Ligue 1 2021/22: Puel must purge perilous progression problems to end ASSE agony – tactical analysis

Saint-Étienne’s 2021/22 season hasn’t gotten off to a very positive start. Les Verts have only managed to earn four points from their first nine league games of the campaign. This low points tally combined with their bleak -10 goal difference leaves them sitting at the bottom of Ligue 1, with just under a quarter of the season’s league games having been played. They’re currently the lowest scorers in the division (8) and they’ve conceded the joint-fourth-most goals of any side (18).

Understandably, this poor start to the season for one of France’s most historic clubs (the most successful in Ligue 1 history, with 10 titles to their name) has led to pressure piling on manager Claude Puel, who spent his entire playing career at AS Monaco — playing under Arsenal legend Arsène Wenger in that time — managed Ligue 1 sides Monaco, Lille, Lyon, and Nice earlier in his career before embarking on a three-year stint in the EPL from 2016-2019 first managing Southampton — during which time he finished as the runner-up in the 2016/17 EFL Cup, losing the final to Manchester United — and then managing Leicester City before arriving at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard to replace Ghislain Printant in October 2019.

The season before Puel’s arrival at Saint-Étienne (2018/19), the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes-based club had finished in fourth place in Ligue 1. Additionally, Saint-Étienne hadn’t finished outside of the top half of France’s top-flight since the 2010/11 campaign before, under Puel’s guidance, they ended the 2019/20 season in 17th place — narrowly avoiding relegation — and following that up with an 11th place finish last term.

With this record in mind, you could argue that Les Verts’ hierarchy has already shown plenty of patience with Puel and recent indications coming from Stade Geoffroy-Guichard suggest that the decision-makers intend to continue backing their man, with it having been reported that a board meeting on 4th October ‘during which the future of manager Claude Puel was debated’, concluded with the 60-year-old remaining as manager, although Saint-Étienne sit bottom of Ligue 1 nine games into the season with a squad value that ranks them eighth in France’s top-flight — suggesting that the quality of players available to Puel means that they’re capable of sitting far higher up the league.

In this tactical analysis, we’ll analyse Les Verts’ poor start to the season. This scout report will try to provide some answers to questions like: ‘what is going wrong for Saint-Étienne?’, ‘Have Saint-Étienne really been this bad?’, and ‘What does Puel need to do to turn things around (and secure his future at the historic club)?’

On analysing the team’s performances so far this term, I’ve recognised some positives and negatives to the 60-year-old’s tactics, which will be discussed in this piece. One major drawback to their overall performances this term has been their performance in the early possession phases of build-up and ball progression. This tactical analysis piece will highlight what Puel’s side is trying to do in these phases, why and how it’s not working, the negatives of the team’s failure in these phases, and I’ll offer some potential solutions to these issues which the manager may be considering.

Attempting and struggling to progress through wide areas

While Saint-Étienne have scored the fewest goals of any Ligue 1 side, with eight, they’ve generated the eighth-highest xG in the league — 12.58, per Wyscout. Their low scoring start to the season isn’t necessarily reflective of a broken system that’s failing to create chances altogether and if they continue to play as they have been and create similar chances at the same frequency, you’d expect them to increase their efficiency in front of goal. So, Saint-Étienne are creating chances and from analysing their performances, I don’t think it’d be fair to say that their big issues are in the final third despite their poor form in front of goal.

However, their performances in possession, in general, haven’t been particularly impressive and during the earlier phases of build-up and ball progression, they’ve struggled this season which has created arguably their biggest problems. Saint-Étienne rank 12th for average possession percentage, with an average of 48.2% to their name in the league this season. However, while possession is not everything — all going to plan, Puel would probably have his side ranking much higher in this metric. Not because it’s inherently better to have more possession, but because of his tactical setup which indicates that he does want his side keeping more of the ball than their average possession percentage would suggest.

Les Verts are flexible in build-up, sometimes playing out from the back via short passes and sometimes going long. However, they generally try to begin their attacks via short passes from the back the majority of the time. We’ll look more into the specific structures and patterns of play that they try to use to do this, but to summarise the point, in general, their goal is to ideally play out via short passes and cut through the opposition’s defensive shape while progressing upfield in an incisive yet careful manner.

So far this term, Saint-Étienne have mainly used one of either the 4-2-3-1 or 4-4-2 shapes. When playing out from the back, their centre-backs split wide, allowing the goalkeeper to advance into a ‘sweeper’ position, their full-backs push high and wide on both wings typically progressing to the midfield line, their central midfielders stagger with one dropping deeper and the other standing in a slightly higher position, while the front four (wingers and strikers/wingers, ‘10’, and striker) often tend to stand quite close together up front, which can overload the opposition’s centre-backs and put them in a decent position to win the second ball if Saint-Étienne are forced long. It’s also common to see the winger on the ball-near side pull away from the rest of the front four, however, to provide support to the team’s ball progression efforts on that wing.

This shape doesn’t offer Saint-Étienne a lot of progressive options centrally, which we’ll discuss at greater length later in this tactical analysis piece. However, the goal isn’t to progress right through the centre of the pitch, but rather through the wide areas, where Puel’s men look to form triangles with the centre-back, full-back and central midfielder or the full-back central midfielder and winger, for example, to help these players to quickly combine with short passes while moving upfield and, ideally, slicing through the opposition’s defensive shape, with Saint-Étienne hoping to have an overload in these areas and hope to have a system in place which gives them an edge in these situations where they’re trying to progress the ball out wide.

Figure 1 shows an example of Saint-Étienne’s typical shape in build-up, which shows the back-three formed by the goalkeeper and two wide centre-backs, the staggered midfielders, the high full-backs on both wings and the compact front four which overloads the opposition’s backline. We see from this image that Saint-Étienne’s shape underloads central midfield, and again, we’ll discuss that at greater length in our next section. However, we also catch a glimpse, from the positioning of the ball-near central midfielder, the centre-back on the ball, and the ball-near full-back, how they intend to create triangles out wide through which they can progress play.

However, due to the opposition’s overload in central midfield, Saint-Étienne find it impossible to play through the near central midfielder, while the opposition are then easily able to cut off the passing lane to the full-back through their pressing, while the near opposition full-back also pushes out and retains access to this player in case the pass still makes it through. This quickly cuts off the left centre-back’s short passing options and ultimately forces him to play the ball back to the goalkeeper.