Introduction
Football coaches, like any other coaches in team sports have a very important role, maybe the most important. In the course of history, there have been many cases when the exact same team, with the exact same players, plays a totally different game after the coach is changed.
Step 1
There are many systems football coaches use with their teams, depending on the philosophy of the coach: if he is a defensive coach, he will organize the team in order to receive fewer goals; if he is an offensive coach, he will organize the team to score as many goals as possible. Of course, systems are much more complex that offensive and defensive, they can be technique based, physical based, or tactical based.
Step 2
The most used system in the history of the game is the classical 4-4-2. It is not used that often these days. Only in the United Kingdom, football coaches use this system on a regular basis. It’s a very balanced system that covers all the areas of the field, with enough defenders, 4, enough midfielders, 4, enough attackers, 2, and enough players on the sides, 2 on each side. However, it’s much less surprising for the opposition and lacks flexibility during the course of the game.
Step 3
The system that football coaches use most often today is 4-2-3-1. A lot of teams play like this because it can be efficient even when the squad lacks high quality players. It’s a rather new system used with regularity since the year 2000, especially by the Portuguese coach Jose Murinho. Murinho coaches football based on efficiency only and not on esthetics. After the system proved its efficiency, it was adopted by a lot of coaches. It is efficient because it creates a high density of players in the middle, having only two natural side positioned players.
Tips
That high density gives the opportunity for the team to stop the opponent’s construction, rebound the ball, and counter attack with ease. The reason it is so successful is the flexibility. Because of the position of the players, it can easily turn into a 4-4-1-1 on defense and into a 4-3-3 on offense. Two of the players from the line of 3, mostly the ones positioned on the left and right, have the responsibility to come back, defend on the sides, and help those defenders so they won’t have to defend the whole side on their own. This way, the coach that uses this system can address the issue of not having enough players on both sides of the field.
Sources and Citations
The most difficult system to impose for a coach is 4-3-3. Not a lot of football coaches use this system because it depends a lot on the quality of the players. But, used in the right way, this system offers the most spectacular play of football. It‘s an offensive system of course because of the 3 attackers positioned on the field. It's rather flexible because the attackers on the sides come back as midfielders when defending in order to become a 4-5-1 system.
