Thursday Tactics 'n' Things - Strategy and Identity

I think this is something that, for the most part, transcends a sport. You see this in a lot of leagues. “System” teams have more up years than down and are able to sustain success in a long term.

Soccer being as big as it is in the world. There’s 11 spots on the field, but 100s of positions/roles. I think there’s potentially an advantage to be had by grabbing players that are underrated but perhaps fill into your system perfectly.

.. is with my #1 European team AS Roma.. They brought in Luis Enrique (Barca B coach previously) and have since unloaded more than half of their roster (a roster that finished 6th in Serie A, not great but respectable) and brought in a bunch of different guys to come in and play the Barca way (as Luis Enrique is a student of Pep)

Real excited for the potential of what could be there, but as was discussed here, it will take a lot of time to develop said identity and could be an interesting first couple of months.

Some Football teams run a 4-3. Others a 3-4. Some run the Wildcat. Others the West Coast Offense.

Baseball teams build personnel around the design of their stadium. (speed and defense vs. power) Ground ball pitchers vs. strike out power pitching.

If you are Barca you have the freedom and money to simply go out and get the players you need for your system. That’s nice for Barca.

That’s not the reality in MLS (or in literally any NA league).

An example from the NBA – take the mid 90’s Sonics vs. Utah Jazz.

The Sonics liked to swarm the ball. Double team traps were a constant part of George Karl’s philosophy. That required a lot of switching which resulted in a team with big guards and small centers. Everyone needed to be able to switch onto anyone.

Compare that with the Utah Jazz where John Stockton was too small to guard any big and Greg Ostertag was too big and slow to man guards. So they ran a more typical pick and roll – man to man system.

Both worked.

The question is, do you have the luxury of conforming personnel to system or do you have to conform system to personnel?

Here in MLS, we can’t simply go out and get the perfect player when we need him. Not only that, but even if you have the players for your system you have to change that system when players aren’t performing well enough (Jaqua) or are injured (OBW).

Sigi seems to realize we can’t keep going with the target forward/withdrawn forward pairing when we don’t have a body to fill the target role credibly.

So we have to change our system because we can’t simply go out and buy the guy we need. We can keep sending in big crosses to guys who aren’t there, or we can switch to building up through the middle.

THAT’s good coaching. ANY coach can simply say “we are a system Y team” and expect his GM to go out and find players for that system. That’s a sign of a good GM more than a good coach. A good coach takes what he has and figures out the best system for those players to succeed.

The raw numbers of 4-4-2 or whatever are much less important than how the right two of the 4 work with one of the 2, or with one of the defensive 4 coming up on the wing, which boils down to how individual players work both with each other and within a system of movement.

If you look at how teams actually play over the course of a match, the “heat map” or other tools, you’ll see a wide variation in formations from the outset (some 4-4-2s are really 2-2-1-2-1-1-1s) but also an even wider variation in how the move. After all, football is not fussball. I’ve always thought it would be better to represent formations not by dots but by lines, or even connected lines (remember the old board game Twixt?) showing groups of linked players who work together. Subsystems, if you will.

My favorite thing in football is watching two players work together who develop that uncanny sense of each other. Good teams do this with more than two, but two are easier to watch. I remember a couple of years ago when Gareth Bale at Spurs was still playing as a back, on the wing, and struggled to do anything until Modric came in the squad, and the moment when they discovered how to work the overlapping runs up the side was just so beautiful. And when Bale moved up to midfielder, still on the wing, he took that step further.

In the same way, in a different part of the field, it’s been fun watching Rosales and Flaco learn to work together. I think all of our guys now, in fact, are actively looking for that connection with each other, which makes them better than they are as individual players. And you can see it with a player like Friberg, who gets it right sometimes but not others, and when he gets it he rises above his skill level, which is lovely. Similarly, Riley always seems to start the season with thirty or forty hundred-yard bombs into the far corner, but gradually over the season starts to figure out where people are more likely to be. Rangefinding, if you will.

If you have two players who work together in a particular way (or three, or four) you can replace one of them with a much “better” player who nonetheless makes the subsystem work worse. For example, you could import a world-class midfielder who continually squibs the ball into an wide open area where no one is ever there to meet it. The receivers may be good players too, but they’re in the wrong areas (or they may just not be good enough). The player is good, the system is good, but the two are not a match. The classic example of this is the club that rains crosses into the box all day but has no big man in the middle to pound them in.

I think “identity” is a good way to refer to this concept. I think the real difference between the really great teams and lower-level teams like the Sounders (speaking globally here, you understand) is that they have the skill to develop systems, or an “identity”, that reacts faster to situations, makes changes more quickly. We’ve all seen the Sounders put together some good linkage play, but they’re definitely slower at taking advantage of gaps that open up, and less accurate when they do, compared to a top European club. What makes Sigi a good coach is that he is pretty accurately tailoring our style of play to our abilities — we all wish he do this, that and the other thing differently, but I think he knows that we just can’t — we can’t put together Xavi-to-Iniesta-to-Villa plays. Fortunately nobody else can either!

The trick when bringing in new guys is, can they drop into this system, this team, and make it better? Which often means not “play better than the guy you replaced” but “make the guys around you better” by giving them better balls and better connections.

Great stuff!

Identity begins with the ownership and the brand the team wants to create. A coach is then hired to implement that identity at the tactical level. Yes, the team’s identity will be morphed by the personality of a coach and the exigencies of a day to day line up, but the identity is a product of the organization.

Look at the Sounders and Timbers, two MLS clubs with wickedly strong identities for young franchises. These identities took shape before the teams even fielded the pitch. Both teams have a clear idea of who they are and what they want to be as a franchise. Now look at Vancouver. Here’s an organization that simply looks lost on some levels.

The strategic side of identity also includes the deep roster signings of players like Levesque. In a salary cap controlled league like MLS, smart teams strategically plan for the roles of the bargain players on their roster. Yes, there is a primary allocation geared toward a particular tactical approach for the team’s current and future stars. But there is also an attention to the detail of who teams bring in to support those stars. Often these players epitomize the emotional side of the club’s desired identity. Roger Levesque is the quintessential Sounder in terms of his mental approach to taking the pitch. This isn’t a strategic accident. And it carries over to the tactical side of the game. When Sigi wants to make a point to a star player about his approach to the game, the player invariably sits in favor of one of the bench players who leave it all on the field.

Stupid typos….