Christophe Pélissier guided Lorient back to Ligue 1 by helping them to win Ligue 2 in 2019/20, ensuring the 2020/21 season would be the Brittany club’s first back in the top flight since their 2016/17 relegation.
Pélissier registered consecutive 16th-place finishes among France’s elite in 2020/21 and 2021/22 before he and the club ultimately parted ways this past summer, making way for long-time Lorient B boss Régis Le Bris to take the reins of Les Merlus’ first team.
Le Bris has a fascinating coaching history, with the 2022/23 campaign representing his first in senior football management.
The 47-year-old may be forgiven for developing quite a rosy impression of senior football management based on his experience this season, as his first campaign has been a very positive one thus far, leading Lorient to 28 points from their first 15 games of the season — placing them in fifth at the World Cup break.
Arsène Wenger once told a story of philosophically explaining he would tell God one day when asked ‘what have you done with your life?’: “I tried to win football games” and in response to God’s follow-up question ‘is that all you have done?’; he would say: “It’s not as easy as it looks!” One could then point to Le Bris’ excellent start with Lorient as a counter to that, given how naturally he’s adapted to first-team football.
(Are we going a little bit over the top?!)
Okay, in all seriousness, football management is unmistakably an unforgiving, cut-throat world, and Le Bris will be well aware of that, despite the 47-year-old’s promising start to life in senior management; he didn’t just enter the football world yesterday and has worked as a coach for quite some time — since 2003, in fact, when he became Wasquehal’s Head of Academy Coaching.
Le Bris spent a year there before taking up the same role with Rennes, where he spent eight years.
The Lorient boss then made the move across Brittany to Rennes’ rivals Lorient, where he’s now worked for 10 years in various youth coaching roles before stepping up to the first team this past summer.
His extensive background in working with young players may partially explain his success with the joint-fifth youngest squad in Ligue 1 this term.
Should Le Bris want to remain in the senior football management world going forward, he’s giving himself an excellent launchpad with his promising start with Les Merlus, a club he knows like the back of his hand at this stage.
Plenty of Lorient’s shining stars on the pitch have been receiving some hype this season, with Enzo Le Fée, Dango Ouattara and Terem Moffi among those most highly praised for their 2022/23 campaign.
However, Le Bris deserves as much recognition as anyone for his performance as head coach which has given his players an excellent platform to deliver top performances and show off their strengths as much as they’ve been able to.
This Régis Le Bris tactical analysis piece and head coach-focused scout report will provide analysis of Lorient’s tactics this season under Le Bris.
We’ll look extensively into how the 47-year-old has set his team up this term and how they’ve played to achieve the success they have on the pitch this term, in all phases of play.
Régis Le Bris Build-up and ball progression
As mentioned above, we’ll look at some key elements of Le Bris’ tactics in all phases of play in this tactical analysis.
We’ll start by looking at how Lorient play with the ball, which we’ve divided into two sections — firstly looking at their build-up play and ball progression, the first two phases of play in possession, before then moving on to their performance in the final third.
Lorient typically defend in a 4-4-2 and attack in a shape that most resembles either a 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 if you want to put a numerical label on it for reference.
However, the shape isn’t necessarily ‘fixed’, so to speak.
Indeed, they typically build up with the centre-backs split on either side of the goalkeeper and the full-backs pushed up just beyond them, generally in line with the deepest midfielder.
However, the exact positioning of the three midfielders varies a bit, especially with regard to Enzo Le Fée’s positioning.
Le Fée is given a lot of freedom to drop or advance his position depending on the picture around him, concerning both his own teammates’ positioning and his opponents’ positioning.
In figure 1, for example, Le Fée opts to drop as he notices both centre-backs and the holding midfielder, Bonke Innocent, are covered by PSG’s aggressive press.
By dropping from his more advanced position, Le Fée can find some space between the PSG forwards and alongside Innocent.
