FC BARCELONA: UNDER KOEMAN

Most of the successful barcelona coaches are their own players who have their DNA in them. They know the actual barcelona gameplay. Koemann has given good results with the Dutch national team and have also served and won UCL with Barcelona. His approach has evolved as the season has progressed based on injuries and the performances of the players.

We have improved majorly in three areas compared to the start of the season, and for the past 3 years for that sake; penetration, width, and movement of the ball. In this answer, I will primarily choose the second leg against PSG as a focal point.

Let’s start with penetration: 

Koeman has opted to use Dembele as Barcelona’s ‘number 9′. Dembele is not a striker but his movement of the ball to get into shooting positions has been nothing short of impressive, considering how little he has played as a ‘9’. There have been instances where he should have put more chances away but his speed and movement of the ball to get into dangerous positions is crucial if we want to play possession-based football. I see a lot of people saying that Suarez would have scored the chances Dembele is getting, I do not doubt that, however, he would never have gotten into these situations anyway because of his lack of speed. 

We had several instances like these in the match against PSG where Dembele gets in behind the defense and gets his shot of. Dembele’s pace makes us able to play with a lot more unpredictability than we would have with Suarez on the pitch. That does not take away the fact that Dembele’s finishing needs to improve.

Width

For the last 4 years, we have lacked width when we had the ball, especially the right side of the pitch has been a puzzle, forcing us only to be able to play with one winger, sometimes not even playing with wingers. This has been a huge problem for us when we have had the ball because we have been completely unable to stretch out the opponents’ defense, thus making it extremely easy to defend against us. The two wide wingbacks elegantly solve this problem.

The importance of width cannot be overstated Johan Cruyff said it best:

“If you have the ball you must make the field as big as possible, and if you don’t have the ball you must make it as small as possible".

Movement of the ball:-

Thirdly our movement of the ball has improved a lot since it has become much clearer whose job it is to get in behind the defense, and whose job it is to stay in between the lines. Messi now has much more freedom to choose where he wants to go, because of Dembele and the two wide wingbacks. The sequence leading up to Messi’s goal perfectly illustrates this:

In this example we see, Dest stretching out the right side, alba on the left, Dembele making sure to force the defenders to keep an eye on him thus giving Messi space. Of course, this is not the best example since you cannot expect anyone to score from here, but I thought it illustrated my point nicely.

Usually, when we had the ball, we would look like this:

Here we would see Dest tucked inside, Trincao tucked inside, thus making it very easy for Juventus to defend against us.

We have also improved in defense mostly because we now have 3+1 always in transitions, where we usually would have 2+1, or 2+2. This is also the perfect place to say that De Jong played an amazing game against PSG, despite him playing out of position.

Compare the abovementioned factors to this picture here from our match against Villareal in September 2020: 

Although we won the game, it is very clear that we had some major flaws in the way we structured our attack. If Villareal did not lose their head in this game they could easily have won. In this image, Busquets is the only one offering a passing lane in behind, no one is trying to go in between the lines, and the right side is completely empty thus making the pitch very small for Barcelona. It is frankly embarrassing that Sevilla even conceded this goal, but I digress.

All in all, the 3-5-2 solves a lot of problems that we have had over the past years, undoubtedly it has weaknesses but for now, it should be our preferred formation in big games.