4-4-2 Formation Explained: Why England Used It for 40 Years
The 4-4-2 formation explained: how two banks of four and a strike pair work, where the shape breaks, and why English football kept it for so long.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Formations & Positions26 min read
- World Cup won without wingers
- 1966
- English European Cups, 1977 to 1984
- 7
- Central midfielders in the shape
- 2
- Leicester City title points, 2015-16
- 81
A 4-4-2 is four defenders, four midfielders and two forwards, arranged without the ball as two straight lines of four with a strike pair in front. Every outfield player has a zone to guard, a partner beside him and one simple first job, which is why it can be taught in an afternoon and why the Football Association's coaching courses taught it to a generation of English coaches. It gives a side a compact block that is hard to pass through and two strikers who keep both opposing centre-backs busy. Its flaw is arithmetic. Two central midfielders are outnumbered by any midfield three, and there is an unguarded strip of grass between the lines.
England's attachment to the shape dates from 23 July 1966, when Alf Ramsey named a team for the World Cup quarter-final against Argentina with no winger in it. John Connelly, Terry Paine and Ian Callaghan had each been given one group match on the touchline, and none of them played again in the tournament. Alan Ball and Martin Peters filled the wide places instead, tucked in beside Nobby Stiles and Bobby Charlton, with Geoff Hurst and Roger Hunt ahead of them. A week later that eleven won the final at Wembley, and English football spent the next four decades playing some version of what it had watched that month. It kept the shape until the flaw was exposed too publicly to ignore.
The 4-4-2 in one picture: two banks of four and a strike pair
Draw the pitch lengthways and put ten outfield players on it in three rows. Four at the back, four across the middle, two up front. That is the whole diagram, and its plainness is the point: nobody in a 4-4-2 stands between two lines, nobody has a free role, and nobody is in any doubt about who is next to him.
The back four is two centre-backs flanked by two full-backs. In front of them, ten to fifteen yards upfield, the midfield four mirrors it exactly: two central midfielders flanked by two wide ones. English shirt numbering, which grew up with the shape, still describes it. Two and three are the full-backs, five and six the centre-backs, four and eight the central midfielders, seven on the right and eleven on the left, nine and ten up front. A supporter over fifty can read a 4-4-2 off the backs of the shirts.
Count the partnerships. Two centre-backs. Two central midfielders. Two strikers. A full-back and a wide midfielder on each flank. Ten outfield players make five pairs, and almost every instruction a coach gives can be phrased as an instruction to a pair: one goes and one stays, one presses and one covers, one comes short and one runs long. The answer to most problems is to look sideways and do the opposite of what the partner is doing.
| Position | Zone guarded | Partner | First job without the ball |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-back | The flank from the corner flag to halfway | Wide midfielder in front of him | Stop the cross, and tuck in beside the centre-back when the ball is on the far side |
| Centre-back | The width of the penalty area | The other centre-back | Mark the nearer striker and cover behind his partner when the other one is drawn out |
| Wide midfielder | The touchline strip ahead of the full-back | Full-back behind him | Close the opposing full-back and track him if he runs |
| Central midfielder | The centre circle to the edge of his own box | The other central midfielder | Screen passes into the forwards and get tight to the man in his zone |
| Striker | The opposing centre-backs and the space behind them | The other striker | Show the centre-back with the ball towards one touchline |
Every entry in the last column is a defensive job, and that is not an accident of how the table was drawn. A 4-4-2 is defined by what it looks like when the other side has the ball. In possession the wide midfielders push on, a full-back overlaps, one central midfielder breaks forward, and for a few seconds the picture is closer to the 4-2-4 the shape descended from. When the ball is lost, everybody runs back to the diagram.
Why two banks of four are so hard to play through
Law 1 allows the pitch for an international match to be anywhere from 64 to 75 metres wide, and the Premier League's standard is 68. Four players cannot guard 68 metres. Spread evenly they would stand 17 metres apart, and a pass goes through a 17-metre gap without anybody needing to be clever. So the block does not try. It covers something nearer 40 metres, roughly the width of the penalty area, and it puts those 40 metres wherever the ball happens to be.
The distance between the lines matters as much as the distance across them. A defence and a midfield standing fifteen metres apart leave room for one pass and one hurried touch between them. At twenty-five, a man can receive, turn and choose his next ball. Arrigo Sacchi, whose Milan side won the European Cup in 1989 and 1990 playing a pressing 4-4-2, is usually quoted as wanting about 25 metres from his last defender to his furthest forward, all three lines inside a quarter of the pitch. English sides rarely squeezed that tight, but the principle preached on FA courses was the same: the two fours move as a single unit.
