ANDREA PIRLO My Football Defensive Phase PDF

Andrea Pirlo coach of Juventus FC during the Serie A football match between Juventus FC and UC Sampdoria at Allianz Stadium in Torino (Italy), September 20th, 2020.

Love him or hate him, this man has a lot to live up to, everybody knows how good this legend was for Italy and domestic teams.

You can not hate this man, he’s as cool as you like and there isn’t much he’s ever done wrong, just look at the beard!

Future Genius? Well let’s take a look, Andrea Pirlo has recently just managed to get himself the Juventus FC job being his first job in managerial football after the Serie A giants sacked Sarri for simply being not good enough in the Champions League, which is obviously the big thing for Juventus as the moment, they’ve completely dominated the Serie A for years now and now they want to take their domestic success and try and take it into Europe.

Andrea is the man for that job I fully believe, it’s like a match made in heaven.

Juventus still have the best odds to win the Italian Serie A with 5/6 compared to that of 2nd place Inter Milan with 21/10 and maybe Atalanta with 9/.

Therefore the bookies still believe that Juventus can win the league despite the managerial appointment.

Andrea just released his Thesis that he had to publish in order to achieve one of his coaching qualification badges, if you would like to read the whole thing, you can read more about it here:

It really is a great read for anyone looking at a great example on how to learn about tactics and why its important to do certain things in tactics, after all football tactics is no different than chess, you need to checkmate your opponent into being able to do nothing, the pieces you use can sometimes help or sometimes hinder this.

“The founding idea of my football is based on the will of a football that is purposeful, possessive and attacking .

I would like to play total and collective football, with 11 active players in the offensive and defensive phase.”

Andrea Pirlo

So straight away from this powerful sentence we can see that Pirlo wants his team to be able to play with purpose, no side passing and none of this rubbish meaningless passing a bit like Louis Van Gaal at Manchester United, with his boring side to side football, this is a massive no to Andrea,

he’s also emphasising the fact he wants attacking football both in defensive phases and obviously offensive phases with everyone involved, including the goalkeeper,

therefore we can see that he is a very ambitious coach, an admirer from Johan Cruyff it seems and his counter parts.

“We will therefore be looking for technical and dynamic players, giving importance one-on-one especially for external players.

Through the tutorials we want to help players recognize situations and adapt to the increasingly liquid context of matches.”

Andrea Pirlo

This is an odd requirement in modern day football, as he wants players especially assigned to have the skill to take a 1on1 on and come out as the winner of the two,

which for me is weird, I always thought football was about getting the players into positions where they essentially have all the time in the world to do something and nobody can touch them,

so I actually like this aspect he’s looking for in some of his players.

He still wants his highly technical players however but that was always to be expected by such a technical player.

Replicating his style into football manager

Now I’m not going to go over everything that Andrea has spoken about in his thesis because I would be here all day and therefore wouldn’t be able to actually get over the actual bit that everyone is interested in and thats how does and can this correlate into football manager,

well firstly I would strongly recommend going to read the article piece because you may not know what I’m talking about later in this article, therefore its very important you go and read that article.

We’re obviously going to be using Juventus or Zebre as they’re called in football manager and we’re going to try and recreate what Andrea is going to be asking for his Juventus squad in the coming months to see if it will be successful or not.

Objectives of his attacking phases:

Construction

Development

Connection to the line

Objectives of his defensive phases:

Pressing.

Defensive Provision.

Defensive Line.

Now you might be familiar with the defensive phase actions that Andrea is requesting,

however the attacking phases may come as a bit of a surprise and may confuse you,

I’m here to explain deeply about what we intend to do with these actions.

Using football manager in game actions and analysis to show you how to do it.

Football Manager

The way I set up in football manager is going to correlate against the way Andrea set up in real life for his first game in the Serie 

A against Sampdoria which they won 3-0 and Cristiano Ronaldo of course scored on the opening day, no surprise there.