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Tactics TFC's Tactical Autopsy Thread

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I look at the premier league this season
And there seems to be be a emphasis on power and strength, as well as pace
Our frost six or seven players a midfield in general is not built like this
Individually they might be some talented players in there
But as a collective they are so week
 
Timothy bird said:
I look at the premier league this season
And there seems to be be a emphasis on power and strength, as well as pace
Our frost six or seven players a midfield in general is not built like this
Individually they might be some talented players in there
But as a collective they are so week
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Yeah - Kudus, Solanke and Kulu are physical players, apart from that Johnson, Odobert, Tel, Richy are not

We could do a lot worse than recruit some physical/strong forwards if technically they may be lacking a bit even in the short term.
 
Next to nothing to do with tactics.

It's everything to do with messaging and competence.

Something and some things are amiss.

Change or changing of tactics does not resolve the issues that relate to the paucity of performance.

We are seeing what Potter had at West Ham and Postecoglou had during his very short-lived period at Nottingham Forest. Rot, once embedded, is very hard to shift.
 
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At the end of the day
How do we turn this s**t show around
Because to be honest, this can’t continue
Not that I’m sure anybody will be answer this
More chance of getting the answers to the gchq advent calendar correct
 
TLDR: Our forward passing, or lack thereof

Let's be honest, our passing right now is as bad as it has ever been. Our goalkeeper can't pass, which regularly forces our CBs to go for wishful attempts in quest of breaking the opponents' lines in one try. Our deep midfielders are often getting bypassed altogether within this framework. But even on the occasions that they receive the ball in a relatively advanced area where they can really make something happen, they instead recycle the possession with a backwards/sideways pass.



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Every team has these sort of sequences where they go back to square one after seemingly progressing the ball, but these are definitely the norm with us while the following kind is the exception:



Do not scratch your eyes, you're really seeing the most extaordinary thing here: Palhinha with a nice pass forward using the outside of his boot.
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And when the opponents score the first goal, something that has happened 5 times in 7 home league games so far this season, and start waiting in a mid to low block, things start looking like this:



The ball shortly finds its way back to Vicario

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United, hell any team really, would gladly sit back in their 5-4-1 and watch this for the rest of the game:Little movement and imagination combined with lots of pointing and passing the buck.

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Don't think that is what football fans are referring to when they use that vague notion that is patterns of play.

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I see a multilayered issue that doesn't lend itself to an easy fix.

  • Our keeper simply ignores midfielders in the initial buildup to instead pass the buck to Romero and VDV for them to get trapped outside, which regularly leads to low percentage passes and turnovers around the halfway line where the lone striker gets smothered.​
  • Our deep midfielders, the double pivot in particular, don't move without the ball very well. They can't get into the openings to make themselves available for a pass on a regular basis. And even on the occasions that Romero in particular threads the needle to find them, they more often than not recycle the possession instead of taking things further due to their limitations on the ball​
  • Now that Maddison is out and this version of Simons can't hold a candle to him, we also don't have an advanced playmaker who can, as the last resort, drop deep to receive those passes straight from the defenders to create.​
  • It looks to me that the issue is exacerbated by Frank's willingness to embrace this situation, reflected in his fondness of the double pivot and this extreme aversion to playing through the middle.​
 
Notabadsquad said:
Next to nothing to do with tactics.

It's everything to do with messaging, and competence.

Something and some things are amiss.

Change or changing of tactics does not resolve the issues that relate to paucity of performance.

We are seeing what Potter had at West Ham amd Postecoglou had during his very short-lived period at Nottingham Forest. Rot, once embedded is very hard to shift.
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Click to shrink...

I think you're actually tight, it's not the tactics which is the issue and it's easy to pick apart if players are doing the basics wrong, it's the attitude and mentality.
 
Hard to do a tactical autopsy when there’s a lack of tactical consistency.

We played 4231 against Utd
Went to 541 against Woolwich
Then 442 diamond against PSG

We played low block against Woolwich and Chelsea, but tried to press aggressively on Saturday.

There’s limited continuity of tactics, formation or team selection.

The biggest items I’ve seen are:-

1) We really don’t know how to play through MF, particularly under any press. Forward passing seems limited in there, it’s all very square.

2) Frank seems to see crosses and set pieces as the most likely (or only watching some of our games) way to score goals. It’s very very rare we try to play a through ball or carve open a team in any other way.

3) Give it to Kudus and hope is the only other tactical attacking option we have. That’s been countered by most of our opponents who are doubling up. Porro rarely ever overlaps to help with that.

4) We see shots from outside the box as low percentage plays. We have very few and we aren’t overly concerned with those opponents are taking there.

5) It seems we cannot balance MF solidity (Pal) with ball playing. We can’t strike a balance.

6) He has zero faith in any left sided attackers. Fair given the resources but I’d prefer to see him play 4231 and give someone some time out there.
 
