[Defence-First Football Tactics]

On 25.04.2024 at 20:30, Szellef said:

Hello everyone, another lurker here to share tactic.

I love defence-first, pragmatist football and I wanted to try it in this year's game when I see this post. I wanted to somewhat create the Simeone's 3-5-2 when I take over A.S Roma, a low-block cautious mentality football.

The main tactic looks like this with mark tighter and tackle harder on 3 midfielders and 2 wingbacks. My tactic tweaks was going balanced mentality when I play at home against worse teams. I would go attacking mentality and mid block when I am chasing a game etc. but the main philosophy remain the same for all season.

The league race was tight but Napoli was the winner at the end. But as you can see we are the best team defensively by far. Only conceding 27. Also another exciting news is I did not lose a match against big teams. My only loses were against Catanzaro (lol), Empoli (again, lol), Udinese and Fiorentina. 

After this over-achieving season AC Milan offered me a job. That is an offer which I can not refuse, so I will continue the new season as coach of AC Milan. I want to play a defensively solid 4-2-3-1 DM AM with Milan. The tactic will be slightly more aggresive from my Roma tactic due to board expectations and squad quality of Milan. 

If anyone interested, I will update this with my first season at Milan.

 

UPDATE!

2nd Season in Italy - AC Milan

As you know after a succesfull season with Roma, I approached by Milan and started the new season as the manager of Milan. I still wanted to continue to play with a defence first mentality. I wanted to create a balanced 4-2-3-1 tactic which emphasizes the strengths of the squad.

I made a few transfer moves to strengthen our squad such as Eyüp Aydın, Fonseca and Kristiansen. Real Madrid wanted Maignan and I sold him for 86 M euros and replaced him with Ramsdale which I only paid about 48 M euros. After some trial and error for roles and duties (Especially for Striker role I tried CF-S CF-A PF-A PF-S and finally AF-A) this is the final version of the tactic.

The PIs I use are:

Dribble More for WB-At (Theo Hernandez)

Hold Position, Tackle Harder, Mark Tighter  for DM-Su (Adli and Aydın)

Take More Risks, Tackle Harder, Mark Tighter for VOL-Su (Musah and Bennacer)

Cut Inside With The Ball, Get Further Forward, Mark Tighter for W-Su (Chukwueze and Saelemaekers)

 

After the January transfer window, the league table looks like this;

The tactic is performing better than I expected if I am being honest.  We are having clean sheets almost every game and scoring a lot. Here is an example match against Internazionale;

They had 57 percent of possession but they only had 1 shot for entire match which came after the 80th minute. They did not had a single shot until 80th minute.

We also directly quailifed to the Round of 16 in Champions League and reached the Semi Final in Coppa Italia. Maybe a treble?

[Defence-First Football Tactics]

11 saat önce, caco4003 said:

Great stufff!! Did you use any opossition instruction?

Thanks. No I did not use any OI

[Defence-First Football Tactics]

Hello everyone, another lurker here to share tactic.

I love defence-first, pragmatist football and I wanted to try it in this year's game when I see this post. I wanted to somewhat create the Simeone's 3-5-2 when I take over A.S Roma, a low-block cautious mentality football.

The main tactic looks like this with mark tighter and tackle harder on 3 midfielders and 2 wingbacks. My tactic tweaks was going balanced mentality when I play at home against worse teams. I would go attacking mentality and mid block when I am chasing a game etc. but the main philosophy remain the same for all season.

The league race was tight but Napoli was the winner at the end. But as you can see we are the best team defensively by far. Only conceding 27. Also another exciting news is I did not lose a match against big teams. My only loses were against Catanzaro (lol), Empoli (again, lol), Udinese and Fiorentina. 

After this over-achieving season AC Milan offered me a job. That is an offer which I can not refuse, so I will continue the new season as coach of AC Milan. I want to play a defensively solid 4-2-3-1 DM AM with Milan. The tactic will be slightly more aggresive from my Roma tactic due to board expectations and squad quality of Milan. 

