My possesion based 433 tactic.

[Guest]

22 hours ago, zZzZzZzZzZzZzZz said:

This intrigued me since it is so different from how I usually play, so I decided to give it a go with Parma, a club with a squad well-suited to a 4-3-3 and a perfect regista in Franco Vazquez.

I played roughly half the season with your set-up unchanged (aside from using my own set-pieces) and while we were winning matches and dominating the possession I felt we were a bit stale in attack, I'd say about 80% of our goals came from either a cross from a wingback into the centre of the area headed in by Bobby English, a set-piece, or a long-shot, while the two inverted wingers were passengers contributing very little in terms of goals, assists or chance creation. With that in mind I made a few tweaks to try and add some more variety into our attack:

Overloading the left flank to create space for Dennis Man on the right, giving us more options in the box and more routes towards good goalscoring opportunities than just crosses. The AP-s will tuck in centrally and look for the overlapping wingback, a through-ball to the striker. switching the play to the other flank or recycling the ball back into midfield. Since the WB-a running to the byline and crossing towards the centre was creating many goals I tried to encourage him to do it more often, hence the overlap instruction. The WB-s has individual instructions to cross more often and cross from byline, so he mostly behaves the same as a WB-a with the ball.

We won the league. dominated the possession metrics and after the tweaks we played some really good, creative football with a good variation of goals (ignore the goals against, Buffon at 44 is leakier than Swiss cheese). Dennis Man went from having scored a single goal in the first ~20 matches playing as an IW-s before the tweak to scoring 10 goals in the final 18 matches as a raumdeuter.

My regista had a season for the ages:

His stats are inflated as he was our primary set-piece taker, but with 5 non-penalty goals, about a half-dozen non-set-piece assists, countless key passes and a 92% pass completion percentage while playing in the DM slot is a fantastic season by any measure. Vazquez was born to play regista! Who is Andrea Pirlo anyway?

One of the things I have been pleasantly surprised about in FM 22 is that there hasn't been a one size fits all tactic for every team I manage. So in the last two versions I could literally put that op tactic in to any team and dominate possession but now I am having to make quite a few  changes in roles and instructions in each save to achieve what I want. What was working for me in that Fiorentina save didn't work for me in my Groningen save and the other thing is that when I manage lower reputation teams I will actually be dominated possession wise by the bigger teams which is obviously more realistic. 

As for the Fiorentina save I just analyzed that it was a dead even split between crosses and through balls for my assists. I fully expected crossing to be the primary source because it is such a narrow formation and the primary passing goes through the middle which is intentional to leave the wingbacks as the free players making forward runs when the switches happen but I was pleasantly surprised by how many through balls there were. which I put down to the technical quality I had in that team. In my other saves I have had to tweak roles, duties and instructions to prevent what was domination of possession with no penetration which makes the game more fun tbh.

[zZzZzZzZzZzZzZz]

Having a pretty extraordinary start in Serie A, at the World Cup break we are 1st and undefeated: 

And we are dominating possession:

Our schedule has been relatively easy and doubt this will last, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless!

Parma are not a typical Serie B squad, but I still expected to battle against relegation in my first Serie A season, I definitely was not expecting a title challenge!

 

[Skywalk3r83]

@Crazy_Ivan What do you think is the better of the two? Zaragoza or JDP Florence? Playing around with Dortmund and have the players for both systems.