What’s your MLS team? I’m a Galaxy fan

Do you have a national team?

Tifo Football on YouTube has some good tactical stuff, it might be a little more in depth than what you’re after. But they’ll put up videos after big games like “here is how team A beat team B and how their tactics achieved that”.

Depending on how much time you have, if you’re interested in formations there’s a good book called “inverting the pyramid” that’s about how modern formations came to be (the title comes from the fact that in the early days teams would have most of their guys further up the field and less defenders, and that has basically inverted over the years).

Formations in elite level football are super fluid in the modern game though. There’s a lot of content out there, depending on how much of a tactics nerd you want to become. That sort of granular analysis isn’t super interesting to me so I don’t have many recs.

I can give a quick run down of positions… this might take a while, haha.

Goalkeeper: pretty obvious, the person at the back with the gloves and weird coloured shirt who can use their hands. You might hear the term “sweeper keeper” a lot. Basically that is used to denote the “modern” style of goal keeper that comes and “sweeps” up behind the defence and is good with their feet, rather than the old school pure shot stopper. (A sweeper used to be a type of defender who would sit behind the defensive line to sweep up balls over the top and so on, now the trend is for the gk to do that job)

Defenders: you’re usually gonna see it described as a back 3 (or 5…) or a back 4. Back 4 is two “full backs” on the left and right, with two centre backs in the… centre. Full backs can also be “wing backs”, which is a more attacking full back who gets up the field much more to help attack. You usually see wing backs on either side of 3 centre backs (this is where the 3 at the back/back 5 including the wingbacks comes in). Centre backs used to just be big tough guys who could tackle and head the ball, but more and more the trend is for them to be good in possession too, to carry or pass the ball upfield (at the elite level this really goes for every position these days).

So to sum up the defenders you have fullbacks, wingbacks, centrebacks (aka centre halfs, a bit archaic now).

Midfield is where it gets complicated. For the sake of brevity I’ll try to keep it simple. As far as central midfield goes, you can have more defensively skilled guys who will sit in front of the defenders and win tackles/cut out passes etc, as well as start attacks if they’re good at carrying the ball or passing themselves. These are the defensive midfielders. Then you have true centre mids, which are weirdly kind of rare at the minute. You’ll also hear the term “box to box” midfielder. It’s because that’s where they do their business, between the boxes, winning that midfield battle for their team and setting up attacks. Then you have your attacking midfielders. The traditional centre attacking midfielder is a skilful guy who threads passes through to the strikers and knits attacks together, but now the role is super varied (if a team has one at all). Besides the CDM, CM, and CAM there’s also left and right midfielders, but they’re pretty rare to see at the top level these days because most teams don’t play a 4-4-2 formation. You’ll have attacking fullbacks or even wingbacks doing the job a wide midfielder used to do.

Oh also just to make things super fun and confusing for a newcomer, defensive midfielders also get called “sixes”, box-to-box mids get called “eights” and central attacking midfielders get called “tens” - however this often has nothing to do with what number the player is actually wearing because the way shirt numbers work has changed, but the short hand has stayed the same. You can also have more than one of each (lmao). Like a team might play a “midfield three” in a 4-3-3 that has two 6s and an 8 - or if they’re being more attacking a 6 and two 8s!

Then there’s the attackers/forwards. This sorta kinda includes the aforementioned central attacking midfielder AKA “number ten” from earlier, as you’d expect. In front of the number 10 you have…. The number 9 AKA the striker. The guy who sits at the tip of the spear whose main job is to score goals (except when it isn’t, but hey this is a simplified explanation here). The attackers on wide left and right are called wingers. Wingers (and full backs and right left mids) used to play on the same side as their dominant foot. So your right winger would be right footed. This was back when a lot of teams played with 2 strikers in a 4-4-2, so the right mids/wingers would be trying to cross into those guys. These days you see a lot of so-called “inverted wingers” who play on the OPPOSITE to the traditional side, trying to come inside and use that angle to shoot with their stronger foot, or play in teammates.

As you can see, with all these positional variants coaches have a lot of options, but they can only pick 10 outfield players. This is where all the different formations come from. For example a 3-4-3 will have the wide play provided by the wingbacks (the outer two of the “four”) while the wingers will likely be inverted (the outer two of the front 3) so those wingbacks have space to work with out wide.

As for how to figure out if a team is doing well when they’re not actively scoring… are they having a lot of shots on target? Forcing the opposing keeper to make a lot of saves? Do they have the majority of the ball possession? Are they stringing a lot of passes together and putting together nice attacking moves? Is the game being played primarily in the opposition half rather than their side of the field? Those are all signs a team is on top and playing well.

Really I could take about this shit for hours because it’s fun for me, but I might just be telling you stuff you already know! Haha