If anyone interested, I will update this with my first season at Milan.

 

[Need Help With Simeone's 5-3-2 Recreation]

UPDATE NO.1

So I did some tweaks to the tactic and tested it for a few games for the new season it is both good and bad and i will explain now what I mean by that.

The tactic you see above is the main tactic that I use most of the time and for the matches that we are clear favourites I switch to the tactic below.

Now I want to show you the results for first 7 competitive matches.

Now you can understand what I meant by both good and bad. We only conceded once. Which is great and the most important thing for this recreation. But we do not score either. We are highly under-performing our xG. I know that Moffi-Abraham rotation is not an elite striker rotation but they are not bad strikers I could not figure out why we are not scoring. I tried going balanced and direct passing or dropping down the tempo but it did not work out. Even if I selected the Focus Play Through The Middle Instruction, our attacks are mainly focused through wings and my wing backs become isolated very easily. To fix that I will change the attacking width to narrow and try for few games.

One another thing that caught my attention is that even if we are the defensively best team in the leauge until now, Our possession won, interceptions and blocks numbers are very low. I could not figure if this is a good thing or bad thing. I thought that it means we are not that aggresively defending but we are defending cleverly.

Here is the general performance of the team if someone wonders. 

 

I really want to hear your opinions and suggestions if you have any.

[Need Help With Simeone's 5-3-2 Recreation]

Hello everyone. As I mentioned in the heading I am trying to replicate this years' Simeone tactic in FM24. I think I have a good base but I am not very good at watching and analyzing tactics so I wanted to ask other Simeone fans like me. 

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The base tactic is like this but I could not manage to pick some roles. For example:

- For Griezmann role I am between the Treq, F9 and DLF-su. Currently I am using F9 with roam from position and move into channels and seems good.

- 3 midfield roles are the most hard to pick for me. Should I use CM or Mez or should I use BBM or BWM-su etc.

- I noticed that actually Atletico plays a high press often but it feels like wrong when replicating Simeone :). I thought that maybe I can switch to high press with positive mentality for easy games at home.

 

I am gladly waiting for your feedbacks and suggestions.

[Defence-First Football Tactics]

11 dakika önce, Fox-7- said:

With two players in the CM strata and a pivot I'd eliminate the Counter TI, as It invites your BBM and MEZ to be even more aggressive in the counterattack together with the WBs and the forwards, leaving only the DLP and the three CBs to defend (and the WCBs will already be wider and higher on the pitch by default when you lose the ball).

For the possession phase there seems to me to be a non-optimal distribution of roles, for example PF and MEZ will compete for the same channel, and IMO WCBs are better suited for possession-oriented styles that looks to create overloads in a prolonged possession phase, that seems not to be yuor purpose. CWBs also Is a very demanding role, I don't know if Mario Rui has the skills to do the job properly in this role (I'm basing this on how I see him IRL in Serie A, I'm not aware of his skills on FM).

I would try this (from right to left):

SKd

CBd

CBco

CBd

WBs

DLPd/s

WBa

MEZa

CMs

F9s

PF/AFa

 

in this way you would have three players on attack in three different channels and at three different depths, with the added support of the WBs on the right wing, with the three CBs and DLP+CMs (with PI hold position) acting as the first defensive screen

Thanks for all the advice I am going to try these in the new season frendiles. I also do not think Mario Rui should play as a CWB. Normally Zalewski plays there. 

[Defence-First Football Tactics]

Hello everyone. In my save I take over A.S. Roma after the mid-season break and I want to play a simeone-esque football. Not heavily counter-attacking but defence first football with proper punch. However my tactic just does not work. I know the familiarty to the tactic is low but the tactic plays nothing. Not defending properly and not attacking either. Can anyone help me and spot the mistakes of my tactic?  I tried WB-A instead of CWB-S and also tried positive and balanced mentalities. Nothing has worked for me.