Tactics Journal

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The distracted striker
12 January 2025

The best strikers are driven by one thing, and they focus on goals. When others are thinking about defending, the build-up, crossing, maintaining possession, the focused striker thinks about the goal. A distracted striker can become ineffective.

Very few strikers can perform multiple tasks. Multiple tasks can become a distraction. You don’t want their attention to be divided.

The distracted striker is moving with the rest of the team. Their eyes are focused where the rest of the team focuses. Their eyes are trained towards the ball. They are focused elsewhere on tasks outside of the penalty area.

The focused striker is studying the goalkeeper, the goal. They are peering over their shoulder at the goal, trying to spot areas they can attack a cross or a through ball. Every action they make is geared towards the shot or the header.

Some players are driven by defending, some are driven by passing, and at least one needs to be driven by goals. Once they get into the box, all the striker should be focused on is scoring.
Trend of quicker distribution from a dead ball in your own end, or a goalkeeper claim
09 January 2025

Teams that are good at set pieces are taking throw-ins and free kicks quicker when the ball is in their own half. The goalkeeper is distributing the ball quicker. The opposition will be disappointed they lost the ball and run a play when they are distracted.

Most teams won’t prepare to be set to defend against the throw-in immediately. They will be jogging back with their back facing the ball or backpedaling. The quick throw-in pins them back on the next throw-in because they’ll then remember you take them quickly. They’ll have to follow the throw-in receivers back into their own half of the pitch, further away from your goal. They have to get into position.

If the other team knows you take throw-ins quickly, before the match, they won’t make the mistake of not being in position, which means you can’t surprise them; they will be pinned back from the start. But you have to keep taking them quickly to maintain that pin.

Strike when they are arguing with the ref. You can almost always guarantee someone will be arguing with the ref from a throw-in or a free kick. Quickly run a play to take advantage of the distraction; pin them back some more.

The throw-in and free kick are big opportunities to pin the opposition back and to always keep them on their toes. Make them think about defending first and attacking second. That is a massive distraction.

Teams that are good at set pieces think differently. They are waiting for a signal. Signal is there; go. They know where to run, and those that take the throw-in or free kick know where the run is being made. They run plays. Teams that are not good at set pieces, so most teams, are not good at thinking about these signals. They are never ready. They are unprepared for rehearsed situations that the opposition can reproduce. For the team that rehearses, they will move without having to think.

In the past, goalkeepers weren’t as sure as to who to throw out to. They had to wait because the run wasn’t being made. Now, the moment they get their hands on the ball, they are charging out to the edge of their penalty box looking for the run and playing the ball immediately, with no hesitation. They aren’t waiting for the run; several specific runs are being made, always. When they are looking to waste time, the run isn’t made, but the run is always made when the countering team needs a goal. I feel like you could blindfold some of these goalkeepers and they would know where to place the ball.

Pin the opposition back from a dead ball to make them think about defending first.
Reply
08 January 2025

I get a lot of inspiration from both questions and comments, especially when they are well thought out. That is why I have added a reply button to the blog below each post. I will respond, and we can go back and forth with ideas.

I can watch many games and find problems within them, but nothing speeds up that process of finding new problems more than a question because the question presents a problem to solve.

Send me your best problem, and I will try to solve it, or you can solve a problem I have.

One problem I have right now that you can solve: I want to know why we need holding midfielders when they are hard to come by. Can we allow them to go extinct?
Growing pains
07 January 2025

Do you know that time in your teenage years when you grew a few inches taller, and your joints ached? That is called growing pains, and the same thing happens to teams that ignore their need to rotate the lineup.

If you are competing in each competition, with the goal to win in each competition, it is impossible to avoid rotation. How do teams rotate effectively? They involve everyone. How do you involve everyone? You have them start. Not come off the bench; start.

Look at your bench. Are you afraid to play them in a big match? If the answer is yes, for most top teams, that means those players have not started enough prior.

