Not a Footium Blog

Another one of those formations that we wouldn’t use in a million years if we were managing a Sunday League team, but one we are definitely happy to try in our Footium journey!

The Line Ups

Our Line Up

This is another formations that highlights both our strengths and our weaknesses! At this point, I’d invested heavily in our new CF and had also been training up our RB and LB.

Average Squad Rating: 40.1 (at the time of playing)

Opponent’s Line Up

They rocked up playing 5-2-3, which we were coming to expect in this little journey of ours!

Average Squad Rating: 38.5 (at the time of playing)

This left us with a slight advantage of +1.6 in squad rating at the time of the match.

Real Life Context

So 4-3-1-2 is still utilised, albeit it is a relatively niche formation in modern football. It is far outpaced in terms of popularity by 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3 and even formations like 3-4-3 and 3-5-2.

However, there have been some pretty iconic teams to use it, including Jose Mourinho’s Porto, Maurizio Sarri’s Empoli and even at points, Phil Parkinson at the might Bradford City.

Strengths:

• Midfield Dominance. This is the obvious one, but if you’re cramming that many players into central areas, you’ve got to hope you’re going to keep a lot of the ball in that zone of the pitch!
• Defensive Solidity. With the ability for 7 players to quite easily sit behind the ball when defending, this can be a really defensively strong way to line up.
• Doubling Up. Two strikers is increasingly uncommon in modern football. Using it gives you a great chance of putting extra pressure on your opponents defensive shape.

Weaknesses:

• Width. Similar to a lot of formations like this, which are relatively narrow, it can get overpowered in wide areas.
• Transitions. Whilst being able to have 7 behind the ball can be great, if you only have the AM and 2 CF’s left forward, it can be difficult to transition forward.

In this game, I think our main weakness is, again, going to be going up against wingers AND wing backs, attacking us out wide.

The Match

I am not sure if the Footium gods have injected all my players with a dose of being rubbish at the start of games, but we conceded first here, yet again!

That was very early, in the 11th minute, with a penalty!

We hit back quickly, with a goal from Bernd Wagner (40 rated CF), who has 3 goals in 8 appearances this season. This was in the 15th minute.

Sadly, all our endeavour didn’t account for much, with them going ahead in the 24th, 2-1.

And that was it for the rest of the game!

Looking at the stats, it’s interesting to see how some of what we predicted came true. We seemed to absolutely dominate the middle of the pitch and have a lot of the ball, making a lot of passes.

However, they seemed to have the ball moving into key areas more quickly, and hence performed better overall.

One to learn from when playing against 5-2-3? Maybe don’t go super narrow!

See you all on the pitch.