As play moves on, the goalkeeper, former Arsenal man Vito Mannone — who’s generally been Lorient’s backup to Yvon Mvogo who made the move to Les Merlus from Bundesliga side RB Leipzig this past summer — slides the ball to Le Fée who’s able to get on the ball and play it out wide for the right-back to continue Lorient’s attack beyond PSG’s first line of pressure.
Le Fée isn’t just given the license to move around vertically during the early possession phases, he’s also given the freedom to switch sides and move about horizontally if he sees fit.
Take figure 2, for example.
Firstly, he switches from the left to the right, resulting in Innocent switching to the left.
The purpose of this is to lose his marker, which we see he achieves as play moves from the top-left quadrant of figure 2 to the top-right quadrant.
As Troyes’ midfield reacts and Le Fée is picked up on the right, he subsequently switches back to the left, again to try and find some space, with Innocent responding in kind, moving back to his initial position on the right.
Le Fée’s dynamic movement results in Lorient’s shape changing a lot in the build-up, so sometimes it’ll appear like a 2-3 and other times it’ll appear as a 2-4 shape.
Ultimately, Lorient send the ball long here, which is absolutely in their repertoire — Le Bris isn’t hellbent on controlling the build-up very carefully, he’s happy for his team to go long to the centre-forward or the wingers if they have an aerial advantage over the opposition there and have the front three/four link up with each other as they did in this example, with Ibrahima Koné knocking the ball down for the ‘10’, Julien Ponceau, to get to the second ball first and continue his team’s progression into the opposition’s half.
Expect this willingness to go long in build-up from Lorient; even though they’ve played the fifth-fewest long balls in Ligue 1 this season, most of the long balls they have played have come from the goalkeeper — with Mannone playing slightly more per 90 than Mvogo.
They’re happy to use the attackers as an out ball when they find it difficult to play through the opposition along the ground in build-up.
Regardless of Le Fée’s positioning, Innocent will be positioned deep and typically on the right, while Ponceau will usually play the advanced midfielder role at the most advanced tip of the midfield triangle, just off the centre-forward as we see in the top-left quadrant in figure 3.
The maintenance of this midfield triangle in some form, wherever Le Fée is positioned at that moment in time, is crucial to keeping the connection between Lorient’s backline and forward line, and easing the progression from one end to the other.
With that said, It’s common to see the Lorient midfield drag the opposition defenders into narrow positions, generating space out wide for the full-backs to exploit.
A lot of Lorient’s long balls from the ‘keeper will go out to the full-backs, Vincent Le Goff and Gédéon Kalulu, with those players then responsible for receiving on the half-turn and driving forward with the ball.
We see an example of this in the top-right quadrant above.
The bottom half of this image shows another example of Lorient’s build-up play which demonstrates another common trend in Les Merlus’ progression, which is their tendency to drag the opposition’s defence over to one wing deep on the pitch before finding a way to switch to the opposite side.
The bottom-left and bottom-right quadrants above highlight an example of this.
Again, Le Bris places a lot of responsibility on his full-backs to drive forward with the ball, but the rest of their team is responsible, then, for finding the full-backs in the first place, preferably with plenty of space to use.
One great way of creating extra space for the full-backs is this method of overloading one side, dragging the opposition’s press to that wing and then switching to the opposite wing.
They must just be careful they don’t bite off more than they can chew and get caught out for trying to be too smart, losing the ball before it reaches the opposite wing.
If they avoid that, which they generally do, then these are some great tactics for getting the full-back on the ball with time and space to get his head up and drive forward.
Le Bris’ side have played the second-fewest progressive passes in Ligue 1 this term (58.88 per 90) but they’ve also made the third-most progressive runs in France’s top flight this season (16.63 per 90).
Figure 4, then, provides a map of Lorient’s dribbles and progressive runs in the league in 2022/23.
