CR Belouizdad: The fluid and possession-based Algerian team who are unbeaten at the top of the league – scout report

After 19 years of wait, CR Belouizdad finally won again the Algerian league championship. Their last trophy was at the 2000/01 season in that competition, with a long drought that ended in the 2019/20 campaign. From there, the success has been fantastic for them, achieving three consecutive leagues and everything seems to indicate that they are going for the fourth in a row.

Nabil Kouki, after being able to manage in his career more than 14 football teams, has seemingly found his place in the world. With 15 games played, they have won 11, only drawn 4 and lost none. They are even undefeated. Not only that, but they have managed to be the side that scores the most goals and concedes the fewest, with 27 celebrated and 8 against.

In addition, the very fluid way of playing with a possession style, in addition to adapting to the fact that opponents constantly play them with a more reactive and pragmatic idea, waiting for their build-ups in a mid to low-block, Koukis team has achieved tremendous stability offensive and defensively. Kouki has achieved the best start in the history of Belouizdad in Ligue 1. If we compare with the previous season where they were also champions, at that time over 15 games played they recorded 22 goals for and 10 against in 10 wins, 3 draws and 2 losses.

We are going to do a tactical analysis, in the form of a scout report, of the tactics deployed by Kouki in Belouizdad, in addition to offering an analysis of various phases of his game.

Aggressive defending

Since their first post-drought league title in 2020, CR Belouizdad have created a status as an extremely powerful and dangerous team to play against. A squad full of good, high-level players who also, under Nabil Koukis mandate, have fitted in quite well and have integrated with positive chemistry between them.

One of the first things to review within their tactics is how aggressive they tend to defend. Normally throughout the game, they seek to defend in the last third or almost step on it if the intensity of the match begins to drop. The form is a 4-4-2 where the midfielders and wingers go out to mark the rival with man-marking responsibilities. This is how they block their rivals options and force them to hit the ball long, where the defensive back-four have been quite solid to clear balls and then the midfield to win second balls.

As we can see in the viz below, it shows the defensive actions of Koukis Belouizdad and how high they have been doing these. Many of them are in the last third of the rival, where they look to win the ball back to transition direct and rapidly later.

The first thing in this 4-4-2 is that the jump is from the two forwards. None of them covers a midfielder from behind, but rather the idea of the Algerian leader is to go and block both the pass of the one with the ball and the one that could be an option to turn the game around. If one wants to go back to the other, they wont be able to because he is marked and vice versa.

It can be somewhat risky but after all, with two players so close to those responsible for the first rival pass, stress will load them and they will look to execute long balls. In fact, many teams have transformed their game against Belouizdad like this, defending lower and hitting the ball into space or to the weak side to attack their backs. However, the improvement this year in the teams block and in their defensive responsibilities has been big.

As we can see, the jumps from th