The origin of this particular story is boredom. Jamie Hamilton was bored. Tired of watching the same football, patterns, and out-of-possession blocks. The homogenisation of football tactics was too monotonous for his tastes - so he went looking.

Hamilton found what he was searching for, virtually, in Brazil. Fluminense, coached by the peripheral figure of Fernando Diniz, were playing in a manner that would have coaching sessions stopped and instructions to reorganise barked out across most of Europe. Players were moving everywhere and there appeared no rational usage of space or rigid build-up structures.

Diniz wasn’t just refusing to adopt the universally accepted truths of Pep Guardiola’s positional play, he was flipping it on his head. In opposition to Guardiola’s ‘Positionism’, Hamilton coined this free-wheeling spectacle of interpretation ‘Relationism’.

“I’d never seen football like this, maybe only as a kid. It was strange,” Hamilton says, reflecting on a break from the rehearsed patterns and rhythms synonymous with any game of football you now watch around the world. Replaced by improvised interactions around the ball.

“And then it turned out it worked - Diniz’s side were winning with older players who weren’t operating at their highest level. I became interested in how that worked because it didn’t make sense. So I watched every minute of Fluminense for a year like a manic.”

While Hamilton did not invent this style of football, he is credited as a leading thinker in the tactical sphere. It was in late 2022 that the new Malmo boss Henrik Rydstrom stumbled across Hamilton’s writing on the topic. A former self-described “safe” defensive midfielder, Rydstrom’s search for something different led him, and his club, down a similar path.

Malmo manager Henrik Rydstrom (Image: Getty) So, what does a Scottish football coach have to do with Brazilian football becoming a winning method in Sweden? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Rydstrom got in touch with Hamilton soon after stumbling across his work which can only be described as unique. The Scot is a UEFA A licence coach and a leading tactical theorist. But, refreshingly, he doesn’t talk about his role in this particular story with any great sense of destiny or ego. The thumbnails on his articles feature laser eyes and artwork, a tactical screenshot from a game could be followed by some reference to another cultural outlet like a sheet of music. He rightly understands that football tactics, how a team plays and what a manager imprints, are attached to culture, expression and understanding. If you question that, just sit next to a southern European and watch their reaction when a British crowd cheers a tackle louder than a goal.

Hamilton’s public work has led him to strike up friendships with leading football figures. When Rene Maric, now the Bayern Munich assistant, was in Glasgow to face Rangers with Borussia Dortmund the pair arranged to meet and later co-authored an article together. The week before this conversation, Hamilton was invited by the sporting director of Ligue 1 club Toulouse to present his ideas to staff, with a Bundesliga club potentially up next. Over the summer he spent four days behind the scenes at Malmo, watching sessions and talking with staff.

“Rydstrom contacted me just before the 2023 season [Sweden play in a summer league] to say he was interested in applying Relationism,” Hamilton says.

“I didn’t know much about Malmo but I was interested that the coach of the biggest club in Sweden was having this conversation. The thing is, lots of people tell me they’re interested in applying Relationism but it’s a totally different thing to actually do it. Because, you know, careers are on the line.

“I thought I’d check in after the Swedish league started. I remember tuning into a game and thinking, ‘Shit, they’re actually doing it, they’re doing the stuff’ - and it was pretty good.

Hamilton (left) visited Rydstrom and his staff this year (Image: Jamie Hamilton) “The team were playing well and won their first eight or nine games in a row. Rydstrom’s football was getting a lot of praise and attention even though he would talk it down. Malmo didn’t have it all their own way throughout the course of the season and eventually required a bit of luck on the final day of the campaign to win the title, but came out on top.”

Guardiola’s influence on football thinking has been so intense that increasingly, it feels as if his way is the only way. Hamilton and others argue the case of an alternative - a style of football that doesn’t require players to be pawns on a chess board, but instead free to combine, move and create as they please.

“I coined the term Relationism because sometimes you need new language to differentiate and it’s resonated with a lot of coaches,” he continues.

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“Will we see it start to really come up as a concept in the Premier League? I don’t know. Every club still hires a coach to try and play like Man City.

“Writing about the idea is controversial because I am criticising the chosen one [Guardiola]. Many people are very sure that his way is the direction football must travel in. Their lives are invested in this. When someone comes along and suggests there is another way to play and attaches some form of over-constraining aspect to it, some people don’t like that.

“It’s not as if I own the term Relationism, but I’m interested in promoting it for a lot of different reasons. It was very important to have a real-world example, that’s where Malmo come in, especially because they play at a high level and like Fluminense, they’ve also been winning.

