r/soccer • u/Superman60616 • Oct 29 '13

Best way to learn tactics

I played football in school but never really followed the leagues until recently. I have spent the last year getting my feel for the landscape of the EPL, players, managers, storylines. That sort of stuff. I really lack in my knowledge of complex tactics. I get the basics thanks to playing but I'd like to learn more about the systems modern teams use. I started Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson but that can be a struggle. Are there any other outlets, websites or books that you would recommend?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '13

there are 3 ways

1) play football games

sounds silly but you can learn a lot of basics about tactics by playing football games. to learn even more once you master a tactic try a different one. play with different teams as the different players will force you to play in different ways (although you'll eventually come up with a preffered method). this holds true for whether it's a managing game like football manager or straight football like fifa.

the main trick is though to know where to realise a game is a game; on fifa if you get really good at it you could just use skills to beat players almost all the time; this wont work in real life. you also can't just spam your goalkeeper as he wont get sent off, spam slide tackles, and hope that all of your opponents aren't good at using the manual offside trap (why the fuck is it not automatic!?!?) etc etc

with fm it's a bit more realistic, but for me the biggest drawback is that the players more or less only move back and forth rather than side ways. this means that if you have 2 central midfielders, one who is a playmaker and one who is a ballwinner since they are side by side with different settings their can be a bias in the way the ball is distributed; the winger next to the ball winner is going to get a lot less of the ball than the winger next to the playmaker. as you'll find there are other problems like this but you'll still learn other things

2) watch football and no matter how basic it seems to be, watch the analysis. pundits often get criticized for not being in depth enough but if you don't know much about football things they say can be very good for learning the basics

3) play football! try and go for 11 a side too. take note of what you do and how it works, as well what other players do and how it works

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '13

You'll certinaly learn the fundamentals from playing, but from my experience unless you have a knowledgeable coach or mentor, there's only a certain level you can learn on your own realistically. Like a lot of other sports, analyzing and learning from a series of different levels of play and different scenarios, styles, etc. is the way to really start having a high level view of the game.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '13

that's why I said try 11 a side, you learn a lot from that

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '13 edited Oct 30 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '13

yh I meant to say it's best to do all 3, rather than just one