Panic on the streets of Rome

[Kieran]

Im trying to emulate Spalletti's false 9 tactic at Roma during his first spell, hoping to see totti drop deep down the pitch to open up space for my unrushing midfielders but rather than drop deep im seeing him occupy space higher up the pitch and trying to get on the end of moves rather than start them, playing either false 9 or trequartista. This causes my players to run into cul de sacs and take long shots as I struggled to break teams down, struggling for possession on scraping by weaker sides. How can I get my tactic to work better? Can I recreate goals where my deeper players run past the false 9 to overload the box, short passing at pace a la this goal?

My team seems to cramp themselves into my box while defending and I rarely see an actual counter attack take place as my team just clears the ball away,

perhaps due to my possession based instructions?

[Draktor]

I can't help too much as I haven't read/watched that Roma team. However, I see you're going strikerless on an older version of FM, you may want to check out Guido's strikerless blog, he goes into depth on strikerless formations and has been doing for years, so that will probably help you out a lot.

[Kieran]

Yeah I took a look at that before setting up, great blog, great help but it only gets me so far. He tends to go with central players whereas I have wingers. Any other ideas of how to implement a 4-6-0?

[Guimy]

A 4-6-0 wide can work

https://strikerless.com/2017/04/22/the-decapitated-buffalo-a-strikerless-production/

Not my own work, but still effective.

[Kieran]

Ok this is what i've got. I tried the linked tactic but it was too attacking so I made it more conservative, Im scoring goals and not conceding but still struggling for possession and shots. Any tips to improve on this?