DOMINATING Jose Luis Mendilibar Tactic
This is a tactic that at the moment of writing this article, took Olympiakos to the UEFA Europa Conference League final.
Thank you friend, for the suggestion!
Jose Luis Mendilibar was born in the Basque country and, unsurprisingly, has played for Athletic Bilbao, but the B team, among other clubs.
During his managerial career, so far, he has had success with Real Valladolid, getting them promoted to La Liga in 2006. And with Sevilla, with whom he has won the UEFA Europa League 4-1 against AS Roma.
In February 2024, he signed for the Greek team Olympiakos with whom he can add another European trophy to his cabinet.
This tactic recreation is based on Olympiakos’ games against Aston Villa and on Jose Luis Mendilibar’s appearance on The Coaches’ Voice en Espanol YouTube channel.
The tactic is a 4-2-3-1 and get ready for it…gegenpress. Yes, Olympiakos did put pressure on Aston Villa after they lost the ball. Mainly, this confused the English team in the first leg.
A sweeper keeper in goal. You need your goalkeeper to be comfortable on the ball, as he will be used as a passing option to break the opposition’s pressing game.
In front of him, two wing backs on support and two ball playing defenders on defend duty.
In the Aston Villa games, the wing backs gradually went up to the attack, essentially creating a 2-3-5 formation.
This put a lot of pressure on the English team, as Olympiakos applied pressure as soon as they lost the ball, and had to go out with a long ball, most of the times. Thus, losing possession of the ball.
In front of them, you have two choices. Either go with central midfielders like so – central midfielder and ball winning midfielder on support duty. Or with two defensive midfielders – a Segundo volante and a defensive midfielder.
I tested both and the central ones seem to emulate the tactic better.
On the flanks, two wingers on support duty. They are both told to cut inside and mark tighter. The right one is also told to get further forward.
An attacking midfielder on attack duty behind an advanced forward. For this tactic to fully work you need your striker to have great off the ball movement, to be able to pull off what El Kaabi did against Aston Villa.
I feel like this tactic wouldn’t work if his teammates couldn’t rely on El Kaabi’s brilliant movement off the ball.
Other player instructions are for the central midfielder to get further forward and close down more. And the attacking midfielder to mark tighter.
As you can see, we are telling our more attacking oriented players to mark tighter, as we want them to harry their opponents when the possession is lost.
As mentality, positive. But you can go with an attacking one at times, especially if you are dominating the opposition or the league.
In possession, fairly narrow attacking width, pass into space and play out of defence. If you feel like your opponent is sitting too deep, turn off pass into space. You would only concede possession if you continue to use it.
Shorter passing directness and slightly higher tempo. Though, at times, Olympiakos has also used a calmer pace in possession. But in the match engine, standard is not always what we want it to be, so I went with this setup.
Low crosses, as we want to score as manty opportunities as we can.
In transition counter-press, counter and distribute the ball quickly to the defence and through short kicks. Olympiakos did rely on counterattack at times, when needed.
Out of possession a high press, higher defensive line, trigger press more often and prevent goalkeeper short distribution.
But the defensive line can also be set as standard, as when they went 2-0 up in the first leg against Aston Villa, they focused more on defending rather than pushing forward.
If you feel like you are getting overrun by your opponent, tick off prevent goalkeeper short distribution as what this option does is dragging your players out of position, moving them forward to put pressure on the defensive line.
This tactic wasn’t as explosive as the last one, but we still won the treble in my building a nation save in Romania. We have won the league title, scored 120 goals and conceding only 32.
Of course, since we could be too good for the domestic competitions, we need to see how this tactic played against tougher opposition.
In the UEFA Champions League, we finished 5th in the League phase, having 6 wins, one draw against FC Barcelona and one loss against Arsenal.
But AC Milan got the better of us in the quarter final.
This tactic was surprising for me. I followed Jose Luis Mendilibar when he was managing Sevilla and of course, having great results with a team like the Spanish one is almost a given.
But to be able to take Olympiakos all the way to a European final is noteworthy in my opinion. No matter the outcome of the final, I am sure Jose Luis Mendilibar will remain a great football manager in recent history.
