breze77

Might be that the Treq is occupying his space? The CMs probably forces the Treq a bit more to the left and then the WBs forces the IW a bit narrower. Maybe try the IW on support and put the W on attack on the other side? Could create an overload on the left side and exploit space on the right.

Brilliant read mate About that first intake being OP.. I got this guy in my first seasons intake at Tenerife: Only to get sacked in January in the second season .. He basically had almost the same attributes at 16 and was my best player at that age. Sadly will be developed by the AI so might not become as good.. oh what could've been .

I captured the video with ShareX and then used this site to compress the video: https://www.veed.io/tools/video-compressor/mp4-compressor You could probably do it in in a video editor as well.

Ok but Ander Herrera has insane stats in Aggression, Anticipation, Determination, Work rate and is very good at Tackling, and has good Bravery. Of course he's gonna be winning balls like that. What was your teams mentality here? Your passing range? Your tempo? What was Koke's role in this match? You can also see in this second clip, that your opponents press was most likely triggered when your midfielders got the ball, so maybe Koke just wasn't expecting the press. Also the striker is running like a madman at him, maybe he was trying to evaluate what to do. People do tend to panic a little when someone comes charging at you. Maybe he didn't notice Herrera coming, because he was distracted by the other playing running at him at full speed. Also he got like barely a second on the ball before there were two players on him, very tough to not make a mistake in a situation like that. And even if despite all of that he was supposed to do the right thing here and pass it back quickly to a safe option, It could have just been a "bad" day for him. Players make mistakes all the time, even world class ones. And if you look at real life, even small teams have had great success when pressing very aggressively againts opponents who like to control possession. But it does come at a risk, a disorganized team shape and defence. So they leave a lot of space to exploit. If they press you centrally, then they will probably leave a lot of space on the flanks. Thats why your players will funnel the ball to those areas. If you need to make a quick decision of where to pass the ball, before the opponent presses you down, the simplest option is to pass it to the guy with the most space in front of him i.e. a fullback or a winger. The opponent will then either hunt down your winger and leave space in the middle or try to compact the middle of the pitch, leaving your winger to go down the flank and try to cross it in. For example: compressed_florenzigoal.mp4 They are defending very narrow here, so we naturally move the ball to the flanks to my LB who is on a FBa role. My midfielder can hold off their press (they gave him plenty of time to receive the ball, turn with it and find a teammate) and the diamond we create on the flank helps us cut them open. You can see that we always have a spare man in very close proximity and we also play on an attacking mentality which means my players will try the more riskier passes. I also have shorter passing and higher tempo ticked here. I'm sure there are some problems with the ME, but a lot of it also depends on your roles, duties, team mentality, passing range, player ability of both your players and the opposition, tempo, width, available passing options... I'm not saying the ME doesn't need tweaking, but this is a complex game and there are a lot of factors to consider.. Not everything can be perfect all the time, even when you have the best players in the world. It's frustrating when you're trying to do certain things in the game and it's not working and usually the simplest thing to do is complain about the ME, but It's a complex engine and a lot of variables come into play. I mean all I just said could be bullcrap, that's just how I think about it.

So after a couple of dissapointing results I've tried to change things up a bit and went with a more standard 4-2-3-1 with high pressing: I got some better defenders in the January transfer window and felt comfortable pushing my wingers up. The TI's mostly stayed the same, except for a higher pressing. The IW's both have "stay wider" and "cross less often" ticked and the FBa has the "sit narrower" instruction. My AMa also has the "move into channels" instruction. It's producing some nice football and I've gotten some brilliant results since I started using this tactic. Mallorca are the current league leaders and Albacete sit in a comfortable 5th place (I'm currently sitting in 9th). Also both of the cup games were played mostly by my youth players, so nice to see they can get some good results too with this tactic. If we take a look at the pass map below, we're still getting that nice 2-4-4 in build up (I think it's even more similar to the Brighton ones - you can find some here: http://mclachbot.com/passmap_list/brighton/2022). Not sure if these are really your typical "De Zerbi" goals but just wanted to showcase some of the nice football we produce: sompressed_fba_goal.mp4 A brilliant underlaping run from the FBa, and I think this is the first time I've seen a player square the ball to the striker in such a position . compressed_iwbgoal.mp4 And here we have the IWBa on the other flank producing another brilliant goal. The right sided IW pulled their LB out of position by staying wide, and the remaining front 3 were occupying the rest of their defence.

Yeah I mostly put the wingers in the midfield line, to be more defensively solid. I more adapted some of his principles and play style into my team, rather than trying to recreate exactly how Brighton are playing right now. In the clip I posted you can see the left midfielder is basically right next to my shadow striker at the start of the build up. Maybe if the player was right footed and had the "move into channels" PPM and perhaps a "roam from position" PI he would be making a more central run, parallel with the shadow striker. A lot of factors to take into account and probably a lot of different ways to implement his ideas. Also depending on your players and your team.

I've actually gone in a different direction when trying to replicate De Zerbi's tactics. I've gone for an asymmetric 4411 formation with IWB and WM on the flanks. The WM's have the PIs: Cross less often, Sit narrower and Cut inside with ball, and both my SS and DLF have the Roam from position PI ticked. I feel this combination of IWB's and WM's causes the unpredictabilty of who goes wide and who cuts inside quite well. I wanted both my front two to move into channels, but also to help with build up play from the central positions. That's why I gave them the roam from position instruction. Now I usually start with the Attacking mentality, but it does depend from game to game, sometimes it works better sometimes not at all. I think the shorter passing, higher tempo and attacking mentality do work well in trying to draw the press from the opposition. The 2-4 shape at the back paired with shorter passing means that the players will naturaly pass it between them when playing out from the back so I don't think a lower tempo is really needed here. The higher tempo also helps them beat the press when it does come as they try to exploit the spaces left immediately. The attacking mentality also helps with this as they will try more risks (it also provides some nice direct football in the final third to catch the opponent off guard). Now I'm playing as Ibiza in Spain's second division and my defence is quite bad and slow currently (I opted to recruit attackers and midfielders over defenders this summer window), so I went with a mid block and standard defensive line. The high press does work when I tried it, but my defence just isn't good enough to play with a high line, so I felt the risk wasn't worth it. I've had mixed results, maybe due to poor players, some teams just being better than me or sometimes our weaknesses just get exploited. But despite all this, the tactic seems to work and provides some nice DeZerbi style football. Note: Not really sure the "Run at defence" instruction is something that improves De Zerbi's style of play but it does improve how my team plays, so I'm sticking with it. Also the passmaps from some Brighton games this season and our passmaps seem to match pretty well. Here's a nice team goal built up from the back (albeit from a free kick): fm_3q7x3uAGoV.mp4 Notice how to left IWB was going out wide when the WM was going inside, and on the other side, the right IWB was trying to go outside, but decided to cut inside when he saw the WM was already in the wide position.

I have the same problem when trying to export the player search list into an html file. Only the first ~15 players names show up, the rest is blank. Only the player names don't get exported correctly, the other data is fine, which is weird. I wanted to export this to help me identify transfer targets with some data visualization and calculations in excel, but without the player names it's pretty much useless. I provided an example of the export in the attachment. Playersearch_sample.html

You should check out BustTheNet on youtube as well, he is very knowledgeable on the game.