Love this thread, and some excellent tactical analysis by OP that is rivalled only by one or two other write-ups I've seen on the subject. I've spent the last week or two trying to recreate this style of football in FM, and have tried multiple different ways to make it work. First things first, you CAN get 7 players, including the ball carrier, to tilt to the ball-side of the pitch. The downside is you need to use wide center backs, which are exactly what this tactic needs. However, to do this in game we have to have a third CB, meaning we have to sacrifice somewhere else on the pitch. For this example, I was playing strikerless, with Ganso as a CAM Treq. With strikerless not being as strong as in previous games, this seems to, on average, lead to fewer goalscoring opportunities than having a striker involved.
For the CD I went with Libero, with the idea being that they would push up the center channel whilst facing the ball-side. This didn't really work, as the Libero is very keen to stay central and doesn't show for the ball often, and will get stuck hanging behind the midfielders. It can work sometimes, but infrequently. I had better examples of the Libero coming to the ball than this that I didn't capture as screenshots, but these instances were limited to only a few times per match. This appears to be about as far as we can push the match engine, without getting into stuff I personally don't want to do, like stacking one side of the pitch in the formation itself (this can work as shown by RDF Tactics, but I'd prefer a team that can tilt to either side).
A few other observations from my testing across multiple formation variations:
1. Escadinhas actually appear very frequently, but are never utilized. Cool to see but I'd love to see them actually work in a future FM title.
2. Not only does this strategy need the right players, but I suspect they need to have the right PPMs. I have a hunch that with a number of players with "plays one-twos," "tries tricks" and "comes deep to get ball," this could end up looking a lot closer to the real thing. I'm tempted to grab an FMRTE license just to test this, but I might just do it the hard way by building a team around this tactic over a few seasons.
3. You need two 8s to really pull this off in any capacity, or at least two DMs who are willing to roam and run. The midfield players will score a lot of goals/have a lot of shots, so for the sake of actually winning football matches, try to find players with good long shots.
4. I suspect "be more expressive" is contributing to players semi-frequently making the decision to go more direct, and the midfielders shooting from distance as often as they do, but it seems too counter-intuitive to the philosophy of the tactic to turn it off.
Apologies for the rapid posts, but I threw one last attempt at the wall today and actually got some promising results. Having noticed that in my two-striker systems, my strikers seem willing to roam pretty far from their designated side, I figured I'd go a little wild and try a double trequartista at striker. This is only based on 55 minutes of football (watching full match), but the far-side treq is very willing to drift to the ball side and create an 8-man tilt. In this case, Arias is the STCL, and is the one unmarked player (I couldn't seem to click on him behind his marker). Possession has just been played back to Guga by Pirani, to be yo-yo'd back into the tilt. Definitely some experimentation to be done with F9s, DLFs or CFs and some player instructions, I think. You can see though that the gaps in our shape have been exploited for a number of high-quality chances by solid opposition. The wide press actually works well, since in systems without wing presence, midfielders will shift across to cover off the wide passing lanes. Once they find a central option and switch the ball though, we've been punished frequently, so some more tweaks might be needed. I think this could look like something really dynamic with, again, the right PPMs and full tactical familiarity, and good team cohesion.