We see plenty of their progressive runs coming from deep or the middle third via the wings, while they also make a lot of dribbles out wide in the final third, which we’ll discuss more later in this scout report.
With the knowledge of their tendency to play to the full-back or look for the deep midfielder, Lorient can create situations where they open up space for the ‘10’ to receive at the tip of a wide diamond as we see in figure 5.
One opposition player covers the passing lane out wide, and another is drawn to the holding midfielder, but this creates a gap for the ‘10’ to occupy and receive with space to turn and drive forward.
Lorient will try to forge this opening and take this passing option when possible.
If the ball isn’t clearly on, again, they’re not afraid to send it back to the ‘keeper before playing a long ball and taking the less secure approach but they can create opportunities for progression like this through their off-the-ball movement and the system Le Bris has set them up in.
Chance creation
Moving on upfield, our next section of analysis looks at Lorient when attacking in the final third, in the chance creation phase of play.
The front three of the centre-forward (usually, Terem Moffi) and the wingers on either side (with Ouattara and Stéphane Diarra occupying the wide slots most often for Les Merlus this term) all have key, distinct roles to play for their side in the chance creation phase, and shoulder a lot of responsibility in the final third.
Like Le Fée in build-up/ball progression, each of these individual players is given plenty of freedom to make decisions and take the game into their hands as they look to break the opposition down inside the final third.
Moffi’s hold-up play is important for Le Bris’ side as they enter the final third.
The Nigerian striker is quite comfortable receiving with his back to goal, but with this knowledge, he can also attract pressure from opposition players before the ball is even played to him, with defenders looking to cut off the access into the 23-year-old full stop.
This was the case in the top-left quadrant of figure 6, with one defender closing down Moffi from behind and another blocking the passing lane from the ball carrier to him, as the ball carrier weighs up his options.
With his magnetic pull, Moffi creates space for the ball carrier to link up with another teammate in front of him just to his right.
After that pass was played, the game opened up for Moffi.
The ball was played back to the initial ball carrier but the pressure has been released from Moffi now and the centre-forward has room to run off in behind and receive a ball into that space behind the backline from the deep-lying playmaker, which we see in the bottom-left quadrant.
As play progresses, we see Moffi enter the box and rocket the ball beyond the goalkeeper at the near post.
This passage of play highlights two key things about Moffi’s game: 1.
How his presence can have a magnetic pull for defenders which, in turn, creates space for others in the final third and 2.
His exceptional ability to time his runs in behind and set up good playmaking opportunities for his teammates to link up with him.
As for the wingers, their key responsibility in the chance creation phase, and as their team seeks to enter the final third, is to find some space to receive the ball out wide, get their head up and take on a defender; they want to be isolated 1v1 versus the opposition full-back and back themselves to win the ensuing 1v1.
Lorient have made the fourth-most dribbles per 90 in Ligue 1 this season (28) and as the ball progression map in the previous section indicated, their wide men in the final third are largely responsible for this high dribble count.
They have the fifth-highest dribble success rate in Ligue 1 this season to boot, displaying how they tend to come out on top of a relatively good number of their dribbles despite taking on so many — a good indication of their quality in this area.
We see a textbook example of Le Bris’ wingers inside the final third in figure 7 here.
Just before this image, the right winger (Stéphane Diarra) dropped back a bit from the opposition wing-back, anticipating the midfielder’s turn towards the right wing and aiming to make himself as attractive a passing option as possible for the ball carrier.
The pass was then played out to Diarra, who won the 1v1 and actually ended up carrying the ball through Troyes’ defence, into a decent shooting position from where he was able to score.
This shows the dribbling quality Le Bris’ side possesses on the wings and spotlights how the 47-year-old coach does well to help his wingers showcase this ball-carrying quality.
Figure 8 shows Diarra’s winger actions from 2022/23 and emphasises how he’s been able to complete so many successful dribbles within this system in and around the final third this season, resulting in scenarios like the goal he scored versus Troyes above.
