Reggae Ball

This tactic doesn't have too much exciting going on in terms of TIs - it's very similar to quite a number of other successful tactics that have been tested on the site, but was built from the ground up. A few things I've avoided that I've seen on many TIs are quick distribution and shorter passing, as I'd rather my goalkeeper take the time to find the space and start the team off in attacking it quickly than rush the ball to defenders to start slowly. That being said, the special sauce of this tactic for me is in the roles and PIs.

My thought process was that I wanted to build on the popular 4-2-3-1 format that many are seeing success with, but wanted to try to score as many goals as possible while avoiding embarrasing defensive numbers. For example, I was more interested in a 4-1 than either a 3-0 or a 5-2 if that makes sense! To achieve this, rather than have two DMs I shifted one player up to CM in a BBM role, with 'Takes Fewer Risks', allowing an additional player in attack but one that doesn't get stranded high up as the opposition breaks. Wing Backs are encouraged to push up but not to shoot as additional chance creaters for the attacking threats, meanwhile the standout role to differentiate this tactic is the AM playing as an AP with the instruction 'Hold Up Ball'. It at first may seem somewhat counter-productive in such an aggressively attacking team, but it provides all those players with attacking mentalities to transition into dangerous positions that are outside of their defensive ones (IFs cutting in, WBs pushing up).

There's a lot of harder tackling, and a bit more risk taking from the attacking players (but not the AM). A high defensive line and a high, hard press encourages opposition to try long ball tactics to break out of pressure, where a goalkeeper on SK (At) is positioned to try to clean these up.

I've set this tactic to have an Attacking mentality for the test. However, in normal use I would use Positive as a baseline for periods of fixture congestion, as you can see the form has a dip in January where there are constant games.

The result in this test is a team that had the most goals for and fewest against - the latter statistic not one I really expected, but was happy with. Please note that I downloaded set piece tactics made by Knap, so as a matter of transparency have included a screenshot of my set piece data from the test for you to weigh up against the value of the tactic as a whole.

I gave it another test with Wolves as the team predicted 11th. Exact same tactic, no changes. The goals for and against were more in line with what I expected, and the impact of set pieces was more diminished, aleviating my own concerns that I was being propped up by them. 6th is an excellent performance I think.

As the fixtures show with the fixture pileup in December the tactic hits a real stretch of poor form, so if you want to give it a go in your own saves then again I will advise that ahead of these runs of games every 3-4 games to use Positive as the mentality and to rotate and sub early to keep fresh legs.

Nice to see someone use a team other than man city

DazzieK said: Nice to see someone use a team other than man city Expand

Cheers! Man City seems to be the go-to, and I wanted to use them first more to benchmark against the others here. But it didn't perform as it has been in my own save (Swansea City), as those Haaland numbers are just madness. Hopefully including Wolves as a benchmark of a midtable side helps people better understand if there is something in this tactic that gets their attention.