Attacking Principle #4: Threaten
A little announcement: I originally started this Substack when I took a year off from coaching and still wanted to stay engaged with it somehow. So I wrote in the hopes that it would help me refine my style and learn more about myself and the game in the process.
At the beginning of this year I returned to coaching. While my plan for this Substack was to publish on a weekly basis it has become hard to sustain as my attention and time have more constraints placed on them now. I still want to make things and share them, but I have not been able to publish as consistently as I wanted to.
Moving forward, I think I need to treat this as a seasonal hobby. In the slower coaching months, such as the summer, I will post more frequently – and I’m aiming for once a week. During busier seasons I will only be able to post when I can.
I suppose this is a long way of saying my posts will be infrequent for at least another month as I continue to coach my teams, but I do have some exciting things I’m working towards for this project. That’s all for now. I hope everything is good in the coaching world for you guys!
At long last, here is our fourth attacking principle: Threaten. To review, the first three are Support, Width, Triangulation, and now we’re finally looking at how to create actual goal-scoring opportunities.
For me, threaten means the team is looking to exploit space behind the opponent’s defensive line. Now this works on a few different levels of course. For instance, you can threaten the space behind the opponent’s first pressing line, you can threaten the space behind the opponent’s midfield line, or you can threaten behind their back line.
None of these attacking principles exist in isolation and there is significant overlap between them. However, for the purposes of simplicity, we’re going to look at what it means to threaten the space behind the opponent’s last defensive line.
Purpose
Perhaps it’s best to begin by stating the obvious. You want to exploit the space behind the opponent simply because it’s how you advance the ball. The more you move the ball forward, the easier it is to score and the farther it is away from your own goal. Whether that latter segment is good or not depends on your team’s strategy, but for my purposes in youth development, I want my players to get as many touches on the ball and create as many goal-scoring opportunities as possible simply because the more touches on the ball you get, the better the player you will become.
The next purpose of threatening space behind the opponent is that either A) they don’t defend well and your team easily advances the ball, or B) the opposition does defend well and gives up field space to your team. Even if the ball doesn’t make it to the threatening player, it still helps your team establish better field position and makes it easier to go through, over, or around the opposition.
Now in my mind there’s two broad camps we can divide threatening runs into: behind the opponent and in front of the opponent.
Runs in Front
Let’s pretend the opposing team’s outside back starts out close to the wide forward. The wide forward can attempt to run behind the opponent, but in a few steps they’ll be offside and it’s fairly easy for the opponent to maintain their positional advantage. So the alternative is to run in front of the opponent, which seals them off from the ball and allows the winger to receive the ball in a center channel.
The same concept can also be applied to the center forward. When the ball is in the opposite half-space from the center forward, the center forward can run in front of the center back on their side and receive the ball into the path of their run.
Runs Behind
Of course not every run should be in front of the opponent. When the opposition is playing closer to the ball then the ball can either be passed around them and into the open space behind or – depending on their positioning, space on field, and technique of ball carrier – the ball can be passed past them and into the path of the running player.
Let’s look at this from the position of a winger.
The same can also be looked at from the viewpoint of a center forward too.
Diagonal Balls Behind
In these last two examples we looked at when the ball was in central channels, but not all balls delivered behind the back line will come from there. When a wide player has the ball they can play a ball into the channel that the center forward is running into. Normally the ball will move past the center back on the strong side and the center forward be running into the space behind them to make a play on the ball. These balls can be early crosses played on the ground when there’s space behind the opponent’s back line to run into, or in the air when the center forward is running into the box.
What’s nice about this setup is that an attacking midfielder can also make a run behind the opponent. This creates a second passing option for the winger and it can also drag the near side center back to cover the run, thus opening up space in the middle for a cross to the center forward (the green space in the image below) or for the attacking midfielder to play ball into once the receive it.
Details
Now there lots of little details that go into good threatening plays. The first is simply the timing of the run which is based on the ball-carrier. When the ball-carrier receives the ball, or is about to, they can communicate with the forward who they are passing to, thus alerting them to the situation and triggering their run. The run can also be triggered when they see that the ball-carrier has looked up and has the time/space to hit the pass.
Now of course these components aren’t always necessary. Well trained teams will be able to successfully execute the play without looking up and/or with limited time and space. When players have a shared collective understanding of where to go with the ball next, they can move the ball forward quicker.
It’s worth mentioning that there is a strong element of trust that coaches need to develop for this to happen. If a player doesn’t trust their teammate to pass the ball, or to pass it accurately, then they won’t make the run. If the player with the ball doesn’t trust that the threatening player will run, they won’t pass the ball. It becomes a cyclical self-fulfilling prophecy that the coach needs to stay on top of by ensuring the team has bought into the tactical game plan and reinforcing good decision-making until the players can perform it accurately and consistently enough. However, this also means the coach must understand what the players are realistically capable of too.
Once that trust and shared understanding has been built, players need to come to understand the technical abilities of the ball-carrier, the speed of the runner, where and how they like the ball played, etc.
Next, there has to be space behind the opposition for threatening passes to be played into. It’s an obvious part of the play but it’s worth mentioning. Limited space behind the opponent’s back line means there’s less margin of error to successfully execute the play. If the opponent is playing with a deeper line, it may be important to make threatening runs to keep them forced back (i.e. decoy runs or dummy runs) and open up space for the next line of attack to take up a higher position on the field.
There’s a fancy term called “dynamic superiority” which really just means how does somebody match up physically against someone who is guarding them. The quicker you can identify whether you have a mismatch against the opponent, or vice-versa, the more you can use it to your advantage or guard against it. Think of all those poor national teams in the 2018 World Cup where no one could stop Kylian Mbappe.
Now it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of how to exploit space behind the opponent but really it comes down to players simply understanding where the space is behind the opponent (or if there is) and the ball carrier figuring out a way to get the ball there. That’s it. Once players understand the technical abilities of the ball-carrier, the tactical game plan setup by the coach, and the playing attributes of the threatening player, finer details can be layered on – such as where the defender is looking, how the opponent is pressing, how multiple threatening runs can be stacked on top of each other, etc. Doing all of this takes time and the fundamental building blocks are players recognizing when and how to make runs and how to get the ball to them.
Wrapping Up
In broad strokes, these attacking principles are all you need. You have width and support to maintain possession and move the ball around defensive blocks, you have triangulation to play through defensive lines, and finally you have threatening options to create goal-scoring opportunities. At its roots, this is a simple game, and you can use these schemas to identify which aspects of your team can be built around and which need improving.
At some point I’ll write about the different defensive tactical principles too, but for now, keep an eye out for next week’s interview with Julianne Sitch, the first female coach to win a NCAA National Championship with a men’s team. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!