Sideways is the direction that takes the drilling.
- Ball reaches the touchlineThe near-side wide midfielder closes the man in possession. The full-back behind him holds his ground, ready for the pass down the line.
- The centre shifts acrossBoth central midfielders move towards the ball. The nearer one blocks the pass inside and the other fills the space he has just left.
- The far side tucks inThe wide midfielder on the opposite flank comes infield until he is level with the centre circle, a third central player for as long as the ball stays wide.
- The back line followsAll four defenders slide the same distance. The far full-back ends up near the back post, marking space as much as a man.
- The far touchline is abandonedNobody guards the opposite flank. The bet is that a pass long enough to reach it is in the air long enough for the block to travel back.
The standard sequence taught for a zonal 4-4-2 defending in its own half. Distances vary with the coach and the opponent.
That last step is the whole wager. A 4-4-2 concedes the square pass in front of it and the long diagonal over it, and defends everything else. Square passes do no damage. The diagonal has to travel forty or fifty metres, and for as long as it is in the air eight players are jogging across.
None of this needs unusual talent. It needs concentration and the willingness to run fifteen yards sideways for the eightieth time in a match, which is why clubs with small budgets have always favoured the shape.
The strike partnership the shape exists for
Everything behind the front two is organised so that there can be a front two. That is the trade the formation makes. It gives up a body in midfield in order to keep a second forward on the pitch, and it has only ever been worth playing when the second forward justified the cost.
The English game produced the partnerships in types. The big man and the little man is the oldest: John Toshack heading down for Kevin Keegan at Liverpool in the 1970s, Niall Quinn doing the same for Kevin Phillips at Sunderland when Phillips scored 30 Premier League goals in 1999-2000, Emile Heskey occupying defenders so that Michael Owen could run off him in England's 5-1 win in Munich on 1 September 2001. The taller forward is the subject of our guide to the target man and why the role works, and in a 4-4-2 he is rarely there to score. He is there to win the first ball and make the second one fall somewhere useful.
The other type is the one who comes short and the one who goes beyond. Kenny Dalglish dropped off the front to find Ian Rush running in behind. Teddy Sheringham did it for Alan Shearer with England. Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole at Manchester United swapped the two jobs between them, sometimes within the same move. Chris Sutton and Shearer at Blackburn Rovers in 1994-95 were something else again, two centre-forwards who could each do either job; Shearer scored 34 league goals that season and Sutton 15, and Blackburn won the title.
Why two forwards pin both centre-backs at once
Against a lone striker a back four has a spare man. One centre-back marks, the other covers behind him, or steps into midfield with the ball. Put a second forward on the pitch and the spare man disappears. Each centre-back has an opponent of his own. If one is beaten there is nobody behind him.
The consequences spread outwards. Full-backs who would like to push up have to stay narrow, close enough to help. The whole back four is held deeper than it wants to be, because a line that steps up against two runners is gambling twice. And a centre-back who has to mark cannot bring the ball out, so the opposition's build-up starts from a worse place.
Without the ball the pair has a job as well. They cannot press four defenders, so they steer instead, standing so that the centre-back in possession can only pass towards one touchline, where the block is waiting to slide.
Two central midfielders and the arithmetic of a midfield three
The pair in the middle are asked to do everything. Between them they must win the ball, move it on, protect the centre-backs and arrive in the penalty area, and they have to do it across the widest part of the pitch with nobody stationed behind them and nobody ahead.
The usual arrangement was one who sat and one who went. Roy Keane held for Paul Scholes at Manchester United, and on other days went himself. Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit shared the work so evenly in Arsenal's Double season of 1997-98 that it was hard to say which was which. The pairings that failed were the ones where both men had the same instinct. England spent most of a decade trying to fit Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard into the same central two. Each was at his best arriving late in the box, and a 4-4-2 has room for one of those.
Then the arithmetic. Line a 4-4-2 up against a side with three in the middle and count.
