With the amount of forward thinking players being linked/signed by us is there a chance we may see the Barca/Spain 4-6-0 (or 2-8-0 with real attacking fullbacks) at times next season?
Without going too much into it (never start me off on the 4-6-0, I've been obsessed with the idea for 3/4 years now) playing a strikerless formation requires a very specific team set up and a very specific style of play.
At the bare minimum you need:
1. Exceptionally skilled inside forwards able to open up defences with skill and pace as well as being great finishers. Mata and Hazard arguably fit this bill but I'm reluctant to put Sturridge in this category because a large degree of awareness is required for the role and you also have to be willing and able to lay the ball off to an overlapping fullback or a midfielder surging forward.
2. Midfield runners. Between Lampard and Ramires we arguably have some of best players in the world to perform this very taxing role.
3. An exceptional player to play the false nine role. This would an insane amount of pressure to put on Hazard and although I believe that Mata could be an incredible false nine, he has shown that his form dips when he is not allowed rest.
4. A metric fuckton of midfielders. Whatever number you're thinking is probably not big enough. You effectively start the game with 6 midfield players. You then need to account for the fact that your midfield runner will need ungodly levels of stamina and will need to be rested. You then need to account for the fact that the front 3 put in a lot of work and will need to be rotated. There are very few squads in the world that have such depth.
5. This is similar to the last point, but you need to also think about the quality of those subs. If your spare inside forwards can't cut the mustard, you're suddenly in massive trouble because the whole tactic is geared towards creating space for them. Wrong footed wingers that can shoot, dribble, pass and run are incredibly rare and incredibly expensive. Likewise, attacking midfielders that can do the same with the added need for incredible vision and movement can be counted on one hand.
6. If Roma's highly aggressive approach to the tactic has taught us anything, it's that fielding 6 midfielders is not always defensively sound. Spain somewhat rectified this by shifting the focus of the style from quick counters to a more possession based game (Barca did this also but if we talk about them we have to talk about Messi's version of the false nine which is another tangent altogether) and in doing so were able to retain defensively solidity. They were able to do this because they had a world class regista (or 3).
tl;dr: I can see it as an option in theory but I don't think our squad is big enough to pull it off effectively and it's such a shift in style that it's not worth all that training to use it as a tactic for the first 60 minutes of 4/5 specific games.
(If anyone is interested I'm writing a series of articles about this subject and I will be publishing them alongside a 4-6-0 thread in the tactics forum. I'm probably going to hold back until November so I can publish it alongside a tactic for the new game, which will help with the fact that everytime I think I'm nearing the end, a loose little thread turns into a whole new ball of yarn. I did recreate the formation in FM2012 by taking Mata to Napoli and ended up with a treble winning side utilising a false nine and flase ten combination, but with only a few months left of FM2012, I'd rather wait for the new edition to push my ridiculously huge wall of text ^^)
