How Manchester City stopped Barcelona

 

UWCL group phase started last week and the focus of this edition is to understand if there is some team able to stop Barcelona's dominance in the competition. We just needed one game to see that there is a way to stop them, thanks to Manchester City which stopped the Catalan team through a really dominant match, especially in the first half. The final result (2-0) probably did not provide the real value of City's performance but it was enough to secure a statement win.

In this article I will try to explain how the 4-1-4-1 issued by Gareth Taylor was able to cope against Barça positional play with some final notes on the consistency of their approach throughout the season.

Analyzing Artem Dovbyk through his goals

Artem Dovbyk had a breakout season last year playing for Girona; a season which allowed him to be the Pichichi of La Liga and his team to reach the qualification to the next Champions League. With his national team did not perform well enough in the last European Championship in Germany, therefore many doubts arise in relation to his transfer to AS Roma.

In this post I will try to find out in which way Girona allowed him to score and to perform at his best. Given the fact AS Roma is very close to sign him, It would beneficial for giallorossi supporters to understand which efforts on a tactical point of view Daniele De Rossi is required to do in order to allow the Ukrainan forward to be the right investment for the team.

In order to perform this analysis I tried to dissect the open-play goals scored by Dovbyk in the last season in La Liga in order to describe the pattern who allowed him to score. Together with this I will show some interesting stats which explain his style of play.

Austria's strategy under Ralf Rangnick

 

Austria was one of the national team participating at EURO 2024 which was within the list of potential surprises of the competition. It is difficult to consider a surprise something you expect to be a surprise, however the fact that Austrian team was able to win the Group D on top of France and Netherlands is definitely a huge achievement for this team.

This result has been obtained through a strategy which is recognizable and that gave identity to a team which now mirrors the whole Austrian football movement. The father of this movement is Ralf Rangnick, the creator of this identity at Red Bull group and now transferring this into the national team.

Let's give a look how this strategy worked in the match against Netherlands, the match won by Austrian team 3-2 that gave them the first place in Group D.

England still needs to find the right tactical solutions

 

After three days of European Championship where many important teams showed some tactical identity, the opening game for England did not provide the same feeling. Southgate's team started the game well and found the net with an header of Jude Bellingham, however after scoring the Three Lions struggled a lot in creating opportunities, especially through positional attacks. In this article I will try to give some quick examples of what went wrong.

Davide Possanzini and De Zerbi legacy

 

We everybody know the style of play promoted by Roberto de Zerbi in his journey from Italy to Ukraine and now to Brighton in Premier League. During this years the Italian manager was supported by many young coaches is his different experiences; those coaches are now manager and they use Roberto de Zerbi vision as a base for their football.

One of them is Davide Possanzini, assistant of De Zerbi at Sassuolo and that is impressing a lot with Mantova, an Italian Serie C team which is now on top of the tournament due to his work. And in this article we are looking at the similarities between the Brighton manager and the current Mantova manager. A similarity which is showing how De Zerbi is creating a coaching tree.