Game Model
“A bad plan is better than no plan at all” - Charles de Gaulle
This is certainly true for your 5-aside team. At least with a plan you can evaluate what went wrong and what went well, so you can improve. So, the first thing is to actually have a plan of how you are going to play. This is often known as the ‘Game Model’. When professional clubs design their Game Model they’ll use club history, culture of the town or city the club is located and the players at their disposal. The Game Model for our 5-aside team doesn’t need to take all of these things into account, but it does need to be catered to our specific context, such as:
What are our team’s strengths?
What are our team’s weaknesses?
What is the pitch environment? (goal size, pitch dimensions, walls or out of bounds lines)
What are the rules of the competition? (offsides, no-go zones, goalkeeper distribution restrictions)
These considerations are important - devising a plan that relies on an aggressive and intense pressing strategy to win the ball high up the pitch when your team is less fit than the opposition and doesn’t train together is going to have limited success.
Phases of play
Along with these considerations, we need to break the match down to make sense of it. This can be done by looking at the phases of play.
At any one time a football match will be in one of four states:
your team is in possession (attacking)
your team is out of possession (defending)
defensive transition (your team has lost the ball)
attacking transition (your team has won the ball)
In Possession we want to make the pitch as big as possible and Out of Possession we want to make the pitch as small as possible.
The transitions are typically chaotic and we are most vulnerable when we lose the ball (Defensive Transition) and move from In Possession to Out of Possession. The opposite is therefore also true: our opposition is most vulnerable when we win the ball (Attacking Transition) move from Out of Possession to In Possession.
Over the following pages we’ll look at specific ways we can plan for each phase of a football match.