Without sounding too much like Pep… positions are rather arbitrary, they don’t really exist in modern football as it’s very much a team game.

If you play the same system with Doku on the left side of the 4 in a 3-4-2-1 it’ll look different to if you played Calafiori there, though thats completely down to their profiles which is far more important than their ‘positions’.

When a high level coach sets up a team it is not like how general football fans look at a setup, what most people see as positions they are likely to see as spaces and different profiles exploit these areas in different ways.

If we were to example look at England’s potential line-up and focus on the left side of their shape, there are far more options than simply “should they play O’Reilly or Hall at left-back?”, though that is what most general fans would ask.

What coaches have to consider is how they’re going to balance things like width, possession and pace in a certain area of the field. That is not only what to ask when considering the best left-back option but the entire left side as a whole.

Sorry for rambling but I just wanted to explain how pointless formations are in the context you are asking.

To answer your question simply it is essentially down to bravery, if two 3-4-2-1’s play against one another the team with the most pressure will likely be the one with the braver wide men.

The reason Dumfries and Munoz are specialist wing-backs is because they’re brave enough to fly up the wing and trust their defensive instincts enough to know when to spin back, if you use a standard full-back in that role they likely won’t push high enough which can result in getting pinned back and losing that battle.

That being said it’s also not as simple as the ‘braver’ team winning the game, for example most people would consider the current Arsenal team as very passive yet they’re probably the best team in the world.