Hello and welcome back to another week of your favorite managerial blogging website! It’s been quite a ride ever since we started our journey and I am absolutely grateful for every single one of you soccermanagerites who keep coming back to learn more about our beautiful game.
Like I mentioned on Friday, we are starting another ‘mini series’ today by taking a look at a team from real life soccer and placing their real life tactics within SM23’s tactical set up. This series is taking place at a perfect time( in my opinion) since almost every major club league is coming to an end within the next few weeks. What better way of displaying a quick review of each team’s tactics that they’ve used up until now?
The way how we’ll be doing this is by taking a look at 2 different clubs from the top 5 European leagues ( Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, and Serie A) and explaining what their tactics that they have been using throughout their league campaign would be if we were to use SM23’s tactical options from the ‘Tactics page’. Our first team within this series will be Arsesnal, who despite “bottling” the prem, have truly had a fantastic season that no one would’ve expected back in August of 2022. Let’s first start by displaying their performance within the league:
Bare in mind that we are only looking at the tactics that have been predominantly used within each team’s respective league
This Arsenal team played some great football over this season and here was their most used starting X1:
The Arsenal Starting X1 that played majority of the matches during the BPL campaign
You already know that it’s not a proper SMB episode without checking out player roles…
Here are the roles that each player played predominantly throughout the course of the season. Aaron Ramsdale’s ability with the ball at his feet was key for their build up play. The back 4 was solid for majority of the season wuth Zinchenko pushing into midfield (since there is no ‘Inverted Fullback’ role within SM23, the next best thing is ‘Fullback’) while Ben White formed a ‘back 3’ alongside Saliba and Gabriel. Thomas Partey (although a Ball Winning Midfielder) was tasked with starting the play from deeper positions hence why he was given the Deep-lying Playmaker role, while Xhaka and star boy Odegaard bombed forward to assist the front 3 in the attack. Gabriel Jesus epitomized how a true General Forward operates with his ability to drop deep, run in behind, drift out wide, and play with his back to goal throughout the entire season, while Bukayo Saka started out Wide and used his dribbling abilities to cut in from the left with Martinelli always looking to be a threat in behind or whenever he had the ball at his feet.
Now, let’s take a look at each Instructional page individually:
STRATEGY
Arsenal are a team that fancy playing out from the back so this is the Strategy that they used for basically every match that they played
INSTRUCTIONS
Instructions are the most self explanatory area within SM23 and although you can place this in any way you’d like, this is generally what we saw from Arsenal.
GENERAL
Here is where things start to get really interesting. Within the ‘Genereal’ area, Arsenal intended to play attacking football via stretching the pitch as wide as they possibly could, allowing their attack minded players to roam around slightly to find different angles and better opportunities while always seeking to take risks on the ball to potentially unlock the opposition’s defence.
ATTACKING
This area within SM23 is all about the most effective combinations of each item and in the case of Arsenal, they aimed to keep the ball on the ground majority of the time, mixing things up in terms of where on the pitch they chose to attack from, thier forwards remained calm on the ball by working it around to break down the opposition, with the same thing occurring when the ball was out-wide. The major difference between Arsenal and Manchester City in terms of style of play is that Arsenal would aim to speed up their play whenever the chance allowed them too, while City would always remain calm, recycling the ball around to force the opposition into a mistake
DEFENDING
Lastly, we take a look at Arsenal’s defensive structure which was all about pressing from the front foot in an attempt to win the ball high up the pitch and immediately transition into their attack.
This Arsenal team is young, energetic and very exciting to watch as they continue to develop what will be needed for them to push on for the 23/24 season.
Thanks for reading soccermanagerite. In tomorrow’s episode, we head to Germany to check out what tactics the ‘Yellow wall’ have been viewing this season 😉
The Soccermanager Experience 