Struggling to get strikers to impact the game

[MBhighfield09]

Third season with Liverpool. Don't get me wrong, first two seasons have been successful. Premier league champs both seasons. CL first season. So overall doing well. But the one area I really struggle to get consistency with is the striker role. First using Firmino but now Haaland. He is still developing but he just lacks goals.  The tactic has been adjusted over time and is very solid. Defensively v strong, good midfield and the flanks are generally strong, although again can be inconsistent. It seems the midfield just do not put any through balls to the striker, you can see him moving across the backline and by the time the pass is made, he strays offside.  I am sure a solution is available but I have struggled. Tried the striker as a DLF (A), PF (A) and CA (A) but all seem to have the same result. Thoughts?

 

[Marbah]

for the offside thing, you could lower your engagement line, or have haaland on custom pressing. but with the CF role he will try to stay on the shoulder of the last defender too. so that could be the cause also.

i would experiment with having him as a AF or even a F9 in this formation to bring the winger into play more.

he might get isolated from the midfield since the IF/IW will cut inside. isolated in a sense that his like the 3rd passing option if the ball is not long, theoretically. 

[Experienced Defender]

9 hours ago, MBhighfield09 said:

I am struggling to figure out what's your reasoning behind using as many as 3 playmakers (roles) at the same time, who - on top of that - are played literally next to one another ???  

Plus having two BPDs behind. 

10 hours ago, MBhighfield09 said:

It seems the midfield just do not put any through balls to the striker

How can the midfield (or whoever) play through balls for the striker when not only your opponents are logically looking to deny you as much space in their box as possible (because you are a top team), but you yourself are also depriving your players of space by playing in such an aggressive manner (higher LOE coupled with extreme pressing + prevent short GKD)?

And even if they try to play through balls, deep and tight opposition defenses will easily deal with them because of insufficient support from deep for your forwards (in addition to the already explained lack of space up front). 

Don't get me wrong, but the fact that you are successful in terms of results most probably has to do with the quality and strength of your team, not the tactic. 

 

[Experienced Defender]

10 hours ago, Marbah said:

with the CF role he will try to stay on the shoulder of the last defender too. so that could be the cause also.

i would experiment with having him as a AF

CF does not play on the shoulder of defense. The AF does (as well as poacher). But the problem in this case is his tactic as a whole, not (necessarily) the striker's role. 

[Rasmus]

You could probably give one of your midfielders a more aggressive role. Why Bruno Fernandes as a DLP? I think he has the skills to get into the box or take some long shots.

There aren’t many passing options for your midfielders. They can either choose to pass it back and forward amongst each other, or rely on delivering a lucky pass which most of the times will lead to nothing. Give the defense extra bodies to think about, cuz right now it’s only Mane, Salah and Haaland.

Haaland has to come deeper to get the ball. Would a target man on support suit him in this setup? I don’t think he should be the one setting other people up though. His speed and physicality makes him a great pure goalscorer. He could probably benefit from more crossing too. Salahs role won’t do it, and I’m not to sure Mane will either. 

Also you have both wing backs on support. If I remember correctly they don’t have cross the ball often as a default setting, but you can probably edit that.

So I would probably change Fernandes’ role to CM-A. I’m not sure how that will work together with your AP-S in midfield though. 

 

[Rashidi]

There is way too little information here to ascertain whether your strikers are over performing or underperforming.

1. Your screenshot is from September, thats very early in the season.
2. It shows average ratings for most players to be in the higher ranges
3. The tactical information indicates that most of your chances are being scored from inside the 6 yard area
4. It also tells me that whenever you get into the final third, converting that to goals is also a good number.

Based on this information and the fact that you are top of the table, how does that stack up with your strikers underperforming? Have you played enough games to tell? Granted you look like you have played around 12 games. I typically find that in a 4123 the top scorers tend to be the players on the flanks. The lone forward will do well to finish with 20 goals in the season, the flank players may see closer to 30.

What is your big chance conversion rate? CCC scored vs CCC created?  That tells me if your strikers are performing or not.  (There is more to this a deeper analysis of your own system will require you to manually drill down to each player in the final third to nail down their own big chance conversion rates which are not available so readily in the game) Since the beta patch was launched, I find that the big chance conversion rate for most teams sit around 74%, most of my title winning sides produce around 2.2-2.4 big chances a game. For me that is low because I want my strikers to score in excess of 1 goal a game closer to the 2 average is my target which should mean that my strikers are banging in around 50 goals in England in all competitions. To achieve that consistently is really hard. Most of the time I am happy when I get 30 goals for my top strikers. Sometimes I like to replicate how LFC are doing where the target is a large number of goals spread across a lot of players.

Basically when you want to improve a strikers finishing, you need to know what your target is. You also need to know how your system is performing in terms of creating chances. By all accounts you seem to be doing well, it would be good if you can give that information. To get that information go to Tactics>Analysis>Goals You will find CCC created and converted. Take the ratio of both and you get your big chance conversion rate. Exclude the friendlies from the total when you are trying to derive the number.

For most of my 4123 systems I tend to drive around 90 goals a season for the team in the league. With my Galileo and other systems I am pushing 100+ goals a season. I find that if you have a really solid grasp of how to identify your chances, how they are being created and who the creators are then you will find that your goal scoring tends to shoot up.