Two against three does not mean the three win every tackle. It means one of the three is always unmarked, and the side with the ball only has to find him. If the two central midfielders each take a man, the third receives facing forwards. If they hold their zones and mark nobody, the three pass around them. José Mourinho, who built his first Chelsea team on exactly this advantage, argued that a midfield triangle would always have a free man against two central midfielders standing side by side, and nobody has ever produced a good answer to it from inside a flat 4-4-2. How the triangle works from the other side is set out in our guide to the 4-3-3 and its midfield three.
There are three cures, and each one costs something.
A striker can drop on to the opposition's deepest midfielder, which evens the numbers and turns the shape into a 4-4-1-1 with one forward left alone. The wide midfielders can come inside to make a narrow four, which evens the numbers and leaves both touchlines to the opposing full-backs. Or a centre-back can step up into midfield, which evens the numbers and leaves a hole in the back line for a striker to run into. A manager picks the cost he can best afford. He does not get to pay nothing.
Wide midfielders and overlapping full-backs in pairs on each touchline
Ramsey took the wingers out of his England team. He did not take the width out of the formation, and in the club game the wide midfielder became the 4-4-2's main supplier.
The mechanics are a two-man move repeated all afternoon. The wide midfielder receives on the touchline and faces up his full-back. His own full-back runs around the outside of him. The defender now has two men to deal with and can stop one. If he stays with the man on the ball, the pass goes down the line to the overlap. If he drops off to cover the run, the wide midfielder has time to cross or to come inside. A right-footer played on the right and a left-footer on the left, because the object was to reach the byline and cross with the outside foot.
The cross from the byline was valued for good reasons. A ball pulled back from the goal line arrives with every defender facing his own goal and every attacker facing the opposition's. It is moving away from the goalkeeper, so he cannot come for it. And nobody can be offside from a ball played backwards. Add the personnel a 4-4-2 puts in the box to meet it (two strikers, the far-side wide midfielder arriving at the back post, a central midfielder on the edge of the area) and the cross is being aimed at four targets. Aimed at a lone striker surrounded by two centre-backs, the same delivery is a much poorer bet, and that is the plain reason crossing declined when the second striker did.
Manchester United's sides of the 1990s had the pattern on both flanks: David Beckham and Gary Neville on the right, Ryan Giggs and Denis Irwin on the left. Nottingham Forest's two European Cups were built around John Robertson on the left touchline, a winger who rarely beat a man for pace and still delivered the cross for the winning goal in the 1979 final and scored the winner himself a year later.
The running the wide role demands
The wide midfielder in a 4-4-2 has the longest shift on the pitch. He is a winger when his side has the ball and an auxiliary full-back when it does not, and the distance between those two jobs is most of the length of the touchline. When the opposing full-back goes forward, he goes with him. When the ball is on the far side, he tucks in beside the central midfielders. A wide player who will not track back breaks the second bank of four, and a three-man midfield line with a hole at one end is no line at all.
Where the 4-4-2 breaks: the pocket between midfield and defence
Stand a player in the gap between the two banks of four, dead centre, and watch who goes to him. The central midfielders have their backs to him. The centre-backs can see him and each already has a striker to worry about. He belongs to no one's zone, because the zones were drawn as two lines and he is standing in the space between them.
This is the number 10's position, the hole, and the 4-4-2's own geometry creates it. The nearer centre-back has a decision with no good answer. Follow the man into midfield, and there is a gap in the back four that a striker or a running midfielder can use. Stay in the line, and the 10 receives, turns, and runs at the defence with the ball at his feet and two forwards to aim at. The role and its history are covered on our page about the number 10 and the playmaker's position.
English football knew this problem before it had a 4-4-2 to suffer it. At Wembley on 25 November 1953 Hungary's centre-forward, Nándor Hidegkuti, spent the afternoon dropping away from England's centre-half, Harry Johnston, who could not work out whether to go with him. Hungary won 6-3 and Hidegkuti scored three. The formation was different. The dilemma was the same one.
For a long time the domestic league hid it. When two English sides in a 4-4-2 met, both had two strikers on the shoulders of the centre-backs and nobody between the lines. What exposed the pocket was the arrival of players who had grown up standing there. Eric Cantona joined Manchester United in November 1992. Dennis Bergkamp came to Arsenal in 1995 and Gianfranco Zola to Chelsea in 1996. Each of them was nominally one of a front two, and each spent his matches ten yards deeper than the man beside him, receiving the ball in a space English defences had never been asked to guard.
The pocket has a second entrance. A side with three central midfielders can pass through the middle two, and the spare man of the previous section is usually found right there. The two weaknesses are one weakness seen from different angles.
