One of my great irritations with Serie A is the obsession with formations and tactics. Every fan thinks they understand every aspect of every team and could do a better job than the manager. In fact, I’m the only one with that ability and the claims of everyone else to possess that unique talent minimizes my own obvious genius. It simply must stop.
With that Lampardian transition out of the way, I’ll begrudgingly engage with the spate of recent articles wondering if Fiorentina should switch to a back
3 and I’ll open with the statement that a formation is essentially meaningless in the modern game. Tactics are more complicated than they’ve ever been and the rise of tracking data means coaches have more tools than ever to line out specific roles to their players. Back fours become back threes in possession. Fullbacks become registe. Wingers become mezzale. Acting like a single set of numbers captures the dynamism of the game is almost criminally reductive. With that out of the way, here are my best bets on how a back three Fiorentina would look, starting with a 3-5-2.
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This looks like a mess to me. Adding another defender means dropping a midfielder or, in this case, an attacker. I don’t like the idea of Mastantuono playing through the middle, where opponents can restrict his space and boot him up in the air more than they already do. I like the prospect of dropping Alieu Njie even less; maybe he’d replace Víctor Valdepeñas at wingback but that introduces numerous issues and would end up looking like the current 4-3-3 in practice so why even bother? The Fagioulaï problem remains, well, a problem. In short, playing a 3-5-2 would push the team’s best attackers into positions on the pitch where they’d likely be less effective. Maybe a 3-4-2-1/3-4-3 is the solution.
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This looks a little better. Fagioli doesn’t convince me in a double pivot but Cher Ndour or Christ Inao Oulaï can do the heavy lifting off the ball. The tridente looks pretty promising, too. Mastantuono can still take up his usual place on the right while Arthur Atta and Njie offer very different profiles depending on their form and the opponent. Pedro Gonçalves might suit this system as well. So it’s settled. Vanoli needs to go to a 3-4-2-1, right?
As you probably guessed, the answer is something along the lines of, “Well, no. Not necessarily.” The defense remains a problem. 2 of the 3 defenders possess rudimentary skill on the ball and having all 3 of them back there means there’s no room for the holding midfielder to drop back and get on the ball. I wrote an entire article on this last year and and one of the salient points holds true: unless the back three understands how to rotate forward, the buildup structure is very static. I trust Luca Ranieri to do that well (although maybe not some of the other stuff). I don’t trust Marin Pongračić, Radu Drǎgușin, or Viery in the same way.
I don’t think that Vanoli would mirror Stefano Pioli’s cursed 3-4-2-1 because he’s got different players and a different attitude but some of the same structural problems would exist. A double pivot almost always requires the midfielders to have excellent physical profiles and the ability to hold up physically, which has been Fagioli’s greatest weakness throughout his time in Florence. I also worry about the lack of width going forward; time and again, we’ve seen how opposing defenses can collapse into the middle and stifle a narrow tridente. That’s not to say it can’t work; there are all kinds of ways to manufacture width and cover athletic shortcomings. They take time to implement, though, and one thing the Viola lack is time.
I feel for Paolo Vanoli, who’s dealing with the the mirror image of last year’s scenario, when he inherited a broken back three from his predecessor and only turned the team around by switching to a back four. That ignores the work he put into the team in training. The tactical stuff mattered, yeah, but the mental stuff mattered more. His biggest task and greatest triumph was patching what looked like a terminally fragile mentality into one that eventually achieved salvation. Changing the shape doesn’t fix the brain.
Here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Vanoli can see this train screeching off the rails and has only so many levers to pull to wrest it back on course. Changing shape is one of those levers. Maybe all he has to do is pull it and the squad will fall into place, both tactically and mentally. After all, when the coach changes the way your team plays, it forces you to reevaluate some how you’ve been playing and why it hasn’t been working. It’s as much a mental reset as anything else.
If it doesn’t work, though, that’s one fewer bullet Vanoli has in the cylinder. The others include benching prominent players (a risk in itself); calling a ritiro (hackneyed at best); fully realigning strategic rather than tactical principles (nearly impossible for any coach); and manufacturing feuds with ownership, fans, the media, or members of the squad (transparently short-term). Those are all single-use options too and it’s probably not wise to use all of them in the same season.
For narrative reasons, it’s important for Vanoli to look calm; button-mashing will puncture that image beyond repair. I don’t like that coaches are influenced by fan opinion because their duties exist on a different scale than those of the fans. The manager has to maximize the chance of success over a full season rather than in a single game. The fans, on the other hand, have to live and die with each match. The tension between those poles results in criticism from supporters that misses the entire purpose of the manager.
More important than massaging the the story in the press is ensuring that the group itself backs the mister; once it loses faith in the boss, it’s over. Tactical or personnel errors don’t just lose a team points; they erode the squad’s trust in its leader. Get too many decisions wrong and the players—who know the game better than any fan—worry about the efficacy of the game plan, and that makes winning nearly impossible. A coach’s job is more acting than any of us want to acknowledge, a performance of steely-eyed resolve and total understanding of and commitment to the plan that everyone, players and fans alike, agree to believe. Scramble too much, grasp at too many levers, and that fiction becomes impossible to sustain.
So yeah, maybe Paolo Vanoli should switch to a back three because it will fix everything and the team will never drop another point and the angels will sing and the kids who bullied me in school will repent. Niccolò Machiavelli certainly thought so: “It is better to act and repent than not act and regret.” He was dealing with minor things like national government, though, rather than anything as complex and important as the Associazione Calcio Firenze Fiorentina and the untold confusion that constantly surrounds it. If Vanoli’s going to pull that lever, he has to understand that he has to be right. Or else.
