Miloš Milojević Tactics At Hammarby IF – His Defensive Philosophy

Miloš Milojević Coaching Career

Milos Milojevic is a Serbian coach who signed a contract as the new head coach of Hammarby IF on 13 June 2021.

Before Hammarby, Milos had a professional career as a player, playing in the Serbian and Icelandic league before the switch to the first steps as a coach in Iceland.

Milos achieved his major breakthrough in Swedish football during his spell at Mjällby AIF.

Hammarby may well be known to worldwide football fans as the club owned by ex-PSG, Manchester United & Barcelona player Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

In Mjällby AIF, he had a very successful period where he first won the Div.1 league (third tier) and the year after won the Superettan (2nd tier), achieving promotion with Mjällby to Allsvenskan in a two year period.

The phenomenal achievements of Mjällby generated a lot of attention for the Serbian coach, leaving Mjällby AIF to follow his dream of coaching in Europe and working as an assistant coach for Red Star Belgrade.

Milos is described as a very disciplined and tactically astute coach who demands a lot from his players.

He is a coach that prioritizes and periodizes his style of play with an (as he stated himself) 80% tactical focus and the rest 20% for physicality focus.

Meaning that he wants to make sure his players are performing tactical actions in the highest possible level of intensity as good as possible as frequently as possible during a game.

Before the appointment of Milos, Hammarby were struggling a lot with inconsistent performances and results in the league.

Still, since the arrival of Milos, they are currently unbeaten in the first seven games which Milos has been in charge of.

The past success and solid performances in such a short time makes Milos definitely one of the most interesting coaches to follow in Swedish football.

This tactical analysis will provide an analysis of the tactics of Hammarby IF coach: Milos Milojevic.

ASYMMETRIC 5-3-2 DEFENDING SYSTEM  (Positional Defending, Mixed With Strong Man-Orientations and weak-side zonal defending)

The most significant strength of Milos philosophy is that he is very ”opponent oriented”.

This means that he is very flexible in regard to his setup and structure against specific opponents and tries to find different ways to disrupt the oppositions structure while defending and create advantages against them in possession.

Some of the formations used most frequently in Hammarby have been the man-oriented system of 5-3-2, as seen against Maribor (in both legs), but also against Degerfors in deeper areas. When facing a 4-4-2 structured team, such as Örebro, Milos changed to a 4-4-1-1 in his defensive set-up. 

For example against an opponent like Degerfors that plays with a 3-4-3 system in possession, Milos started with an asymmetric 5-2-3 system with man-oriented central-midfielders, which means that Milos is flexible in forcing play wide as the wing-back creates access in his positioning to press opposition wing-back but also force plays centrally as he prioritizes man-orientations in central zones. 

Against Degerfors, the struggle came when Degerfors positioned their wingers/10s in the half-space areas and pushed up their wing-backs into more advanced zones.

In half-spaces, Hammarby tends to push up with a lot of man-orientations on the lateral centre backs in the 5-2-3 system, but against deeper half-space players and counter-movements such as Degerfors, this became harder to control.

The solution to this was to drop into a more positional defending 5-3-2 to create more central control and access.

Here is Hammarby in their ”attacking-press” where you can see the roles of the players in an asymmetric 5-2-3 system when trying to press in the attacking press.

We can see how ball-near 6 (Bojanic) is man-oriented on the ball-near midfielder of Degerfors, while 9 (Seljmani) is more oriented on the central defender of Degerfors.

As the pass is played wide the 10/winger of Hammarby (Amoo) starts his press and the rest of Hammarby acts accordingly as described above.