BJK said:
Everything points out to the conclusion that Palhinha and others are instructed to defend in this highly conservative way.We could only speculate on the reason behind this; but my hunch is that Frank is willing to live with those shots because he considers them low percentage / low xG hail mary plays that cannot hurt you repeatedly over the course of a large sample.
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BJK said:
To add to the bolded part regarding the wisdom of welcoming those shots:

They're not low percentage attempts as a rule. Funnily enough, what makes them that way is the football teams' usual willingness to take them seriously and deal with them accordingly by throwing bodies in the way. Once you start taking things for granted and getting out of the way like we've been doing under Frank, they suddenly start posing a much bigger threat.



This graphic from the broadcast that shows Fulham to record an xG of 0.35 was from the end of the first half. We could only guess the xG attributed to their first goal, but it must be significantly lower than 0.35 since that was hardly their only attempt until that point in the game. It was an accumulation of:
  • First goal+ second goal + another shot from the edge of the box that hit the woodwork I can vividly remember + others
So by all indications, xG of the 1st cannot be higher than something like 0.20. In other words, they have 20 percent chance of going in. Well I disagree, I think this estimate takes it for granted that they are being defended reasonably well.

When you're getting out of the way to invite the opponents to take those, that percentage probably skyrockets.

Frank is getting led astray by a faulty piece of math that misses this nuance I presume
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Frank said this today apparently:



Other than a casual remark bordering on truism regarding how he'd like to see his team concede less of these goals, I don't see any indication that Frank has a specific issue with the way we've been defending these shots from the edge of the box.

As I suspected, he simply considers those kind of attempts that led to Fulham's first goal among others this season low xG and that's that: He and the team are just unlucky whenever one hits the back of the net.

Put a tenner on Newcastle scoring at least one tomorrow, this issue isn't going to fix itself.
 
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Who should Tottenham fire: A Premier League recap​


Ted Knutson
December 01, 2025

One of the things we promise in the first email you receive from The Transfer Flow is we will tell you when your Director of Football should be fired.
Today I am going to turn that lens toward Spurs because… well…

Spurs 1 - 2 Fulham​

Look, we know many people were let go this past summer including iconic minority owner/CEO Daniel Levy. The Ange Postecoglou contingent including Scott Munn also moved on to, uh, weirder pastures. But there’s still the two-headed executive football monster of Johan Lange + Fabio Paratici that allegedly has had significant power throughout and is now officially in power again.
Yes, we know that Paratici was merely “a consultant” while serving a ban from football for shenanigans while at Juve, but he’s been there a long time. Things have been deteriorating a long time now too. Correlation? Causation? Levy apparently had a lot of faith in his ability but the record is spotty at best, especially while benefitting from the Magic Money Tree at the Evil Empire in Italy.
Meanwhile, Lange presided over the Aston Villa spending catastrophuck from summer 2020 through December 2023. The buying during that period was an extremely mixed bag, with various expensive blanks (Moussa Diaby, Diego Carlos, Coutinho, Danny Ings…? Danny Ings!) mixed in with some decent players like Jhon Duran, Morgan Rogers, and Tielemans-on-a-free. They did get to sell Jack Grealish during that period for a hefty fee, but that would have happened under anyone, so you’re not getting full credit from me.
Back to Spurs… they signed a well-regarded head coach this summer who can play defensively solid football and knows all the modern wrinkles for style of play, and then chose to run an experiment: What would happen if none of our central midfielders can actually pass the ball?
This was their most obvious need coming into the window, and it’s an even more obvious need coming out of the window. They signed Kudus from West Ham for a big fee (ball mover, not a passer, weirdly headless), Kevin Danso (fine), Kolo Muani (Poor CF - loan), locked in Mathys Tel (Future CF - on the fence), 2 CBs 20 years old or younger (good, actually, but v v young), and Xavi Simons also for a big fee and who IS a passer, but needs competent teammates to get him the ball.
Like, this is Simons two years ago versus Simons now. That stats profile is the hatchet of unrealised potential — but IT MIGHT NOT BE HIS FAULT. The system and players around him not only don’t help him, they actively detract from what he’s good at. But also… he might not be ready now (or possibly ever) for the physicality of the Premier League.
Xavi_Simons-Premier_League-2025_2026_sadness.png

Oh, and desperate for midfield depth, Spurs signed Joao Palhinha on loan, who IS a midfielder, but about as definitively not-a-great-passer as anyone who made a move to a big league this summer. Which is a fact we told you about before it happened.
Spurs did sign two 18-year-old midfielders last season (Archie Gray, Lucas Bergvall), and both have potential, but Bergvall is mostly an AM in Sweden converted to CM/DM at Spurs for now, and poor Archie Gray has PTSD from all the abuse he took last season while forced to play centre back.
The last fit-for-purpose DM/CM Spurs signed was Bissouma in 2022 (allegedly a discipline problem under multiple coaches and not likely to feature in the future), and Lo Celso + Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg in 2021. So it’s not like they have been trying and failing to find the right fit — I guess they just haven’t seen it as a proper need given *waves hands* all the other needs?
This totally bears repeating because it is easy to forget: this is a team in the Champions League.
Anyway, we don’t know who is really at fault because football teams rarely work like that, but firing the coach (again) isn’t going to get you anywhere because this squad wasn’t set up to succeed. My suggestion is to ride it out, reload, and then see what happens next year.
But also… hope those expected goals numbers get better and hope they start to win a few home matches, because both have been grim thus far.
(And yes, we were VERY early to sound notes of caution when the Spurs’ table position was very far away from their expected goals position. We did that with Liverpool’s hot start too! This could be a reason why the gambling results at Variance Betting are SO GOOD right now.)
 
