Birmingham City Women: “Glimpses of promise” but still plenty for head coach Scott Booth to work on – tactical analysis

It is fair to say that 2021/2022 was always going to be a tough campaign for Birmingham City Women, with a managerial change over the summer and the departures of the majority of last year’s squad hampering their pre-season preparations. As a result, when Scott Booth succeeded Carla Ward, having led Glasgow City to the last six consecutive SWPL titles, he was always going to need time to rebuild the team. However, despite 13 new arrivals, they have yet to win a game this season.

This tactical analysis will explore Birmingham’s performances in the WSL so far, examining their tactics and picking out the reasons for their struggles. In order to do this in a thorough manner, the scout report will look at their attack, midfield and defence in turn.

Attack

We will first focus on Birmingham City Women’s attacking play. Last season, under now-Aston Villa Women boss Carla Ward, they looked to get the ball up to striker Claudia Walker as quickly as possible, allowing her to get shots away with as few defenders as possible for company.

However, Scott Booth has preferred to push as many players up the field as possible to support the forwards, enabling them to pass the ball around opposing defenders and create plenty of goalscoring opportunities. The issue is that this only works if the players spread out and make the pitch as big as possible, as this forces the defenders to leave gaps open in their efforts to mark the attackers. By narrowing up, like in this image, Birmingham have not been able to turn these chances into goals, with only 0.25 goals netted per game, compared to 0.81 last season. On this occasion, Reading Women have closed down the three Birmingham players in the final third, highlighting how getting too close to each other makes it easier for the defenders to surround them.

However, the other problem that arises from this is that, when the ball reaches former Leicester City Women striker Libby Smith here, she has no options available in the middle to play the ball to. Therefore, she needs a player to run into the space behind the defence and give her a passing option, and improving this will allow Birmingham to create more chances and potentially score more goals.