The growing pains come when those players are introduced into the lineup. They come onto the pitch cold; they are off the rhythm; they stand out because they look slow, and they aren’t matching the timing of the rest of the team. That means they’ll put a touch wrong, they’ll mistime a run, they’ll misplace a pass, keep everyone onside, forget who to mark, and forget to make the run in the crucial moment of the game. They will get in the way.

A world-class player will look mediocre if they aren’t in rhythm.

That process of getting rid of the growing pains can take several matches and many weeks. It can be painful if you are starting from scratch. But once you have a squad of seventeen players, you are golden. Then you can look at your bench, and if they are experienced, you can be confident the rhythm won’t be broken. I want those seventeen players to feel what it is like to warm up and start from kick-off. If you feel it, you can start.

When you have that squad of seventeen starters, everyone is fresh. Everyone is ready. It is harder for the team to dip in form when there is an injury. You remain flexible, and you can sleep at night.

Teams that play every two to three days that don’t rotate can’t sleep well at night because if one of their starters falls, they’re done. Season over.
Solve the puzzle
06 January 2025

Solutions, solutions, solutions, more solutions. So often we talk about the past and how it can be different, but the hard part is finding the solutions to the problems.

That is what is in the mind of an innovator.

Skip past the part where we diagnose the problem and then get right to the solution as quickly as possible.

It helps to document what hasn’t worked. That is what public football analysis is. We point out the things that should be obvious. Highlights for those who don’t know what to look for, for those that missed the game, or for those that watched casually.

The solutions are boring because they did not happen yet. They are theoretical, and we can’t implement them ourselves. We have to wait for the team, and then we can point to our solution and say, “Hey, I was right; look, I was right. Everybody, come here. They did what I said they should do, and it worked.”

If all you offer are solutions, you’ll never have to point them out because that is all you share.
Solid as a William Saliba
05 January 2025

Arsenal center-back William Saliba frees up thinking time for the rest of the team because of how consistent he is. The other players never have to worry because he always wins the ball, and he very rarely makes a mistake. You can quickly take for granted.

That feeling that when the ball is played in the air, and an attacker is running at his back, he is going to make the right decision and win the ball for the team.

Not many players, let alone defenders, offer you confidence that they can execute every action close to perfection. No worries.

Because you know he will make the right decision, the rest of the team can be planning for the next move, rather than having to factor in a possible mistake.

That is a major advantage because you can count on one hand the amount of teams that have this type of player.
0-0
04 January 2025

When you score the first goal, tell the rest of the team, “It’s zero-zero.” When you are up or the game is tied, treat it like you haven’t scored. Stop reacting to the score and play the game.

I would put up my hands in the air to the rest of the team, in the shape of two zeros, nil nil. Forget the goal; treat it like the game just started.

If you have the mindset that you are up, you’ll relax. You shouldn’t want to relax. You should immediately want the next goal because it is zero-zero.
Don't relax when you defend deep to counter
03 January 2025

Teams that like to defend deep to counter will defend even deeper when they go up a goal. If they are built to conserve energy for long periods of time as the opposition maintains possession, why do they relax out of possession?

If a team that normally presses high relaxes, they’ll simply be open. But when the team that doesn’t press high relaxes, they’ll both be open and form a wall on the edge of their box.

When they form a wall on the edge of the box, now the defenders and midfielders have room to pick their pass. Midfielders can collect in front of that wall, turn, and find passes over the wall to the forwards and out to the wings.

I understand the forwards on the first line of defense will want a rest after running and running and running on each counter, but this mindset to relax seems unproductive for the team that likes to defend deep to counter.

I think the best teams, even those that like to counter, are those that never stop. They don’t take leads for granted.

