Why the early signs show that Bolton Wanderers may be promotion contenders this season – scout report

The most depressing sight in football is watching the demise of once great football clubs slowly slipping down the savage pyramidical tier system.

The English game has been rife with these cases, from Sunderland to Swindon Town, from Blackburn Rovers to Oldham Athletic. Once a side sinks to the depths of the water, reviving the wreckage has proven to be a near-impossible task.

One of the most severe instances of this is Bolton Wanderers, the old stomping ground for players like Jay-Jay Okocha and Fernando Hierro.

From drawing with Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena and knocking Atletico Madrid out of the UEFA Cup in the 2007/08 campaign, the Wanderers were relegated to League Two just over a decade later.

Nevertheless, the club are slowly but surely climbing back up the ladder under their exciting head coach Ian Evatt, formerly of Barrow, or ‘Barrowcelona’ as they were nicknamed.

Having returned to League One in 2021, Bolton managed to stabilise and regroup over the summer. This season, Evatt’s men have begun tremendously, unbeaten and sitting in fourth place, hoping to chase promotion to the EFL Championship. In fact, the club from Greater Manchester haven’t lost in any official competition since March.

This tactical analysis piece will be a scout report of Bolton Wanderers’ tactics this season. The analysis will look at why the Trotters are one of the most exciting teams in England’s third-tier.

Preferred formations

Despite being in charge for little over two years, Evatt has overseen Bolton radically shifting from a conventional 4-2-3-1 to variants of a back-three system.

In his debut campaign with the Wanderers, the young coach preferred to deploy a 4-2-3-1 system, using a fluid double-pivot in front of two centre-backs as well as wingers that would tuck inside to make way for advancing fullbacks.

In their 2020/21 promotion campaign from the fourth tier to the third, Bolton used this shape in 43 percent of their games in all competitions.

As he so often does, Evatt ensured that his players were rather flexible structurally and so the Trotters were certainly no strangers to a back three or a 4-3-3.

However, upon return to League One, while the 4-2-3-1 still remained a prominent feature of Bolton’s tactics, Evatt gravitated more towards the 3-4-1-2, setting his side up in this formation in 32 percent of their games.