The variants a team sheet hides
A printed team sheet lists eleven names and, if it gives a shape at all, three numbers. Four different sides can all be announced as 4-4-2 and line up in ways that have little in common beyond the back four.
| Variant | What changes | What it gains | What it gives up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat 4-4-2 | Nothing: two straight lines of four | Width, two crossers, the full sliding block | The centre of midfield against a three |
| 4-1-3-2 | One central midfielder sits in front of the back four | A guard for the pocket between the lines | A passer and runner higher up |
| 4-4-2 diamond | Midfield becomes a holder, two shuttlers and a player at the tip | Four in the centre and a number 10 | Natural width; the full-backs must supply all of it |
| 4-4-1-1 | One striker plays ten yards behind the other | A link to midfield and a marker for the opposing holder | A second man on the shoulder of the centre-backs |
| 4-2-2-2 | Wide midfielders come inside as twin number 10s | Short passing distances and bodies around the ball when it is lost | The touchlines, again left to the full-backs |
Ramsey's World Cup winners were, strictly, the second row. Stiles played in front of the defence and the other three midfielders worked ahead of him, which is why some accounts write 1966 as a 4-1-3-2 and others as a 4-4-2. Both are describing the same eleven.
The diamond turns the midfield arithmetic on its head. Four central players outnumber any three. Carlo Ancelotti's Milan, with Andrea Pirlo at the base, won the 2003 Champions League final at Old Trafford in a version of it, and Brendan Rodgers used one at Liverpool in 2013-14, with Raheem Sterling at the tip behind Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge, in a season in which Liverpool scored 101 league goals and finished second. The price is on the flanks. A diamond has no wide midfielders, so each full-back must cover the whole touchline alone, and an opponent with two good wingers will attack exactly there.
The 4-2-2-2 has a long history in Brazilian football and a more recent one in the pressing sides associated with Ralf Rangnick. Ralph Hasenhüttl brought that version to Southampton. It looks like a 4-4-2 for as long as it takes the wide players to walk infield, and after that it is a narrow, short-passing system built to win the ball back within seconds of losing it.
The 4-4-1-1 is the commonest variant in English football and has its own section below.
4-4-2 or 4-4-1-1: how to tell from the stands
Television graphics will not help, and nor will the programme. The reliable test takes ten seconds and needs the opposition goalkeeper to have the ball at his feet.
Look at the two forwards. If they are standing level with each other, one near each centre-back, cutting off the short pass to both, the side is playing a 4-4-2. If one of them is up against the centre-backs and the other is ten or fifteen yards behind him, standing on the opposition's deepest midfielder, it is a 4-4-1-1. The second forward's starting position without the ball is the entire difference between the two, and it tells a spectator what the manager is worried about. Two level means he wants to press the centre-backs. One dropped means he is afraid of being outnumbered in midfield and has given up a forward to prevent it.
A second check comes the moment the side wins possession. In a true 4-4-2 both forwards run away from the ball, towards goal or into the channels. In a 4-4-1-1 the deeper man comes towards it, showing for a pass between the opposition's lines and turning to feed the striker or the wide players. One movement is a striker's and the other is a playmaker's, and it is rarely hard to see which a player prefers.
Terry Venables' England at Euro 96 is the clearest English example. On paper Sheringham and Shearer were a front two. On the Wembley pitch against the Netherlands on 18 June 1996 Sheringham played between the lines, Shearer stayed high, and England won 4-1 with two goals each from the pair. Bergkamp behind Thierry Henry at Arsenal was the same arrangement, and so was Wayne Rooney behind Ruud van Nistelrooy at Manchester United. All three sides were routinely described as playing 4-4-2.
Which raises the honest caveat about the whole exercise. A formation is a notation, three or four digits standing in for eleven people who do not stand still. The useful question from the stands is where the spare man is, and whose job it has become to deal with him.
Where the 4-4-2 came from: Maslov's Dynamo Kyiv and Ramsey's wingless England
Brazil won the 1958 World Cup in a 4-2-4: four defenders, two midfielders, two wingers and two centre-forwards. Its weakness was obvious to anyone who had to play it with ordinary players. Two men in midfield could be overrun. Brazil's own left-winger, Mário Zagallo, had already begun dropping back to make a third.
The 4-4-2 is what happens when both wingers drop. Two coaches got there at about the same time, a continent apart and without any evidence that either knew what the other was doing.
