One of the encouraging signs of the growth and development of the game of soccer in the United States and Canada is the emergence of many soccer publications - both nationally and locally.  Soccer America has really moved along and I receive daily electronic newsletters that keep me right up to speed both internationally and North America wide.

Steve Spence, a coach with the Ottawa Fury, writes for Kick About ( www.kickabout.ca ), a magazine largely aimed at the Ottawa/Gatineau area with something like 115,000 readers

Steve's article is about team formations (systems of play).

An Obsession with Three Magic Numbers

by Steve Spence, Ottawa Fury

Is it my imagination, or are we today placing far more importance on a team's formation? Coach's banter seems to jump right to these three magical numbers. It's often fancied up and called "Systems of Play" (SoP), but in most cases it's still just a plain old ‘formation'.

In my humble opinion, too much emphasis on formation usually means not enough time on the basics.   This is dangerous because we all know you cannot build a solid house on a weak foundation (apologies for the overused metaphor). Why spend countless hours trying to get 13 year-olds to master a new formation, when few of them can jockey properly, and most don't understand the difference between second and third defender responsibilities? A formation cannot compensate for weak skills any more than a house framed with steel can compensate for that inadequate foundation.

A formation is a simple alignment of players, intended to give structure to a team's play. A formation should serve as a starting point, a base camp from which players have the freedom to trek, but with the responsibility of covering for others and returning when needed.

Unfortunately, we don't seem comfortable giving players this kind of roaming freedom. Most coaches obsess over control and appearance, and discourage their players from leaving their assigned "zones".  This produces players with squelched creativity, lack of movement, and an underdeveloped sense of the game's natural fluidity. Using balance as the reason for demanding rigid compliance with a particular formation, is misguided. Effectual balance, requires players to dynamically adjust to the position of other players, the ball, and the goal.

The Building Blocks

The primary reason players and coaches stress the importance of formation, is undoubtedly a belief that it gives the team its organization. But organization does not result from the formation. It comes from the shared knowledge and collective mastering of the Principles of Play (PoP), the tactical building blocks of soccer that have been with us for 40 years.  In 1968, English coach Allen Wade summarized the Principles listed below that have been the foundation of tactical development ever since; essentially providing us with a fool-proof roadmap of player development.

Principles of Play

Although simple by its rules, the game of soccer is tactically complex. The over simplification that comes from too much focus on formation, does not give players the tools they need to handle the almost infinite challenges they will face. But the ten Principles certainly can. The essential point here is that independent of a team's formation, these principles should be trained conscientiously so that whatever situations players encounter, they will be equipped to respond effectively.

I recently contacted two previous Canadian Men's National team head-coaches for their opinions. Tony Waiters, noted author and developer of the popular Byte Size Coaching program, is coincidentally just about to release a book titled "Systems of Play". Tony describes the impact that PoP has on creativity. "Soccer is a game of Cat-and-Mouse and each team changes its persona when the ball changes hands," he says. "From being creative, fun-loving, expressive, skilled attackers, the team should become stingy, totally committed, deadly serious, get-the-job-done defenders." (Notice how the principles are paired so that each attacking principle has an offsetting defending principle.)

CSA Technical Director Stephen Hart, an extremely well respected coach who led Canada's national team to an impressive performance in the 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup, observes that many of us mistakenly think of SoP as fundamental: "Many coaches and fans view Systems of Play as tactics, a be-all and end-all solution". 

One might argue that formations serve only to assign the number of defenders to be positioned along the Line of Defense. Maybe we should just use single-digit formations like "3" or "4". Whatever your belief in the relative importance of formations, the ten PoP are the developmental building blocks necessary to produce players who excel in any system and in any situation. Bypassing them, by jumping from a technical focus directly to a formation focus, will likely produce less than ideal results.

Copyright© 2008 Stephen Spence