We see a similar situation, perhaps to an even greater extent, in figure 9 — Ouattara’s winger actions from 2022/23.
Again, we see a staggeringly high amount of successful dribbles in and around the final third here, along with plenty of positive crosses to the six-yard box for the likes of Moffi and Koné to poach.
Le Bris is happy for his mavericks to take the game into their hands in the final third.
We see a lot of personality from his attackers, and it results in unpredictability every time the wingers create their desired isolation out wide.
Transitions
Next up, we’ll take a look at Lorient’s transitions, starting with their transitions to attack, as the wingers play a key role in this phase of play for Les Merlus too, as does Moffi.
Again, Moffi’s hold-up play can be crucial in transition to attack, players will look for him as an out ball, fire it to his feet and rely on his hold-up ability to link the play with other attackers once they get up in support of the 23-year-old forward.
Moffi’s more than just hold-up play, he can chase balls reliably into the channels and has decent pace.
However, his intelligent run-making ability is the key to his tendency to get in behind and exploit space.
Similarly, Lorient’s deeper ball-winners will often look for the wingers immediately after regaining possession as they look to take advantage of the turnover.
In figure 10, the ball has just been regained in midfield by Lorient, with the ball-winner drilling it immediately into the winger’s feet.
The receiver is in just enough space to get on the ball before the defender who we can see approaching, hoping to stop this counterattack.
Thanks to his composure and technical quality, the winger is able to knock the ball around the defender, dodge the challenge despite taking a bit of a knock and carry on, driving his team into the final third and taking advantage of the weakened opposition defence in transition.
This is a perfect example of the wingers’ role in transition to attack within Le Bris’ side.
So often we find space on the wings in transition due to the opposition sending their full-backs/wing-backs forward in the previous attack.
Lorient’s wide men can exploit this space well, receiving the ball and attracting pressure from another defender who’s forced to cover for the absent full-back, resulting in more space opening elsewhere for Les Merlus to take advantage of should the winger get around his man.
Due to the technical dribbling quality of Le Bris’ players out wide as previously discussed, they can reliably beat their man, and the 47-year-old coach’s side can be very dangerous in transitions as a result.
Le Bris likes his team to play in transition and is very comfortable without the ball, knowing the threat they can pose immediately on regaining possession.
We see Lorient playing without the ball more than their opponents quite a lot, with Le Bris happy to bet on his team’s counterattacking quality.
In transition to defence, Lorient are happy for their backline to drop off.
It’s common to see Les Merlus playing with a 3-2 rest defence structure, with at least one full-back usually found sitting deep.
Le Fée and Innocent, from the most-common starting XI, are often found in the two-man midfield ahead of them and they may press more aggressively.
Still, the backline will drop off aiming to protect the space in behind, not engage in 1v1s and give the opposition no chance of beating them.
They want to hold up their dribble, not give the opponent too much space to drive into and buy time for the more advanced Lorient players to track back and support the backline, not leaving them exposed.
If Le Fée and Innocent press and are beaten, they need to immediately pick their heads up and get back for a second bite of the cherry — they can’t give up and leave the backline exposed.
High-block
We’ll start looking at Lorient’s defensive tactics by looking at their approach in the high-block phase.
In this phase of play, it’s common to see Lorient defending in a 4-4-2, with the wingers dropping deep alongside Le Fée and Innocent (again, assuming they play) and number ‘10’ Ponceau joining Moffi in the forward line of two.
We see an example of this 4-4-2 shape in figure 12.
Ponceau advances while Innocent drops, and this can leave a bit of a gap between the two that can be exploited.
However, the wingers will typically sit quite narrow to bolster their side’s midfield presence and they can help to cover this space between Ponceau and the deeper Innocent.
They operate in a position-oriented zonal pressing system that won’t get very aggressive.
Of course, Moffi and Ponceau will apply pressure to the opposition centre-backs but they aren’t going all out to win the ball high.
