work rate and defensive discipline of No. 8s. The position had been folded into a more demanding one without most people noticing it had happened.
Riquelme & Özil: One of the last No. 10s
Juan Román Riquelme might be the most important cautionary figure in this whole story. He was among the most gifted footballers of his generation, a man who could slow the game down around him through touch and movement in a way that seemed almost telepathic, and his career became a case study in what happens when a pure No. 10 of genuine quality is placed inside a system that does not accommodate him.
At Boca Juniors, where the game was slower, and teammates were organized specifically around his strengths, Riquelme was extraordinary. He controlled matches with a kind of arrogant ease, winning the ball in tight spaces, holding it under pressure, finding passes that nobody else had seen. He was impossible to play against when the conditions were right.
But the conditions were rarely right outside Argentina. At Villarreal, he had excellent periods, and the team performed well with him in it, but the demands of elite European competition exposed the limitations of building around someone who required so much of the game to come to him.
Opponents who pressed hard turned his deliberate pace from a strength into a liability. Managers who wanted a structured defensive shape from their midfield found that Riquelme’s low defensive contribution made that shape difficult to maintain. He was not lazy. He was simply designed for a different game, a game that European football was in the process of abandoning.
His story mattered because of what it said about the position rather than the player. Even the very best version of a classical No. 10, a player of Riquelme’s talent and intelligence, was finding the highest level of European football increasingly hostile. Coaches were not putting up with the defensive absences that came with the position, not when they had evidence that pressing systems and positional structures could win trophies without requiring that compromise..
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Mesut Özil is probably the last player who operated as a traditional No. 10 at a genuine elite level and did it beautifully. In his years at Real Madrid and his early years at Arsenal, he was magnificent, threading passes through midfields with a vision that felt other-worldly, ghosting into pockets of space that defenders had not been told to mark, setting up goals with assists that took your breath away.
His decline at Arsenal was presented publicly as a story about attitude, work rate, and willingness to engage with the team’s pressing demands. There was probably some truth in that framing. But the structural reality was just as important.
Unai Emery wanted a press-heavy system that Özil was not physically designed to lead. Mikel Arteta arrived with an even more demanding tactical framework built around collective defensive work and coordinated pressing. In that system, a player who contributed minimally without the ball was not just unhelpful but actively counterproductive, creating gaps in the press that opponents could exploit.
The tragedy of Özil was not that he ran out of talent. It was that the game ran out of room for the specific things he could do without also demanding things he could not.
Players around him at Arsenal, players with half his technical quality, stayed on the pitch simply because they pressed harder and tracked more runners. That is not a statement about the fairness of football. It is a statement about what football had become by the mid-2010s and what it remained through the 2020s.
Modern football is a collective exercise. Each player within a well-organised system covers for every other player. When the defensive structure is set, everyone has a zone. When the press is triggered, everyone moves simultaneously. One player who does not press, who stands in his zone and waits rather than attacking the ball, breaks the whole mechanism. You cannot press with ten and a half players. You press with eleven, or you give the opponent time to play out.
The Inverted Winger Took The Space
While pressing was removing the time and structure was removing the freedom, a third force was removing the territory itself. The rise of the inverted winger through the mid-2000s and into the 2010s gradually colonised the central pockets of space that the No. 10 had once occupied exclusively.
An inverted winger is, simply put, a winger who cuts inside rather than going around the outside. Right-footed players on the left wing, left-footed players on the right. When they receive the ball wide and turn infield, they arrive naturally into the space just behind the opposition midfield, the No. 10’s traditional operating zone, but they bring pace and directness with them that a static central playmaker rarely offers.
They also create defending problems that are different in character. A classical No. 10 in the centre is a predictable threat. Everyone knows where he is and adjusts their defensive positioning accordingly. An inverted winger who starts wide before cutting infield creates constant decisions for defenders about whether to follow and open space behind them or hold and give the winger time on the ball in a dangerous area.
Mohamed Salah on Liverpool’s right side is the definitive example. He starts wide, draws defenders toward him, cuts inside onto his stronger left foot, and arrives in the same central space where a No. 10 would have operated, but carrying far more direct threat and doing far more work without the ball. Vinícius Júnior does the same from the left at Real Madrid. Bukayo Saka at Arsenal covers both phases of play with a completeness that would make most classical No. 10s seem half a player by comparison.
