Formed by Hammers supporters Jack Elderton and Callum Goodall to offer their fellow fans in-depth but accessible analysis of their team and its players, Analytics United will provide content for the Club's official website, app, Official Programme and social media channels over the course of the 2023/24 season.
Here, Analytics United use performance analysis and data to examine how West Ham United can get the better of the Serbian SuperLiga highfliers...
Many Hammers fans may not have heard of FK TSC Bačka Topola prior to the UEFA Europa League group stage draw just a few weeks ago, but the Serbian side have been experiencing a meteoric rise and have enjoyed an excellent start to the 2023/24 season, sitting top of the SuperLiga after six games.
The team from the northernmost province of Vojvodina are unbeaten in the league at time of writing and have already faced one of the heavyweights, managing a 3-3 draw against 2017 champions FK Partizan thanks to a 96th-minute equaliser from once-capped defensive-midfielder-cum-centre-back Nemanja Stojić – someone we’ll be coming back to focus on later in this piece.
Manager Žarko Lazetić has been with FK TSC for just shy of two years and has surpassed all expectations. The former Partizan assistant manager took over when TSC had dropped to eighth midway through the 2021/22 season and guided them back up to a fourth placed finish before taking them to new heights in challenging at the very top of the table last season. TSC would eventually take second, with FK Crvena Zvezda (Red Star Belgrade) finishing well clear at the top with a mammoth 97 points after a full unbeaten season, but this was still a huge achievement for the club and their highest all-time league finish after only being promoted to the SuperLiga in 2019.
Whilst TSC have had limited success in their European fixtures so far – they were guaranteed a Europa League group-stage place despite a 7-1 aggregate defeat at the hands of SC Braga in Champions League qualifying – history tells us not to write off a Serbian team in UEFA competition, as Liverpool found out on a trip Belgrade in 2018, when Milan Pavkov rattled home a brace and secured a famous victory for Zvezda. In fact, Serbian teams have beaten British opposition on 17 occasions in UEFA Cup/Europa League history and that’s without considering recent draws for Zvezda and Partizan against Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal respectively in this exact competition.
Despite this and Lazetić’s impressive work so far, there are systematic and qualitative weaknesses in the TSC side that David Moyes and his team are sure to have recognised ahead of this encounter. The first and most interesting of these comes as a consequence of the complex approach Lazetić takes to his team’s formation and its re-organisation in different phases of the game. Whilst starting formations are largely irrelevant across most top-level football now as coaches tend to organise their players in different shapes to maximise strengths and minimise weaknesses appropriately when pressing, defending, building up, and attacking, Lazetić’s imagining of this creates some transitional dysfunctionality.
The clearest of these issues comes in the transition between Lazetić’s pressing shape and defensive shape as his team reorganises. TSC encounter issues in this transition as a result of the disparity in aggression shown by the midfield and defensive lines. At times, TSC can find themselves caught with a defensive unit of five and a pressing unit of five with wing-backs, or full-backs (TSC have played a myriad of different formations so far this season including 5-4-1, 5-3-2, 4-4-2, and 4-3-3) too reluctant to bomb on and impact opposition build-up, leaving dysfunctionality in the press and huge gaps between the lines.
These issues are then compounded by the solution to this problem as TSC’s centre-backs can step out of defence to aggressively close down opposition advanced midfielders, or a floating number ten that can cause carnage in these yawning gaps between the lines. Looking at an example from when TSC lost 3-0 to Braga in Champions League qualifying, Stojić – who at times advanced into a double-pivot himself when TSC got on the ball – was left exposed at the heart of TSC’s 5-4-1 defensive shape as he was constantly forced into the channels to cover dovetailing countercurrent runs from opposition wingers exploiting the lateral centre-backs’ aggression.
To break this down more simply from an attacking perspective: If build-up can be completed successfully through TSC’s press versus first phase, then a domino effect can be instigated by the movement of the attackers drawing the attention of one of the defenders in TSC’s back five. In reality, this chain reaction begins before this when drawing TSC’s midfield high but the effects are seen when an attacker can draw out a defender and create the necessary space for a teammate to surge into. Suddenly, the TSC defenders find themselves chasing and any overcommitments easily lead to overloads in dangerous areas of the pitch.
This is exactly how Braga scored their first goal against TSC in Champions League qualifying as former Hammer José Fonte triggered a rapid series of passes that led to serial defensive overcommitments and an opportunity for Bruma, which he gobbled up brilliantly. Lazetić himself admitted the size of this issue after the tie by saying that he was ‘too busy with what to do with the ball and did not pay enough attention to the fact that, in defence, we have to be aggressive.’
Braga were also able to capitalise on the other key problem that TSC could face tonight – failure to retain possession through build-up against advanced opposition. Though they might be challenging to break down when settled in a deep block, if TSC lose the ball when trying to play through pressure, as they more than likely will attempt, this can leave defenders similarly exposed to the qualitative differences between the sides and create issues for the Serbian side defensively.
