Hi guys, welcome to my channel. Yesterday was a real sad day for me, as an AC Milan fan since 1990, seeing my beloved AC Milan losing 5-1 against Inter Milan was a shock. But we deserved it, we did not play as we played in the first 3 games and the reason could be easily explained with one sentence: Inter is much stronger than us, their players are better. But it's not only that, when a team loses 5-1 it's not only because Inter players are better, all AC Milan players made mistakes and did not play the way they wanted and our coach, Stefano Pioli must work hard to find tactical balance, because this team hasn't a good balance. Pioli's new idea to let Calabria play as a central midfielder, like a playmaker to help the team in building the play is good when Milan is in possession, but in the defensive phase Calabria is slow to cover the right flank and this can be seen both in reality (Thuram and Mkitharian exploited that space) and in Football Manager as you can see in my video (I chose to use two IWB to replicate the position of both Calabria and Theo Hernandez, who was used to play also as a central midfielder since last year too). Let's now examine how I emulated this tactic on Fm23. In Football Manager 2023, I tried to emulate this tactic with the two fullbacks being two inverted wing backs to obtain their staying in the middle (Theo often did so last year too and, in the match against Atalanta he scored a beautiful goal starting from the left flank and cutting inside with the ball, dribbling all Atalanta's defenders towards the box). Then the two central defenders are a BPD on defense and a CD on defense too. The 3 midfielders are a DLP on defense playing in front of the defense (this role is modelled on Bennacer obviously) and two CM, the one in the right being a BBM-support to emulate Loftus-Cheek position, I tell him to move forward to let him make runs towards the box, the one in the left being a mezzala-attack (I thought also about using an Advanced Playmaker on attack but to replicate better the continuous forward-movement of Tijani Reinders, a mezzala suits better). Finally, the attack trio, we have two inside forwards on attack and a complete forward on support who has to drop down to link the play (Giroud is good at doing this.) In the possession phase, the instructions are the following: wide attacking width, shorter passing, sligthly higher tempo, play out of defence, overlap left and right, low crosses. In the transition phase, I gave the following instructions: counter press because Pioli wants his team to press high when they lose the ball, and counter because then they can start the attack immediately, roll it out and pass to the two cbs Out of possession: High press, higher defensive line, trigger press much more often because Milan wants to dominate the game, stay on feet (to avoid too many yellow or red cards), step up more to apply off-side trap, trap outside to force the opponent to play near the touchline where they have less options and stop crosses I finished 3rd (2nd together with Lazio) with Sassuolo, having the 2nd best attack (83 goals, after Inter's 86) and playing a beautiful football but having the same problems of Milan yesterday against Inter in defense. We conceeded 46 goals, being the 8th defense in Serie A, not a so bad result despite the fact that Sassuolo is not a top team with a top defense, but I think Pioli must work hard to improve the team's tactical balance. I trust Pioli because in his 4 years as Milan coach always tried new solutions to improve his team stability and this is one of the reasons why Milan won Serie A title in 2021-22 and came close to reach Champions League final last season being defeated by Inter (yes, we lost 5 times in 2023 against Inter!!!!) in the semi-final.