The consequence was that the territory the No. 10 depended on was now being used more efficiently by someone else. Managers looked at their options and reached an obvious conclusion. Why carry a specialist in the central creative role when your wingers were occupying that space and doing it while also pressing, running the channels, and contributing defensively?
The No. 10 was not just tactically inconvenient. It had been made positionally redundant.
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What a Modern No. 8 Is
The player who replaced the No. 10 was not invented overnight. He evolved gradually from the box-to-box midfielder of earlier decades into something considerably more demanding, a player who is expected to contribute across essentially every phase of the game at the highest level.
The modern No. 8 covers the full length of the pitch over the course of a game. He defends with genuine intensity when his team is without the ball, tracking runners, covering half-spaces, pressing the opposition’s defensive build-up when the trigger arises. He supports the defensive structure and makes sure the team’s shape is maintained even when the game is open and the instinct might be to push forward.
And then, when the ball is won and the team transitions into attack, he drives forward, arrives late into the penalty area, creates chances and scores goals, and combines in tight spaces the way a classical playmaker once did.
Jude Bellingham is the best current example and possibly the best the position has ever seen. He arrived at Real Madrid at 19 years old and immediately performed with the kind of authority that takes most midfielders a decade to accumulate.
His attacking production, the goals, the assists, the moments of quality in the final third, is the output of a No. 10. But his defensive engagement, the way he presses, the distances he covers, the defensive duels he contests across 90 minutes, is the output of a No. 8 who takes that responsibility seriously. He does not switch off when his team does not have the ball. He earns the right to be brilliant offensively by being relentless defensively.
Luka Modric at his peak embodied the same balance. The statistical picture of a Modric game shows a player who covered vast ground, won the ball back in multiple areas, passed with exceptional accuracy under pressure, and still managed to arrive in dangerous positions to score or assist.
He had the technical gifts of a classical playmaker but used them from a position that also demanded and received his full defensive engagement. Nicolo Barella at Inter Milan, Pedri at Barcelona, and Martin Ødegaard at Arsenal. These are players with classical creative instincts who work within systems that demand far more than creativity. They press, they recover, they track, they cover. Their moments of genius happen within a structure rather than instead of one.
What Data Cannot Capture?
Football’s adoption of detailed performance data over the last fifteen years accelerated the decline of the No. 10 by giving clubs a language for what they had already started to feel tactically. When analysts began measuring pressing intensity, distance covered, defensive duels contested, and high-intensity sprint counts, the classical No. 10 appeared in those numbers as a player who was not pulling his weight.
The metrics that matter most in modern recruitment were precisely the metrics in which the position was structurally weakest.
Clubs could now see in data what coaches had been seeing on the pitch.
A player who covered four kilometres less than his midfield teammates in a game, who contested half the defensive duels, who pressed at a fraction of the intensity, was not just tactically inconvenient. He was quantifiably costing the team something measurable. And when you could replace him with a player who matched all those pressing and running numbers while also carrying comparable creative output, the case for keeping the specialist became very hard to make.
The deeper problem is that what the classical No. 10 offered was not easily quantifiable. The pass that nobody else would have attempted. The dribble that unlocked a defence when nothing else was working. The moment of individual genius that turned a draw into a victory in the 82nd minute. These things are real, and they matter enormously, but they are irregular by nature, and modern football has increasingly little patience for irregularity in return for enormous salary and structural compromise.
In the era before detailed analytics, a manager could say his No. 10 was worth the defensive holes because the No. 10 was special and everyone accepted that on faith. Now the data demands evidence of that value in every game, not just the memorable ones, and the classical No. 10’s contribution tends to disappear in matches where the space between the lines is compressed, and the opponent is organised and nobody is giving him anything.
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The Players Who Survived by Adapting
The story is not entirely a funeral. Creative players did not vanish from football. They evolved, or they found ways to thrive within the new demands, and the ones who managed that successfully are among the most complete midfielders the game has ever produced.
Bernardo Silva at Manchester City may be the finest example of what the evolved No. 10 looks like in practice. His technical quality, his vision, and his ability to play in small spaces and find angles that other players do not see, is classical playmaker territory. But he presses with extraordinary intensity, covers enormous ground in every game, and functions as a completely reliable defensive unit within Guardiola’s system.
