Tactics and Strategies in Football

Do you want to talk a bit about Roma?

Yeah, go on.

Roma does this to you.

Man-to-man.

And the goal, the goal is here with the ball and the

goalkeeper.

Yeah.

What do you do now? Where's the space?

Here.

Okay, perfect. There are matches you have to prepare for

like this.

Yeah.

It requires absolute concentration.

Then there are teams that do this to you, that

drop their fullbacks to draw you in, to free up more space, leaving you

four up front. There are others that play like De Zerbi, right?

They split their two center-backs, drop their two deep-lying playmakers,

drop the number nine, drop

the number ten, leave these two wide to draw you in,

draw you in, draw you in,

boom, boom, boom, and leave you all this space.

Then, three days later, maybe you go and play, I don't know, against

another team

and has to prepare in two days, where the most important thing is recovery,

against a team that doesn't press you—

But waits for you.

And waits for you. It's not a game of structure.

That's why it always seems a little

silly to me, just saying I play four, two, three, one.

Yes, our structure, what I give the lads is a

four, two, three,

one. But if I want to see how often we

are

in a four, two, three, one, it's almost certainly never.

There are lots of rotations, there's movement, support, there's occupation

of space, there's—

I drop deep to draw them out, to free up another, another player,

to—

to—for other things, to attack in behind,

to have a one-on-one.

And then there's the other team.