How Olympique Lyon uses the diamond formation

Normally the French Ligue 1 isnt an interesting league to analyse because a lot of teams play similar styles and there arent great tactical revolutions. However, if you want to observe the next great players, your chances to watch a big talent are pretty high in France. The French academy system brought great players into the World-Football the last few years. Olympique Lyon is probably the team which produced the highest number of talented players alongside AS Monaco. Before that season they sold Alexandre Lacazette and Corentin Tolisso for more than 90 million euros.

Nevertheless, Lyon has the next group of talented youngsters who want to develop in Lyon and then probably go the same route as Samuel Umtiti or Corentin Tolisso before them. In general, Olympique Lyon is an exception in Ligue 1 because they not only have great players, their system and approach to playing the game are really interesting. Their coach Bruno Genesio wants to use all of his talented players. Against Nantes, he used a diamond in midfield which isn´t a common formation in the top league in Europe except for Italy. The biggest disadvantage of the 4-3-1-2 is the missing opportunity to play through the wings.

Lyon was capable of using the advantages four central midfielders in a diagonal position to each other gives you, simultaneously they occupied the wings in different ways which helped them to break through Nantes defence.

In this piece, I am going to take a look at Lyon´s play with the ball in their 4-3-1-2 against Nantes. So it won´t be a normal match analysis more an aspect analysis.

Lyons well-structured build-up

The team of Bruno Genesio impressed with a good positional play. They always occupied the important positions, they were able to move the opponent, open space and use that through different actions like the third-man concept.

In the first third Lyon created a 4v2 advantage against the two strikers of Nantes. Nantes pressed in a 4-4-2 system which didnt work well because of the superiority Lyon could create out of their positioning.

In the build-up, Lyon created a diamond with both centre-backs, the central midfielder Lucas Tousart and goalkeeper Anthony Lopes.

Here, we can observe the diamond nicely. The basic structure was important to overplay the first line of pressure. However, not only the basic diamond is crucial. Lyon also positioned perfectly and adjusted their position in reference to the position of the ball. For instance, both centre-backs are positioned wide in order to stretch the opponent shape and give themselves time to orient and control the ball.

Furthermore, Lyon wasnt afraid to move the ball quickly a few times in order to attract the strikers of Nantes. As a consequence, the team of Genesio could open space to advance easily to higher zones.