He is creative and industrious in equal measure, and that combination makes him indispensable in a way that the classical No. 10 could rarely claim to be.
Pedri at Barcelona carries the instincts of the great Spanish playmakers of the previous generation but applies them through a lens shaped by the demands of the modern game. He understands positional play, covers his defensive responsibilities, and yet still finds time and space to produce the kind of passing and dribbling that remind you of the players this piece is mourning.
He is what the No. 10 becomes when it accepts that it has to earn its creative freedom rather than simply being granted it.
Serie A and La Liga have been more accommodating of classical playmakers than the Premier League, partly because the intensity of pressing varies more across those leagues and partly because certain coaches in those competitions have remained philosophically committed to building around technical quality rather than athletic output. But even in those leagues, the trend is unmistakable. The space for a player who contributes primarily in one phase of the game is shrinking at every level.
The Shape of the Loss
It is possible to look at modern football and see only improvement. The games are faster, the pressing is more coordinated, and the tactical organization on both sides of the ball is more sophisticated than it has ever been. The physical standards are extraordinary. The athleticism of players who also carry genuine technical quality would have seemed almost impossible a generation ago.
And yet something specific is absent.
It is the feeling of a game organised around one person’s genius, a feeling where you watch not just what is happening but what that one player might do next, the sense that at any moment he could produce something completely unrepeatable that would change everything.
The classical No. 10 created that feeling. He was the individual within the collective, the person who did not follow the same rules as everyone else and was brilliant just because of it.
Riquelme, at his best, made defences look confused in a way that no system could replicate. He held the ball in tight situations and seemed to be operating on a different clock to the players around him, as if he had been given slightly more time than everyone else.
Zidane, in a Champions League final, produced moments that had no tactical explanation, pieces of technical brilliance that existed outside any system or structure and simply expressed the way football looked in the best possible version of his imagination.
Those moments have not disappeared from football entirely. But they no longer come from a player whose primary job is to produce them, a player given the freedom and the structural protection to operate as an artist rather than a worker. They come instead from players who have earned the right to be brilliant by also being relentless, who produce those moments in between all the pressing and covering and running that the game now demands of everyone.
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Where This Goes
The question of whether the classical No. 10 ever returns is really a question about whether football ever reverses the tactical arms race that made it obsolete.
It is a question about space.
If every team presses and every team defends with coordinated structure, then the margins between them narrow and eventually a moment of individual genius in a tight corridor becomes decisive again, becomes the thing that separates two otherwise evenly matched systems.
At that point, the player who can find and exploit that corridor, who can receive under extreme pressure and produce something unexpected in a half-second of space, becomes enormously valuable once more.
Football does move in cycles. Tactics go through phases where one approach dominates until a counter is found, and then the game adjusts again.
The high press that killed the No. 10 has itself been countered in various ways by teams who build out patiently under pressure and draw the press before finding passes through it. If that counter becomes widespread enough and the spaces between lines open up again as a result, the player who can operate in those spaces might find himself back in demand.
The version of that player who returns will not look exactly like the originals. He will press. He will cover ground. He will defend with genuine commitment. The game has moved too far for the pure artistic model to return unchanged. But the instincts, the vision, the ability to find the pass nobody else sees and to make the game look temporarily slower than it is, those things will matter again if and when space opens up.
Until then, the 8s do the work. They cover the ground, contribute to every phase, press with the intensity the game demands, and still find moments of genuine quality within all that industry.
They are excellent players, and they win competitions. Bellingham at the Bernabéu, Barella at the San Siro, Ødegaard at the Emirates, watching them play is its own kind of pleasure.
It is just a different pleasure from what the No. 10 gave you. It is collective and earned and athletic, where the old pleasure was individual and free and effortless. You can admire the modern game deeply and still feel, in the quieter moments of a match, a small absence where the most exciting player on the pitch used to stand, waiting for the ball, seeing things nobody else could see, getting ready to make something impossible look simple.
That player does not play here anymore.
He moved on when the game stopped making room for him. The room he used to occupy was measured out and divided among players who could use it more efficiently, and efficiency won, as it tends to do, and the game became what it is now, which is faster and more organised and athletically extraordinary and, in one very specific way, slightly less magical than it was before.