If an opposition midfielder, such as the one Le Fée is marking here, drops deep to help out the centre-backs, Le Fée generally won’t follow him all the way, only a little bit before that player is out of his zone and he returns to focus on his position.
Le Bris requires tactical, positional discipline from his players in this regard.
The aim is to overload the centre, control this area, not get dragged about by the opposition and their possession play, and just focus on maintaining a solid, compact structure that’s difficult to play through while leaving little space for creators to exploit between the lines in valuable, central areas.
Lorient have the second-highest PPDA in France’s top flight this term (16.22) — they don’t deploy a very aggressive press.
The highest importance is not necessarily placed on regaining the ball as high as possible, though it would be nice if they were gifted something, they focus on ensuring they control the valuable central areas and remain difficult to play through with a disciplined position-oriented structure.
When the ball is played out wide, the ball-near winger may push out and close down the ball carrier while keeping the passing option up the wing in his cover shadow, thus allowing the Lorient full-back on that side to remain deep and in contact with his near centre-back.
The rest of the midfield will shift over to cover for the winger where he’s vacated space centrally, with the ball-far winger now playing quite centrally, almost as a central midfielder with the shape transitioning to a three-man central midfield.
Meanwhile, as play progresses beyond the first line of pressure, Lorient’s ‘10’ will drop and slowly merge with the midfield once more.
In this case, we see him marking the opposition’s deepest midfielder, allowing the rest of the midfield to remain deep and compact, giving the opposition ball carrier no easy forward passing options.
The ball carrier does actually try to play through the deepest midfielder as play moves on, and the ‘10’ is there to pressure the player and prevent the ball from moving through him, highlighting the sensible nature of Lorient’s defensive tactics, they don’t over-commit, they just control the space and press when the opportunity is good — still, without over-committing.
The back four, at this time, will shift over to this wing slightly, though not as much as the midfield.
They’ll largely remain quite central and horizontally compact while trying not to allow too much space to open up between them and the midfield.
However, they’ll drop off a bit and be ready to defend a ball played over the top.
The ball-far full-back will not shift over as much as the other members of the back four if there’s a possibility of switching to a wide man on the opposite wing.
He’ll defend in a more option-oriented manner, focusing on the possibility of that switch to the far wing and ensuring his team is not vulnerable to it.
This can allow space to open between the full-back and his near centre-back, but that’s the downside to guarding against the big switch to the opposite wing.
Mid-block and low-block
Our final section of this scout report looks at Lorient’s play in the mid-block and low-block phases.
We tend to see more action in terms of defensive actions and possession regains from Les Merlus the closer we get to their own goal.
Take their defensive territory map in figure 14, for example.
We know they don’t play with an extremely high line or aggressive centre-backs, and this shows when you look at how many of their defensive actions this season have occurred inside their own third of the pitch, with many interceptions coming inside their box.
So, we see plenty of action from Lorient when defending deeper, but how do their tactics look in these phases of play?
In the mid-block, Lorient still appear in the 4-4-2 but it may appear as more of a 4-4-1-1 now, with the ‘10’ generally dropping noticeably deeper than the centre-forward.
This closes the gap between the ‘10’ and the deepest midfielder much more, making it harder to exploit the more the opposition progresses upfield.
A lot of the same concepts we mentioned in the previous section are still evident here; Lorient want to protect valuable spaces in the centre and remain as vertically and horizontally compact as possible, allowing no space to open up between the lines for eagle-eyed deep playmakers and crafty attackers to exploit.
In figure 15, we see an example of Lorient defending in the mid-block, with Innocent jumping into action to close down an opposition midfield receiver as he tries to get on the ball between him and Le Fée.
Innocent ensured this space was not free to exploit, crunched into the receiver as the pass arrived at his feet and got the ball back into Lorient’s possession, generating an opportunity to attack in transition.
