Need help fitting a striker in setup + Tactical setup review with statistics

[maztheplaya]

Hello,

I'm currently managing Arsenal in the future, Lacazette is 33 years old, physically is declining but still exceptional technically and mentally, will let his contract run out at his season.

In anticipation of this I've brought in a 21 year old German/Brazilian striker to replace Lacazette for 50 mil. Euros.

I was pretty excited by Carlos Alberto in the beginning, but now that the season is finished his stats are pretty worrying. He looks like almost a Complete Forward, lacking a bit in pace and dribbling but having very good Finishing, Composure, Anticipation, Technique and Off The Ball I expected him to be lethal. So I started playing him on Advanced Forward thinking his insane OTB and Anticipation will be enough to get him in the right positions to finish. But after around 10 games I noticed that there were a lot situations where he would try to outrun a defender but wasn't quick enough at this point I've decided to play on supporting roles like CF(S), DLF(S) and DLF(A) with mixed success.

To asses my team after the final season I've exported some of the in-game statistics to Excel and tried to analyze my attacking performance and specially Carlos for whom I've got high hopes. I've attached the spreadsheet if anyone is interested.

The Statistics

For context Arsenal reached the quarter finals of the Europa League and 3 or 4 game in the 2 English cups.

He started in 27 games and 11 appearances from bench, he would have gotten more but his form forced my in January to buy a different kind of striker more of a Target Man to have a plan B.

In which he scored 7 goals and 3 assists, 3 of which where scored in a single game of the Europa League knockout stage, and makes him second in the team behind Pepe's 9 goals. I was expecting him to be around 15 goals contributions this season and then maybe around 20-25 the next season.

His Games Won Ratio is pretty good in the team 55% which is 3rd in the team alongside 1.89 Pts/game also 3rd can be pretty misleading since his Team Goals/90 is very low at 1,19 compared to Lacazette who has 1.84 and Sargent at 1,73 who both have played only half of Albertos minutes (around 1000)

The shooting stats still don't look very good for our future striker, he is the worst of the 3 in Minutes per Goal, Goals per 90, Shots per 90, Shots on target per 90. And some of these numbers are comparable to the team's AMR/AML/AMC in some cases they do even better.

In terms of creating considering he played the same time as Lacazette and Sargent combined and have extremely similar numbers .

The Tactical Setup

You can view it here. I've had some various setups during the same session but the idea I was trying to implement was the same.

The aim is to keep the ball and use the DLP to control the game spread the passes and this seems to have worked seeing that Caqueret after 3311 minutes has 2.94 Key Passes per game.

If the ball reaches the right side where Pepe usually plays and is very direct and uses his dribbling to unlock the defenses (6.27 Dribbles per game at a very low 58.5 Mins/game) getting 9 goals and 6 assistsmaking him the best attacker in my team. The issue I've seen with Pepe is that he requires at lot of shots 4.53 per game with 2.63 on target. Hoping to train him to round the keeper give him better shots as most of his shots are from very tight angles.

The AMC is an all rounder who is mostly played by Gibbs White and the stats confirm this.. While on the left side I've struggled with Correa and Smith-Rowe being pretty poor. But the left side was working well overall due the Overlap, this is my slow build up side while the right side is the direct attack side.

On the defensive side I play with a High Line and Counter Press since I have fast defenders and modify them in more difficult matches. I'm pretty happy here.

The Dilema

At this point I'm not sure what to do with Carlos Alberto to get more out of him. Having played half of the season on CF(S) and DLF(A) he didn't create very much and this is to be expected since I have a playmaker that draws the ball more and Pepe who has low Team work and dribbles quite a lot. I've started training him to Place Shots since he has good Technique and Composure. But tactically not sure how to get more out of him.

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks for taking the time to reading.

 

 

 

arsenal-att-team-stats.xlsx

[Experienced Defender]

For now I'll tell you what in my opinion is problematic in your tactic and why, which will hopefully give you some food for thought:

- Focus play through the middle is not a good idea IMHO when you manage a top team, because most opponents will play defensively against you and look to crowd the very central areas through which you are focusing the play. So why would you want to play directly into their hands?

- Exactly the same goes for your (fairly) narrow attacking width

- Lack of meaningful central penetration (the striker and AMC are both on support duties and both CMs are played in holding roles)

- CF as a role usually tends to struggle in these (top-heavy) types of systems even if the player has the right attributes for the role, simply because the CF as such works better when he has as much space to operate in and take advantage of as possible in order to fully express himself (for example, I like to use a CF in systems like 442, 4411 or flat 4141)

- The "Hold shape" in-transition instruction only compounds the attacking sterility caused by the already mentioned lack of (meaningful) penetration (I do not say that you should use the Counter instead, just remove the Hold shape and leave both on default)

- You probably don't need to distribute specifically to CBs and FBs when you already use the Play out of defence instruction