If you are going to commit to defending deep to counter, I think you must always maintain the same level of intensity throughout a match, or you risk consistently giving the edge to opponents with the qualitative advantage.
Running plays
02 January 2025

If we choreograph the way in which players move, are we giving them more room to think, or are they thinking more about the next pass or next move? Can we get it to where the entire team moves on autopilot, and will that create more opportunities to be creative?

A team that is not used to choreographed movements will play worse if they are forced to follow strict instructions. I believe that. They should at least, depending on the opponent they are playing against. No two games are the same.

But if you practice something enough, if it works consistently, and it is reproducible, why would you not want to run that play every game?

If you can run a play, pre-planned for open play, like teams do on a set piece, can it to a level in which there is no thinking required on the part of the player? What if you could plan for every action?

I don’t think that is a good scenario to manufacture because the best players do. They don’t need to tell you how they are going to do it, they just do it. And I would assume most can’t verbalize why they are doing something. They know how to do something in the moment, and they adapt in real time. What makes them good is their ability to find a solution in the moment.

Other players can run plays, making minor adjustments to the route they are running within that play, reacting to how the opposition reacts to the play. But how do you include the players that perform better when they are able to find their own solutions? Do you exclude them, forcing them to adapt?

I think teams that do that will struggle more when there is adversity because they’ll have to wait for the solution rather than creating their own solutions on the pitch, and the solution will come after the game, not during the game.
Why the Tactics Journal is no longer posting on X
01 January 2025

I will no longer be posting on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. The decision to leave is being forced upon me due to the deterioration of the website. I no longer want to contribute to their platform.

In my apolitical view, the site has been overrun by crypto scams, porn bots, conspiracy theories, racism, and misogyny. It is has become nearly impossible to have any productive conversations. It is a cesspool of rage-baiting content made to drive engagement. It is an angry platform driven by division and controversy. Reading the site makes your day worse. It makes you want to start disliking your hobbies because the worst conversations around them become sensationalized.

If you can somehow get past that, then there is their targeted and increasingly rampant attack on external websites, like mine, through the disgusting practice of link suppression.

It started last year when I learned more about the site’s increasing concerted effort to suppress links. Here is an example of how posting a link to X works.

First, I add a link to my blog post in an X post. I am sharing my hard work, something that should be celebrated by X because I am providing content to them for free.

When you post a link, X applies a link shortener to that link automatically. You can’t remove it. The link changes from tacticsjournal.com to a t.co (Twitter) domain URL.

When this was implemented over a decade ago by the previous owners, the purpose for that link shortener was to provide stats to Twitter to help them measure how many people click on that link on their end. It was annoying because it caused the page to load slower. When you clicked on the link from Twitter, your browser loaded the t.co link, and then it had to redirect you to tacticsjournal.com. The difference in loading times compared to directly linking to the intended destination URL was minimal at the time.

Things changed in the past year or more.

In September of 2023, The Markup confirmed the fears many in the community had that X was throttling links using their link shortener. And not just throttling all links equally, which is bad enough as it is; they targeted any specific domain name they liked, like Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Substack, plus other news organizations.

The Markup:

On August 15, The Washington Post reported that X had slowed by about five seconds traffic to websites that had been criticized by owner Elon Musk, including the competing platforms identified by The Markup and media properties like The New York Times and Reuters. The Post also reported that X reversed some of the throttling after its story was published.

Slowing traffic to websites can harm the companies that run the sites and the people who use them. Even a 2.5-second delay after clicking a link can feel extremely slow to users, potentially discouraging them from waiting around for content to load. A 2017 Google study found that the probability of a user “bouncing,” or abandoning a site, increased 32% when page load times increased to three seconds from one second. Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth wrote that they hope X reverses its decision to impose a delay on Substack links. “Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that have proven they are willing to make changes that are hostile to the people who use them,” they said in an email. Meta and Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment.

The Markup ran tests, tests you can still run for yourself in that article I linked, that to this day slow down the loading speeds of links using their link shortener. You can notice right now when you are using X’s website or app.