TLDR: Some half baked observations regarding the team shape in possession and the implications for our passing patterns and general play.

I'm fully aware that all this conversation on team shapes and formations refer to entities that are in practice quite fluid, being contingent on multiple factors including but not exclusively;
  • the tendencies of players involved
  • scoreline
  • phase of play
  • what the other team is doing
Still, for the last month or two, a type of 3-2-4-1 where the left back is given free license to push forward while the right back tucks in has been by far the most common and noticeable shape Frank prefers. To put the template of it in positional terms:

RB-RCB-LCB
CM-CM
RW-AM-LW-LB
ST​
Slight alterations of this where:
  • one of the CMs and the AM push forward by a notch to make it a 3-1-4-2​
  • AM pushes forward to make it a 3-2-3-2​
  • AM instead drops back to make it a 3-3-3-1​
have also been observed

To visualize all this:









One issue you can see here is how congested the middle is due to the presence of 2 CMs and 2 AMs, one of which is either LB or LW drifting to that area. Now managers and teams usually welcome those congestions these days under the umbrella notion of creating overloads: Instead of stretching the pitch as wide as you can to find better passing angles like the common sense would have it, you go the completely opposite direction and create numerical advantages in small spaces around the pitch to progress the ball through there.

Ange loved those overloads for example, and was willing to live with the fact that fullbacks could sometimes be caught in #10 spot when we turned the ball over inside the opponent's half. Risk and reward are the two sides of this coin that is trade-off. So you pick your spots when it comes to this stuff, based on a relative assessment of said risks and rewards.

Therefore, for you to even have a chance of reaping the rewards of overloads, you need players with required skills and a manager willing to take some risks: Such as forcing the ball through those crowded areas at the risk of turning it over and getting caught at the back from time to time. Otherwise it's just unnecessary congestion that gets you trapped outside and forces you to go for speculative attempts in wide areas, or even much inferior opponents sitting back and watching you recycle the possession.





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Copenhagen with a very narrow 4-4-2 to congest the middle at all costs the way we tried to against PSG.












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This is not exclusively a Frank issue to be honest. We have a group of bang average midfielders, some of whom are especially dodgy on the ball. Our best bet of threading the needle in these situations is to give it to a centre back in Romero, which says enough. And even on the occasions that he does it succesfully, there's a decent chance of ball coming right back to him in a matter of few seconds because the recipient doesn't know what to do with it. That's why I consider a deep playmaker the most urgent need at the moment.

That being said, Frank's willingness to embrace the situation instead of trying to address it with what he has at his disposal has been endangering our defense for quite some time now. What, at first glance, looks like a clear case of risk aversion on Frank's part has led to us concede 17 goals in the last 10 league games, or 26 in last 17 in all competitions. Here's a simple math for you:

17 ÷ 10 = 1.7
1.7 x 38 = 64

26 ÷ 17 = 1.52
1.52 x 38 = 57

We conceded 65 league goals last year, with a defensive line that was ravaged with injuries for a good few months of the whole campaign. The fact that we, with a healthy defensive line as well, have been conceding at the same exact rate over the course of 1/4 of the season (and counting) should ring alarm bells in terms of how long Frank can continue like this. Our football is horrendous to watch, and we're not even defending well. What are we doing then exactly?

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Planning on making a follow up post using illustrations from a different game where we used a different shape with much more distance between the players and less congestion to see if that could be a more viable model going forward.
 
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Wasn't sure where to ask this but thought BJK might be able to give an answer of sorts:

In FPL this year they give out points for "defensive contributions" - I'm not exactly sure what the metrics are for these actions BUT I have noticed that none of our players ever seem to get above the threshold for earning these points.

Why? We defend a LOT. What's going on?
 
I'm too old to understand all this alphabet stats stuff. I'm not competent to comment with any degree of knowledge on technical elements of our play. I just go by what I see.

Having initially been sceptical of Frank's appointment, I was persuaded, by people more clued in than me that he is an excellent, and proactive, coach who would get the best out of us. I felt he should be given time, and the resources, to build a squad to implement his vision. I'm not a fan of firing managers every couple of years.

However, I am so disappointed in where we seem to be headed. The manager, it seems to me, is not courageous, and his timidity has infected how we play. No energy, no ambition, no intent to impose our will on the opposition. We seem so passive all the time. If not for Cuti on Tuesday, we would have been embarrassed by a very limited Newcastle.

I just can't see how we are going to progress with this manager.
 
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