Viktor Maslov took over at Dynamo Kyiv in 1964. He withdrew his wingers into the midfield line, had his players mark zones instead of men, and asked them to close down the opponent in possession in groups. Dynamo won the Soviet league in 1966, 1967 and 1968. Maslov is credited by historians of the game with the first four-man midfield and with pressing as an organised method, and he remains far less known in Britain than the scale of the idea deserves.
Ramsey's route ran through Suffolk. His Ipswich Town side won the First Division in 1961-62, its first season in the top flight, with Jimmy Leadbetter playing as a left-winger who stood so deep that opposing full-backs did not know whether to follow him. With England he went further. On 8 December 1965 in Madrid he sent out a team with no orthodox winger in it, and England beat Spain 2-0. The press called them the wingless wonders.
He did not commit to the idea at once. England began the 1966 tournament with a winger in each of the three group matches. From the quarter-final onwards there were none: Ball on the right and Peters on the left, both of them midfielders by instinct who would run back as readily as forward. Ramsey's reasoning was practical. He did not think he had a winger good enough to justify a place that came with no defensive work, and he did have midfielders who could do two jobs. He once described Peters as ten years ahead of his time. The story of the tournament itself is told in our account of how England won the World Cup at Wembley.
The decision changed what an English wide player was. The outside-right and outside-left had been specialists who stayed on their touchline and waited for the ball. After 1966 they were midfielders who happened to play wide.
Why England kept the 4-4-2 for forty years
Winning the World Cup with a formation is a strong argument for it. It was not the only one, and it does not explain why the shape outlasted Ramsey by three decades.
The coaching courses
The FA trained the coaches who trained everybody else. Under Allen Wade, its director of coaching from 1963, and Charles Hughes, who worked under him and later held the post, the FA's courses and manuals gave English football a common method, and the method assumed a back four, a midfield four and two forwards. Hughes went further in The Winning Formula, published in 1990, which argued from match analysis that most goals came from moves of very few passes and that the ball should be delivered early into the areas where goals were scored. Two strikers are what that argument requires.
The league
For most of those years the First Division meant 42 league matches, two domestic cups and pitches that were mud from November to March; the surface at Derby County's Baseball Ground was notorious for it. Short passing through midfield is hard on a surface where the ball stops dead. A long pass to a front two is not affected at all. The weather and the grass pushed the same way, towards a shape that got the ball forward quickly and had two men waiting for it.
The European Cups
And it won. Between 1977 and 1984 English clubs won the European Cup seven times in eight seasons, playing 4-4-2 against the best sides on the continent.
| Season | Winners | Final opponents | Score | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1976-77 | Liverpool | Borussia Mönchengladbach | 3-1 | Rome |
| 1977-78 | Liverpool | Club Brugge | 1-0 | Wembley |
| 1978-79 | Nottingham Forest | Malmö | 1-0 | Munich |
| 1979-80 | Nottingham Forest | Hamburg | 1-0 | Madrid |
| 1980-81 | Liverpool | Real Madrid | 1-0 | Paris |
| 1981-82 | Aston Villa | Bayern Munich | 1-0 | Rotterdam |
| 1983-84 | Liverpool | Roma | 1-1, 4-2 on penalties | Rome |
Five of those seven finals finished 1-0, which says something about the method. These were sides that kept their shape, conceded little and trusted a goal to come. The complete record of English finalists is on our page about English clubs in European Cup finals.
A football culture that has just won seven European Cups does not go looking for a new formation. Then English clubs were banned from European competition after the Heysel disaster of May 1985 and did not return until 1990-91, so for five seasons the domestic game had no outside measure at all. The 4-4-2 was not kept out of stubbornness. It was kept because for a long time nothing had beaten it, and then because there was nobody to play who might.
The high-water mark and the turn: 1999, 2004 and Bloemfontein
Manchester United's treble of 1998-99 was the last great achievement of the English 4-4-2 and probably its best. Beckham on the right, Keane and Scholes in the middle, Giggs on the left, Yorke and Cole in attack: two crossers, a sitter and a goer, a pair of forwards who alternated roles.
The Champions League final on 26 May 1999 showed how much the shape depended on the right people. Keane and Scholes were both suspended. Beckham moved into the centre beside Nicky Butt, Giggs switched to the right and Jesper Blomqvist played on the left. United were second best to Bayern Munich for most of the night at Camp Nou and won 2-1 with two goals in stoppage time, both from corners, both scored by substitutes. The formation survived the evening. The balance of it had not.