This practice of throttling links has been expanding since then. They can target whoever they like; they can decide to target all links theoretically. It has affected my blog, and it lowers viewership greatly.

Once people learned about this, I thought that would be the turning point for everyone to leave X, but it wasn’t.

X does not want people to leave for an external website because in their mind, that means the user will never come back. But the nefarious targeted attacks on specific domains did not stop at just throttling links.

It has been confirmed by many sources, after X’s algorithm was made open-source, and by Elon Musk himself, that X docks you points on your post, in their algorithm, if you include a link. They limit it from being seen by your own followers and those that it could be recommended to. That shrinks your audience further, and people miss posts because they simply don’t show up in their feed.

What is the point of contributing to this website if my content is not valued and not being shared with the people that follow me or to a greater audience?

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the largest organization of journalists in Europe, representing over 295,000 journalists in 44 countries, has announced that it will stop posting content on X.

President of the EFJ, Maja Sever:

We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists.

The social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric.

They join The Guardian and many other European news outlets:

We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.

This is something we have been considering for a while, given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.

If nothing changes, more and more people will leave in the coming months. Journalists and writers are leaving. News organizations are leaving. Creators are leaving. And then all they will be left with are those that enjoy a constant stream of draining chaos.

If I do want to get real-time news, now I go to Bluesky. A rapidly growing social media platform that has very early Twitter vibes, is developer and creator friendly, and it supports the open web. They want you to share links. During the exodus that occurred over the past two months, Bluesky’s user base has quickly grown to nearly 26 million users. That is where everyone is going. The football community is there, the football tactics community is there, the reporters are there, and many other communities are moving there. The conversations are more civilized; they have better moderation organized by the community and controlled by you, not a company. Developers are flocking to Bluesky to create third-party apps, community-run feed algorithms, and more.

It is very hard to leave the 35,900 Twitter followers behind. I put in a lot of work to grow that audience, and I have a lot of relationships I’d like to keep. But I don’t want to contribute to X’s platform anymore. I am happy to report that the traffic to my site from outside of X has surpassed the traffic I got from X, despite the fact that my follower count is significantly smaller on all other social media platforms.

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Best of 2024
31 December 2024

It is hard to pick because I put a lot of thought into them, but if I had to pick, these are my top sixty favorite posts I wrote in 2024 in the Tactics Journal. Thank you all for reading, and Happy New Year!
If you would like to read all of the posts, visit the archive or search on the homepage.
Roll out the red carpet
30 December 2024

Why are we afraid of the other team shooting the ball? Why not get it over with quicker? “Expedite the shot to regain possession,” says the impatient center-forward waiting for his next chance to score.

This is another way of thinking about defending. Roll out the red carpet and allow the other team to enter your half, herd them to limit where they can shoot, then allow them to shoot. Get it over with.

The sooner they take the shot, the sooner you regain possession of the ball. If you are a possession-heavy team, you are not going to turn the ball over often, which will limit the amount of chances for the defending team.

If you know how to lose the ball, you will limit the attacking team’s ability to get off a high-quality shot because you will have numbers back to block the shot.

And what are the chances that the team on the counter transitioning from defense will rush the shot? I think the chance is high that they will fall into the trap of shooting quickly because it will come as a shock to the defending team that the opponent would allow them to shoot on the counter. They won’t know what to do with themselves. It is awkward.

Maintain possession, know how to lose the ball, herd the opponent when they win the ball, allow them to take the shot, get numbers back to block the shot, regain possession, and attack again.

Make the center-forward happy by regaining possession quickly. If you can’t reliably win back the ball by tackling, this is the next best thing.
Stretching the defense with a ball over the top
29 December 2024

When you play the ball over the top and through, rarely does the defending team have the discipline to wait once they regain possession, nor does the rest of their team move back. Making it easier to immediately counter press.

Figure 1.1 - Team with the ball plays over the top to the center-forward.