“There’s a scale to Relationism and Rydstrom takes some elements into a style of play that is very much his own. There will be times where you can clearly see, ‘Oh, they’re playing a 4-3-3’ but in other moments there are evident signs of something different.”

What is Relationism by definition? It is, firstly, the opposite of Positionism.

The latter is a style of play that “uses abstracted, flattened space as a primary reference for player organisation. Relationism does not.”

In short, a Positionist coach thinks that dictating players’ positions will allow for maximum impact, whereas a Relationist coach believes freeing players from positional restrictions will do the same.

“Guardiola has taken to painting a chalk spot on the training pitch to mark where he wants Sterling to stand during matches, so pronounced is Sterling’s urge to skitter inside, forgetting Guardiola’s orders to stay wide, to create space by not moving, stretching out the furthest point,” Guardian journalist Barney Ronay wrote in 2016 of the former approach.

And describing the latter more recently, he said: “Rydstrom wants to succeed by breeding spontaneity. The idea is to find overloads and weak spots with fluid, unpredictable movements that are essentially made up in real-time, to play close together in small areas, pass at strange, high-speed angles.”

Hamilton's presentation to Toulouse staff members (Image: Jamie Hamilton) “Relationism is a non-zonal attacking system. Defensively we have zonal and non-zonal, usually man-for-man marking. In attacking football, generally, people don’t talk about zonal and non-zonal,” Hamilton continues.

“All of possession football assumes the necessity of a zonal attack. Players are organised to occupy certain zones. Of course, they all move but there is a primary reference as to where they should be in certain moments. In Relationism's hardest form, Diniz rejects that and flips it. Rather than playing in pre-decided spaces, he believes spaces will open up because of how his side plays.

“It all came together with this view that you don’t need to constrain players with positional rules, you can be effective without that. That’s a radical thing because most coaches say you can’t.”

Positionism believes the ball will come to you - you’ll never see a Guardiola winger travel across the pitch to gain possession. Relationism rejects that. It argues that the interconnection of players breeds unpredictability. Moreover, the moral argument Hamilton highlights is clear - Relationism empowers the players.

“A Relationist style of play uses the ball as the primary reference,” he adds.

“Usually when you get clustering around the ball, you’ll hear people say ‘That’s kids football’. A Relationist team will use the ball to interact without scripted attacks. Guardiola trains with a grid which, depending on the situation, players know where to stand, to a degree they’re a machine.

“Rydstrom’s style of play isn’t full Diniz, sometimes Malmo’s play looks quite normal and positional. But in moments you’ll see that dynamics, interactions and relationships are the primary attacking tool, rather than automatic patterns. That’s the question for opponents, how do you defend eight players on one side of the pitch?

“This isn’t a solving of football, it’s just another way to attack with its own drawbacks and problems. But I do think the ceiling for this football is higher, with the right resource and interest.”

And what to expect from Malmo? A blend, according to Hamilton. They’ve been impacted by the loss of their best attacker and best defender, Sebastian Nanasi and Derek Cornelius. Elements of their game will appear very familiar and make you question why you spent valuable time reading about the supposed differences before suddenly there are five light blue shirts clustered around the ball moving in patterns and at angles that will raise eyebrows.

An example of Malmo's tactical set-up (Image: Jamie Hamilton) “They started this season strong and there was a real focus on Europe as a result,” he adds.

“Rydstrom was a gamble that paid off because Malmo finished seventh the season before he arrived. The start of this season has tailed off a little due to losing key players and the strikers not really clicking. Malmo were disappointing over two legs against Sparta Prague to miss out on the Champions League. The performance was quite nervy.”

While not quite the cusp of the wave feeling from the start of summer Thursday night is still a return to European competition for the club. For Philippe Clement’s Rangers, this challenge will be simultaneously difficult and unique.

He calls himself only an observer or influence on what Malmo are trying to do: “A guy who has proposed alternative ideas and this coach was interested in them”.

In the era of the manager as puppet master, thinkers like Hamilton and Rydstrom are liberating those on the pitch, taking the attention away from the cult of the dugout.

And what’s next for Hamilton? Far more animated discussing others than himself. Between his time talking to clubs about alternative ideas and jotting them down on his medium platform, he continues to coach himself. He jokes that his lack of planning is a factor in life, not just career. Just like the style of play he preaches, the origin of this journey and likely the next, life's best stories' originate from spontaneous beginnings. With the outcomes in the hands of their actors.