Five years later José Mourinho arrived at Chelsea. His 2004-05 side played with Claude Makélélé behind two central midfielders, a striker, and two wingers, and it won the Premier League with 95 points, having conceded 15 goals in 38 matches. Opponents in a 4-4-2 found that their two central midfielders could mark Chelsea's advanced two and leave Makélélé free, or go to Makélélé and leave one of the others. Within a few seasons most of the division's leading clubs were playing three in the middle.
The national team was slower. Sven-Göran Eriksson, Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello all used a 4-4-2 as their first choice, and it was Capello's that met Germany in Bloemfontein on 27 June 2010, in the last sixteen of the World Cup. England had Gareth Barry and Lampard in the centre, Gerrard nominally on the left, and Rooney alongside Jermain Defoe. Germany played a 4-2-3-1 with Mesut Özil between England's lines.
Germany won 4-1. Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski scored inside the first 32 minutes; Matthew Upson pulled one back; Thomas Müller scored twice on the counter-attack in the second half. The match is also remembered for Lampard's shot at 2-1, which struck the bar and landed well over the line without a goal being given, and England chased the game differently because of it. But the pattern was visible before and after that moment. Özil kept receiving the ball in the pocket, and neither Barry nor a centre-back could get to him without leaving a hole.
It was not quite the end. Roy Hodgson's England defended in two banks of four at Euro 2012 and went out to Italy on penalties in Kyiv. By the 2014 World Cup the national side had a lone striker and a number 10.
Why the 4-4-2 survives as a defensive shape, and how Leicester won a title with it
The flat 4-4-2 with the ball has largely gone from the top of the game. The 4-4-2 without it is the commonest shape in football.
Watch a side that attacks in a 4-3-3 lose possession and settle into its own half. One of the two advanced midfielders steps up beside the centre-forward, the wingers drop level with the remaining two midfielders, and there are two banks of four with a pair in front. A 4-2-3-1 gets there even more easily: the number 10 joins the striker and the three behind him become four with the addition of nobody at all. Managers who would never announce a 4-4-2 use it every week. Two forwards screen the pass into the opposition's holding midfielder, eight players cover the width of the penalty area, and the far touchline is still the only thing on offer.
Some sides never stopped using it in both phases. Diego Simeone's Atlético Madrid won the Spanish title in 2013-14 in a narrow, ferociously compact 4-4-2. Sean Dyche's Burnley finished seventh in the Premier League in 2017-18 with one. And in 2015-16 Leicester City won the league in it.
- 81Points
- 23Wins
- 3Defeats
- 10Winning margin in points
Final league record over 38 matches. Arsenal finished second, ten points behind.
Claudio Ranieri's side was close to a textbook. Wes Morgan and Robert Huth were centre-backs who defended their penalty area and did not try to do much else. N'Golo Kanté and Danny Drinkwater did the work of three in the middle, Kanté winning the ball and Drinkwater hitting it early over the top. Marc Albrighton on the left crossed. Riyad Mahrez on the right did not, and was the one licence in the team: a left-footer cutting inside, 17 league goals. Up front Jamie Vardy ran beyond and Shinji Okazaki dropped short, which made it a 4-4-1-1 by the test given earlier.
Leicester had among the lowest shares of possession in the division and did not want more. The block sat deep, drew the opposition on to it, and released Vardy into the space left behind. He scored 24 league goals and at one stage scored in eleven consecutive Premier League matches. The season is told in full in our guide to Leicester City's Premier League title.
What Leicester showed is that the shape's weaknesses are conditional. A 4-4-2 is outnumbered in midfield only if it tries to contest midfield. A side content to let the opposition have the ball in front of it, with a block compact enough that the pocket between the lines is ten metres deep instead of twenty-five, can hand over the centre circle and lose nothing by it.
So the fair answer to whether the 4-4-2 is outdated has two halves. As a way of controlling a match with the ball against a strong side, it has been out of date since about 2004. As a way of defending, it has never been bettered for the number of problems it solves with instructions simple enough to give at half-time. More on the positions and systems that replaced it sits in the football section and on the England guides hub.
Next time a Premier League goalkeeper stands with the ball at his feet, count the opposition. Two in front, pointing him towards one side. Four behind them. Four behind those. The team sheet said something else.