This is not a risky pass and a good place to lose the ball. The chance you will lose possession is high, but the advantages you gain from playing this pass frequently normally outweigh the negatives.

Knowing where to lose the ball is a skill. This is a good place to lose the ball because if you win the race to the ball, your center-forward is in on goal, one-on-one with the goalkeeper.

Figure 1.2 - The defending team regains possession, and the space between the back line and second line is large.

The defending team’s (white team’s) back line sprints back in an attempt to get to the ball before the attacking center-forward to quickly defend against that first pass over the top, while their first and second lines jog back.

If the defending team wins the race to the ball, the space between their back line and second line is large, making it easier for the attacking team (blue team) to counter-press.

If this is a match where the blue team is maintaining a lot of possession, what are the chances they will be impatient? Most inferior teams, or teams that prefer to counter, would then immediately want to play forward. They wouldn’t have the patience to wait for their midfielders to get back.

It is easier for the attacking team to counter-press because the team attempting to play out from the back has fewer options. Their impatience will further limit their options. They win the race to the ball, and then the distance between the back line and the midfielders is large. They will have to play back to the goalkeeper or through the wings to get out of their half.

If the team counter-pressing wins the ball, they can take advantage of that space between the large space between the opposition’s back line and second line.

For all those reasons, it is worth it to lose possession a few times a half to stretch the opposition’s defensive shape.
Don't assume everyone knows what you know
28 December 2024

That is the biggest lesson I have learned from this blog: Just because I understand something does not mean others can spot those same things. Things that you may find common or insignificant could be new to someone else.

That lightbulb clicked in my head when I was explaining a formation change to someone and only using words to describe what I wanted changed. The changes seemed simple to me; I explained it in one or two sentences, but they were asking a lot of questions; they were confused. I then said, “Let me draw it; I’ll be back.” I came back and shared the image, with a longer explanation, and then they responded back with, I’m paraphrasing, “You put a lot of thought into that; I would have never thought of that.”

Something that seems simple to me is new to this person. Everyone looks at football differently and has different levels of experience. I don’t know everything there is to know, but I have enough experience to know that many people can benefit from what I know.

I saw that X, Y, and Z needed to be fixed, and they only saw X and didn’t even know Y and Z were possible solutions to the problem. And then there is an entire set of the population that wouldn’t even spot X, Y, or Z.
The most dangerous pass in football
27 December 2024

A low cross from the corner into the six-yard box with a forward attacking the near post, a forward attacking the middle of the six-yard box, and a player sneaking up on the back post has to be the most dangerous pass in football.

Figure 1.1 - A low cross from the right corner is touched on from the forward attacking the near post to the back post for the tap-in goal.

Major prerequisite: You must have someone that is good at crossing, but even the most inconsistent crossers can have success because this cross doesn’t require perfect accuracy. Even an inaccurate cross can end up redirecting off an attacker or defender towards the back post.

The pass should be swung in at head height. Almost at the speed of a hard-hit shot. Putting a slight curve on the cross will help the player attacking the near and middle of the six-yard box to head the ball into the goal, and putting less curve on the cross will help them knock the ball on to the player attacking the back post.

If the crosser is accurate enough, teams can treat this cross like a set-piece rehearsed play to make it reproducible. That means they can involve players that would not normally end up in these positions, for example, a center-back. A center-back attacking the middle of the six-yard box sounds terrifying, and it will surprise the opponent.

The players attacking the front post and middle of the six-yard box will curve in towards the cross, whilst the player on the back post will curve their run away from the cross.

It will be difficult for the defender, usually a fullback, to track the run of the player curving away on the back post because they will have their eyes on the cross. Every attacker and defender is moving towards the ball except for one, the player on the back post, who is sneakily moving away from the ball.

That back post run is what makes it dangerous because of the number of scenarios each run covers. They can head it directly in, flick it on, and the back post run will have a simple tap-in if the goalkeeper has a weak parry.

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