FC Sochaux-Montbeliard: The French Press

I talked a little in the previous post about the need for an identity at FCSM, and what our values were going to be. The first thing I wanted to try to get right with our playing identity was the pressing/counter-pressing. More long-term I really wanted us to be a club with a big reputation for youth development.

This season we fought our way to the title and won promotion back to Ligue 2, so we can definitely call the first campaign a success. But how did we do in terms of implementing our 'Concept'? I wanted to take a quick look at how we did.

Les Lionceaux

The first thing to consider is did this season help with the development of our young players? So let's take a look.

I wanted to ensure minutes were given to the young players at the club and with a season in the third tier and a fairly restrictive season in terms of transfers I felt I had the ideal opportunity.

As the graph to the left shows, a pretty significant number of minutes (around 60%) were given to players aged 22 and under.

A large number of players were brought up to the first-team squad from our 2nd team and some played significant minutes throughout the season.

Christ Makosso was arguably the player to benefit the most, with the 20 year old playing more minutes (3420) than anyone else in the squad.

But the player whose development really surprised me was my 19 year-old left-back, Leny Tela. My first-choice left-back was injured at the very end of pre-season, so Tela was thrust into the line-up for the first few matches and he performed fairly well.

Tela ended up playing 34 matches throughout the season and, as the image above shows, his development over the course of the year was pretty incredible.

To re-affirm my commitment to giving game times to young players, I allowed Kevin Hoggas (32), Kevin Zohi (27), Issouf Macalou (25), Julien Dacosta (27) & Amilcar Silva (24) to leave in the winter transfer window.

The Press

So with the youth development aspect looking OK, how about our style of play - our identity. What does the data say?

A big theme in 'Intensity' by Pep Lijnders is how Liverpool don't necessarily need to be the best team, but a team who can beat the best teams. They focus a lot on being horrible to play against. Their energy, their relentlessness, their speed and their intensity - coupled with their tactical positioning on the field - is aimed at making things uncomfortable for the opposition. Never letting them settle, always having to look over their shoulder.

I wanted to take this kind of attitude to France. In order for counter-pressing to be successful, the team requires compactness and proximity. In other words, you need to be close enough to your team-mates to hunt in packs, and close enough to the opponent that you can do it quickly.

I wanted us to play a high line, so we had vertical and horizontal compactness, so lets see how that looks in the numbers.

As the images below show, our OPPDA was around average but the real outlier was our high line. We pushed much higher up the pitch than the rest of the teams in the League. While this can be a risky approach, if it is done well it also brings big rewards.

We won the ball in the opposition half quite a lot, and it'll be interesting to see how these numbers look at the end of next season against stronger opposition.

I mentioned that this strategy can be risky, but for us it paid off massively:

• We had the best defensive record in the League, and this was backed up by our xGA which was also the lowest (23.58) with the next best side, FC Martigues, conceding an expected 29.12.

• We conceded the fewest Shots (189) and Shots on Target (80) by a considerable margin.

• We also allowed by far the fewest Passes Attempted/Completed against. (13007/11049 vs 16244/13959)

• We also allowed the fewest Final Third Passes Against per game (38), which was far fewer than the next best team (59).

One area I think we could stand to improve upon is set pieces. We face just over 4 defensive corners per game, while having almost 10 of our own. But over the course of the season we scored 4 and conceded 4.

In summary, the early signs of our pressing style and youth development are positive. It'll be interesting to reflect back on these numbers as a point of reference at the end of our next campaign.