Sparta Bucuresti – Asymmetric

Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part VI.chapter one – Attacking Football and Developing a Style

Recent tactical experiments saw me focus a lot on ideas revolving around concepts on defending and the systems I’ve focused on have been a consequence of maybe too much dwelling on that, so I’ve decided to try out something new, yet again, with my Sparta Bucharest side Attacking football is a very debatable term… is it GegenPressing? is it Route One? is it Schimdt’s overloads? is it Conte’s 3-4-3? Continue reading “Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part VI.chapter one – Attacking Football and Developing a Style”

Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part V – Libero Rewind

As previously promised in the Libero article and due to the fact that I get easily bored playing the same system for too long, this is my attempt to integrate the Libero in FM with a squad of overall lower quality. I’ve decided to try this out with my Sparta team, considering the presence of the highly praised Milas Ionita II amongst our ranks: Continue reading “Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part V – Libero Rewind”

Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part IV – Simplicity brings Efficience

Hello everyone and I hope you’re enjoying this series thus far. You might be wondering why I change my approaches so often, as until now we’ve had very good success with most of the systems employed. This probably originates in my utter disregard to concepts like ‘stick to what’s working’ and ‘if it’s going well, don’t change it’, when it comes to football management. The whole idea behind this series is to provide an illustration of the fact that being adaptable and flexible are some of the most important aspects of management. Given this is a youth-only save, the ‘logistic’ set-up provides the perfect scene for that, as we’re unable to buy players and have to constantly look to adapt our tactics to players that come through the team through youth recruitment. Then again, it’s an exercise in trying to prove that success can be achieved on a football pitch with different styles of football, and therefore a subtle dig to the moralists of these realms which advocate a ‘right way’ and ‘wrong way’ to play football. Before this starts looking like an ego-trip, I will conclude on this conceptual side of things and I’ll get on with the real deal: Continue reading “Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey: Part IV – Simplicity brings Efficience”

Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey – Part III: Evolve and Assess

The last couple of years have marked our successful transition from a team that has to focus on defending in order to survive the majority of the matches to one that can afford to try and test the opposition a bit more and even control play when the occasion arises. This happened mainly thanks to the much improved technical ability of the new generation of players that came through the youth ranks in the past 2-3 years. Last season was the main step up in that sense, as we shifted from half a decade of using a conservative, quite rigid system, mainly in the forms of the above shown 3-5-2/3-3-1-1-2 to a variation of 4-1-4-1 that allowed for more fluidity and variety in our football. Continue reading “Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey – Part III: Evolve and Assess”

Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey – Part II: integrating youth development & tactic design

After 6 years of using the 3-5-2/3-4-3 system described in the previous article in this series, as well as molding through specialized training the very young squad at our disposal to reach the desired attributes that are required by our philosophy, I decide to change the system based on a few key issues: Continue reading “Sparta | A Tactical Identity Journey – Part II: integrating youth development & tactic design”

Sparta: A Tactical Identity Journey – Part I

Hello everyone and welcome to this new-ish series 🙂 You might have heard the title before, or witnessed some of the content in other, separate posts, so I’ll explain what’s going on before all sorts of confusion kicks in. The Sparta Bucharest save is reaching its climax by now, as I have just finished my 16th season. Being a youth challenge, I have tried to provide as much detail as I could about player development and the general management issues in previous posts. This would usually result in really long posts that require quite a ‘geeky’ approach in order to make sense of what’s going on. If you’re more interested into that aspect of the save, check the thread on the SI forums where I go through these issues in a lot of detail. The most interesting side of this project has by far been the tactical aspect and how much I’ve learned along the way, and it seems it makes for a more accessible read too 🙂 Even though I did mention the tactical changes I have made along the way, that part of the story seems to have been lost in the sea of details about everything else, so this series will be specifically dedicated to the tactical aspect of this journey, aided by more detail and insight in each part. Continue reading “Sparta: A Tactical Identity Journey – Part I”