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The standard formula?

4-2-3-1 is an incredibly common formation. Last season in the premier league, 50% of clubs used it as their main formation.

It’s everywhere in world football, and offers a balanced team, with spaces allowing for key players such as the AM to shine.

Across every corner of the globe, you’ll likely find a 4-2-3-1 team that is shining on the football pitch.

The Line Ups

Our Line Up

This formation is a bit of a mixture of where I have bought strong players (AM, Full Backs) with positions we really only have cover players in (CM, Wingers).

We’d be relying heavily on Rossi in the middle to make something happen.

Average Squad Rating: 38.7

Opponent’s Line Up

4-3-3A! A super attacking formation, and a line-up with quality all over the pitch. Needless to say, I was pretty worried about this one.

Average Squad Rating: 41.4

This leave our Average Squad Rating at 2.7 lower than our opponents.

Real Life Context

As we said early, 4-2-3-1 is incredibly common. In the last round of Premier League Fixtures, here’s the list of teams that used it:

• Chelsea
• Brighton
• Bournemouth
• Liverpool
• Newcastle
• Manchester City
• Nottingham Forest
• Brentford
• Everton
• Leicester City

That’s a whopping 50% of all Premier League Teams using it.

It emerged out of Spain, but has really gone on to absolutely dominate world football.

Strengths:

• Balance. We have talked about balance a lot, but this is perhaps the most balanced formation out there. Because of the two pivots and two centre backs, there generally tends to always be good defensive cover, even if the wing backs bomb forward.
• Possession. It gives teams a great opportunity to build possession, with pivots, wingers, full backs, the attacking midfielder and the striker being able to find pockets of space throughout the pitch.
• High press. If the CF, AM and Wingers stay forward, the press can start with 4 players and quickly win possession high up the pitch.

Weaknesses:

• Wide midfielders. This is a stretch, sure, but if the two wingers aren’t great one or one, or have poor movement, they can become the weak links on the pitch.
• Congestion. Similar to a lot of formations with wingers and three midfielders, if they all crowd the middle of the pitch it can become incredibly congested.

The Match

We expected to struggle in this one, but as always knew the Mighty Marrouck boys would put in a hard shift!

We were very surprised to score first, with Magdić, our CF, scoring on the 40th minute.

Our opponents responded incredibly quickly, scoring just 2 minutes later to equalise.

We kept working, but sadly conceded a 2nd in the 77th minute!

This is how it ended, with a tight 2-1 defeat to a stronger opponent.

The stats are below:

You can see they edged us in all attacking departments, but we will still happy with a battling performance. This leaves us still in the relegation zone, so there’s a lot of work to do!

See you all on the pitch!