Maybe we are not aligned on strategy v tactics. I view strategy (for example) as the formation a team plays: a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-4-3 or a 3-5-2...how a national team sets up is strategy. You obviously cant sign free agents to address your weakness so a national team needs to play to its strength and away from its weakness.
To me, within that strategy are the tactics. For example both Spain and England play a 4-2-3-1. Strategically it is the same set up. However, those two teams employ very different tactics. Spain play a very possession based system. When their goalkeeper gets the ball they play the ball thru their fullbacks to move the ball up field with possession. This is how the USMNT tries to play. England on the other hand uses more "dump and chase" tactics. When they get the ball they "boot it" up the field and try to chase it down. They have a Center forward (Kane) very adept at hold up play. The skill, and athleticism of their attacking wingers and attacking mid (Saka, Foden, Bellingham, Palmer) allow them to counter attack with great success and to employ a strong high press when their opponent gets the ball back. Same strategy different tactics.
So, to (maybe) answer your question (imo) the 4-4-3 formation the USMNT employs is the correct "strategy". But, with Bologun, Pulicic, Weah, and Reyna (plus players like Aaronson and Pepi off the bench) it is my opinion we are better served using the same "dump and chase" tactics as England. Our attacking players seem best suited to use their speed to "chase" as quickly as possible up the field and apply ball pressure on opposing full backs when we lose the ball knowing (when healthy) Dest and ARob have the speed to chase and catch opposing wingers who try to counter. And Bologun is physical and athletic enough to be a pretty good hold up player as well. On the other hand our fullbacks plus Adams and McKinnie all (imo) are pretty weak trying to possess the ball and pass it surgically up the field (like Spain). The USMNT (imo) is not a highly skilled team. We are a pretty athletic team (relatively speaking). I feel we play to our weaknesses not our strengths.
Tactics that require ++ball skills are not the right tactics for the USMNT (imo). Since Pulicic left Chelsea, Dest left Barcelona and McKinnie left Juventus there is not one player on the USMNT who are playing for what is considered an "elite" club team. Maybe Pulicic on AC Milan but not sure AC Milan are "elite". Meanwhile the teams who employ the same "tactics" as the USMNT have rosters littered with players playing for the best club teams in the World such as Man City, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool, etc. The only national teams using the same tactics as the USMNT have a level of talent on their roster that the USMNT simply does not have.
To use a college basketball analogy I feel Berhalter played a Princeton system with a Loyola Marymount (Bo Kimble/Hank Gathers vintage) roster.
Soccer formations are really
not a strategy. I'll defend that statement at the end of my post.
First, let me rephrase what I was trying to say... Strategy is a
plan. Tactics is the method of executing that plan. The plan can contain contingencies, but it's mostly predetermined prior to a game and doesn't typically change much during the game. The method of execution, OTOH, does change constantly and in many different ways throughout the game. Anyway, it's mostly semantics and not really important - I brought it up only because I misunderstood what you were saying about GB based on our different semantic takes.
As for England... England played what I think you're referring to as possession-soccer against the Dutch. And they had 60% of the possession. But while they appeared to try and do the same against Spain, there were largely unsuccessful and only had 37% of the possession.
After the game, Southgate was quoted as saying "we didn't keep the ball well enough". Now, perhaps England
was trying to be play more direct than they did against the Dutch. Who knows. But I assure you that England very much wanted to retain possession of the ball as much as possible, as Southgate's above quote makes clear.
Unless you mean playing more directly (but still with possession), then I'm not really sure what you mean by "dump and chase". It's not a phrase I've ever heard in my coaching life. In fact, I've only ever heard the phrase "chasing the ball" used in two ways, both with pretty negative connotations:
(1) When a player (typically a midfielder or back) is caught out of position by a sudden transition to defense and that player has to chase the ball backwards (recover back) towards his own goal to resolve the numbers-down situation. Number's down situations being generally undesirable, this form of chasing is seen as a bad thing and teams work to avoid it.
(2) When a team fails to properly swap to a new first defender after the first attacker makes a sideways pass. When that happens, the initial first defender often winds up having to chase the ball sideways to re-establish themselves as the first defender marking the new first attacker. Other than when a pass is quite short, this is pretty much always a really bad thing. Because it opens up the center of the field for easy through passes on the ground. This form of chasing is typically a sign of improperly established defensive shape. Because
proper defensive shape allows a second defender to quickly move up to become the new first defender as the prior first defender quickly recovers back and tucks in as a second defender in order to prevent an easy through pass. With good defending, nobody ever has to chase the ball, the defense just rotates (kinda like a basketball zone) which is way more efficient and makes it way more difficult for the attacking team to make penetrating passes on the ground (i.e. high percentage passes).
TBH, I've never heard "chasing the ball" used as an attacking soccer term. I
have heard the term "kick and run" which seems to match what you're describing. But I don't actually know any coaches who intentionally do that unless they feel their team is vastly overmatched. Then they play long passes out of the back, hope they can get some lucky bounces, and settle in to defend very compactly ceding possession to the other team almost entirely. I've resorted to doing a few times when in games where we were totally overmatched. But it's a measure of last resort. A kind of teamwide lack of composure. It's embarrassing.
Hm... Perhaps you're referring to pressing or defending high? In that context, it can appear like the defenders are chasing the ball. The forwards will essentially chase sideways in that context and the mids will play a bit of man on man to force the other team into playing a low percentage pass upfield, often giving up possession. It's not a total abdication of zonal defending, but it's necessarily less compact.
But that's
not how you advance the ball from your defensive third. It's what you do when the ball's already up in the attacking third and you lose possession. And while there are certain contexts where it can work, there are contexts where it's a really, really bad idea.
Against a team like Spain, doing that is likely to get you scored on quickly because their defenders are so good at ball distribution out of the back. You can only do it when you have a very strong back line. And the USMNT is weak at the back, so yeah, probably a very bad idea against elite teams. And the USMNT has no good reason to not play possession soccer against weaker teams at this point.
Also, I don't agree that the USMNT lacks the skill to play possession soccer. GB's teams were regularly beating Mexico and dominating time-of-possession. Mexico may not be at their strongest at the moment, but they're still ranked pretty high last time I checked (14 maybe, not really sure). And the US did decently against Brazil in their friendly. I think they need to work on getting better at it; and should not abandon it. We can agree to disagree about that.
Back to soccer formations. Formations aren't what most people seem to think they are. They're just a framework for discussion about the game, an initial point of reference, and often have little to no actual bearing on what takes place during the game. Within a given team, a formation is used as a reference for discussing roles and responsibilities.
Outside the team, in media and fan-land, it's a framework for discussion too. But the discussions lack the inside knowledge to ever really be meaningful. Fun, perhaps, but mostly meaningless. Although, I thought Landon Donovan did a decent job of discussing system of play during one of the England games I watched (can't recall which one). He got beat up online for being boring, but that's 'cause most people lack the background to understand what he was saying. Of all the former USMNT players commentating, Donovan seems the most educated from a coaching point of view (makes me wonder if he's had some coaching exposure at some point, or if he's just smarter than the other former players).
So yeah, formations are not really strategies. They're just a tool in the coach's arsenal. A system of play
is a strategy. But the exact same system of play can be based around several different formations. And one formation can be the foundation for several different systems of play. There are no rules about this stuff.
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