FCV Farul Constanța: Gheorghe Hagi’s budding force to be reckoned with on the verge of glory – tactical analysis

When you think of Romanian football, you think of Gheorghe Hagi, undoubtedly the greatest player to ever come out of the country.

Hagi enjoyed plenty of success for Steaua București in the late ‘80s, including a second-place European Cup finish in 1988/89. Following that, he became one of the very few players to star on both sides of La Liga’s El Clásico, spending a couple of seasons with both Real Madrid (1990/91-1991/92) and Barcelona (1992/93-1993/94) — with another couple of season’s with Italian side Brescia in between — winning just a Supercopa de España (1990 and 1994) with both Spanish giants.

Hagi successfully finished his playing career with Galatasaray, enjoying plenty of success with the Turkish goliaths including a UEFA Cup win (1999/00) before hanging up the boots in 2001.

Everything started out for Hagi at FC Constanța — a direct predecessor of the club he currently owns and manages, FCV Farul Constanța.

‘Marinarii’ or ‘The Sailors’ are on course to win the Romanian Superliga title this term. This league title victory would go down as their first since a merger between the Hagi-founded Viitorul Constanța and FC Farul Constanța. The latter had just been through some turbulent years following some financial mismanagement which lead to Hagi’s boyhood club going bust and being rebuilt from the ground up in a supporter-led project.

It’s been less than a decade since the historic FC Farul Constanța declared bankruptcy, and it’s been just 14 years since Hagi initially established Viitorul Constanța. Their rollercoaster could have reached new heights by the end of this season, though, should Hagi finish the job and deliver a league title to the club he had grown up playing for and is now responsible for in every sense of the word, as both owner and manager.

This article will detail all things concerning the team from Romania’s fourth-largest city. We’ll provide a look at Hagi’s broader vision for the club, some key players in 2022/23 and, of course, provide some tactical analysis of Hagi’s approach this season, looking at The Sailors’ strategy and tactics.

Hagi’s broader vision

We’ll kick off the analysis with a section looking at Hagi’s broader vision for the club — what are some of the key characteristics that define this project with FCV Farul Constanța?

Immediately on looking at trends relating to the Romanian top flight over the last decade or so, we can see that Hagi’s team, be it FCV Farul Constanța now or Viitorul Constanța in the past, tends to be one of the youngest in the league.

As a matter of fact, Wyscout’s average age data goes back to the 2015/16 season and Hagi’s club has been the youngest in the league in five out of the eight seasons within that time span, including this season where they have an average age of 24.7.

In only one of those seasons, 2021/22, has Hagi’s team has been out of the top two youngest in the league, on average, for that season.

Per a CIES Football Observatory report from January of this year, Farul Constanța rank 36th out of all clubs in their top 27 European first divisions for percentage of minutes played by club-trained footballers this season (31.1%). This is the most of any Romanian club.

It’s evident that the utilisation of youth is a key aspect of this club and this ties in with the top reputation of The Sailors’ youth academy — Academia Hagi.

Founded in 2009 along with his club at a reported cost of €11m, Academia Hagi is said to be one of the biggest and most well-equipped academy complexes in all of southeastern Europe — let alone Romania.

Empoli’s Răzvan Marin, Galatasaray’s Alexandru Cicâldău, Standard Liège’s Denis Drăguș and, of course, Rangers’ Ianis Hagi are just a few who have come through Academia Hagi before being sold by their club for millions.

In addition to the academy products’ sales providing a healthy cash flow for the club, the academy’s quality provides a neverending pipeline of top talent for the club to enjoy, meaning they haven’t needed to break the bank to compete at the top of their division.

In fact, not only do The Sailors have the healthiest transfer fee balance (transfer income minus transfer expenditure) in Romania’s top flight for 2022/23 (€3.65m) but Hagi’s club (FCV Farul Constanța for the last couple of seasons and Viitorul Constanța in the preceding campaigns) have got the healthiest transfer fee balance of any Romanian top flight club when counting every season from 2012/13 (when Viitorul made their first top-flight appearance) to 2022/23 — a balance of €42.87m.

In those same 10 years, they’ve spent €3.01m — less than four other teams (Astra Giurgiu, Universitatea Craiova, CFR Cluj and FCSB). Their income vastly exceeds every side but FCSB, with FCSB also spending a lot more money than The Sailors, hence why their overall balance is lower.

Hagi has created a nice harmony between his elite academy and his top-flight football club. On one hand, he’s created a clear pathway for promising academy talents to get into the Romanian Superliga, showcase themselves and continue developing at the necessary level before, perhaps, moving on to another team. At the same time, he’s created an invaluable resource for his club to lean on and constantly have exciting, fresh talent ready to come through the doors.

With Hagi both owning the club, being the founder of the academy and managing the first team, he is fully aware of everything that’s going on in the whole system. He’s familiar with academy players coming through and will have ideas about how to best utilise them, and while there’s obviously an incentive for him to cash in on promising talents when the time is right as the owner of the business, there’s also an incentive for him as the manager to ensure the squad remains competitive at the Superliga level.

FCV Farul Constanța have done very well at striking this balance of late, hence why we see such attractive numbers on both the balance sheet and the league table.

This setup with Academia Hagi and the top-flight team is still young but we’re already starting to see FCV Farul Constanța emerge into a very important club in the southeastern European football landscape as a producer of talent and competitor in the region; this is exactly what Hagi envisions for his project.

In possession

Let’s progress into the tactical analysis portion of this article. To start off, we’ll take a look at The Sailors’ approach in possession of the ball under Hagi this season.

In the build-up, it’s common to see the centre-backs come short on either side of the goalkeeper, Marian Aioani. From there, it’s common to see short passes out to the centre-backs on either side, as we see in Figure 1 (a pass to the right centre-back on top and a pass to the left centre-back on the bottom), or long passes directly out to the full-backs who’ll have pushed a bit higher up the wing.

Aioani is right-footed and, therefore, passes to the right are a bit more common due to the way he naturally receives the ball and lines up his passes — it’s trickier to play the ball out to the left as the ‘keeper has to go across his body.