Basic Tactics: Shape

In soccer, the way in which a team of players lines up is called a team's shape or formation. Shape is an important part of tactics. Depending on what kind of players a team has, and what their particular skills are, a manager needs to field them in a way that harnesses those skills to maximum effect. While footballers are generally more fluid in their ability to move around the pitch, generally speaking players tend to stick to the part of the pitch assigned to them in the team shape. In this article, we'll talk about how a shape is organized, how notation defining a shape is written. We'll go into the specifics of different formations in later articles.


What is a formation/shape in soccer?

Simply put, the shape a team takes indicates where their players will spend most of their time on the pitch. In a team with very rigid organization, a player may rarely or never leave the area assigned to them because of their formation. Remember the map of zones from our earlier article on positional basics?

That's the one

A formation is the description of where on this map each of the ten outfield players will line up.

How do you choose a formation?

A manager chooses a formation based on the type of football he or she would like to play. This is partially contingent on the manager's tactical preferences, game situations, and also on what kind of players are available to him. For example, a manager who wishes to play an attacking style might field more attacking players. A manager whose strategy is to control possession might field more midfielders, etc.

In practice, modern formations virtually never field players outside of the following parameters:

Defenders: Between 3 and 5.
Midfielders: Between 3 and 5
Attackers: Between 1 and 3.

Once in awhile you might see numbers more or less than that depending on game situation. A team down late might throw forward a bunch of extra attackers, for example. But those numbers are the usual range.

How are formations notated?

This one is a little tricky. Broadly, formations are described by counting the number of players in each of the major bands and writing them out that way. For example, a 4-4-2 is a formation with 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, and 2 strikers.

The problem with this system is that it doesn't always capture exactly where players line up, particularly if some of them are wide players. Consider the following formations:

Realistically, both of these formations can (and have been) written as a "4-3-3." Four defenders, three midfielders, three attacking players. But notice the difference in shape - in the left formation two of the attacking players play on the wings of the attacking midfield, while one of the midfielders plays deeper in the defensive midfield. So maybe we could call it a 4-1-2-2-1? Or a 4-5-1 (Four defenders, five midfielders, one attacker)? Because of this it's generally incumbent on the person describing the tactic to explain how it looks, beyond the notation.

Something to keep in mind: Two teams with the same formation can play very differently depending on the characteristics of the players on the team. I plan on getting to some position specific articles soon but for now it's important  to understand that two players can line up in the same part of the pitch and yet play drastically different roles in their team. Take as an example the player in the left attacking midfield position on the left side of the diagram above. That player might play as a winger - focusing on hugging the touchline and sending long horizontal passes to the striker. Or, the player might play as an inside forward - lining up on the wing of the pitch but then cutting inside when they have the ball to shoot on goal. Knowing a player lines up in a particular position isn't enough, we also have to know their skills and how they like to play, in order to understand how the players around him complement those skills.

And, that is the basics of shape or formation. In future articles we'll discuss some of the different basic formations, when you might use them, etc.