It’s important for Le Bris that his midfielders react to attempts from the opposition to exploit space in midfield like this, ensuring that the attempts get shut down.
We’ve said it before, but the central spaces are sacred for Lorient, they mustn’t be breached and the opposition will test their awareness and defensive ability by putting balls into those precious areas with the goal of getting their foot on the ball centrally, facing Lorient’s goal and creating from the valuable positions.
Les Merlus rely especially on Innocent to spot these attempts and shut them down before they get to an advanced stage, as he did on this occasion.
His deeper position gives him a better view of the whole midfield situation than his midfield partners, thus allowing him to spot the danger more easily, while his deep positioning also helps prevent space from opening up between the midfield and defensive lines.
Occasionally, space may be exploited between Lorient’s midfield and defensive lines — it happens to every team and Le Bris’ side is no different.
Remember how the backline acted when transitioning to defence? They’ll usually tend to act like this.
They don’t defend aggressively, look to close the attackers down and engage in duels high upfield.
They prefer to drop off, protect the space in behind and bank on their midfield getting back to support them.
We see an example of this in figures 16-17.
Firstly, in figure 16, we see PSG getting on the ball in between the lines, putting Lorient’s backline in danger.
But they don’t panic, jump into a challenge and leave their goalkeeper even more exposed, they know their job is to drop off, give the ball carrier no space behind them to run into and protect the space between them and the goal, which is how they naturally react.
This buys time for the full-back to get across and cut out the through pass attempt to cut Lorient’s defence open and expose the goalkeeper — an excellent example of why Le Bris wants his side to defend in this way, and how it can be effective.
No matter how the opposition progress into the final third, expect to see Lorient’s backline not looking to engage high and get drawn into 1v1s.
They know their role is to drop off, protect the space behind them and deny the opposition the chance to exploit that space.
They’re happy to allow the opposition possession in decent positions if need be in order to ensure the really good goalscoring positions are denied.
They don’t want to engage as early as possible and risk the opposition beating them in a decent position and then progress into a really good position.
This is perhaps not the most popular approach to defending in the modern game but it can be an effective approach with the right players and right setup, which Lorient have shown this season, conceding the joint-seventh-fewest goals in Ligue 1 so far in 2022/23 (21) despite seeing their opponents take the second-most shots against them so far this season (12.88 per 90).
Lorient have made the second-most blocks in France’s top flight this season (3.13 per 90) — another direct result of their more passive defensive approach.
Their opponents will often progress into ‘decent’ shooting positions from where they may fancy their chances, Lorient’s defenders won’t jump into a challenge, resulting in a scenario where the opposition takes a shot that Lorient’s defenders aim to deal with via their body positioning a relatively high amount of the time.
Figure 18 shows Lorient’s shots blocked map from 2022/23 so far, indicating they’ve blocked 48 shots in total this term — a combined total of 2.39 blocked xG.
The map shows where these blocks occurred, with bigger circles indicating a higher xG block.
Most of these blocks have come from Lorient’s centre-backs, with 19 shots and 0.81 xG blocked coming from Julien Laporte and 10 blocked shots / 0.57 blocked xG coming from Montassar Talbi.
This is an important part of Lorient’s defensive method due to the passive-over-aggressive approach from the backline.
They’ll naturally see plenty of shots they need to block, and their ability to position themselves effectively to deal with these shots and pull off the necessary blocks will be crucial to the success of their overall defensive strategy when the opposition does progress to an advanced position.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we hope this tactical analysis and scout report has given you a thorough analysis of Régis Le Bris tactics with Lorient FC that have seen the Brittany side start the 2022/23 campaign so well.
It’ll be fascinating to watch Lorient grow and evolve as the campaign progresses.
For us, Le Bris has demonstrated an excellent aptitude for the senior football management game in his short time in what is his first senior management position with Les Merlus, and we back him as one to watch as we enter 2023.
