Coaching: How to create overloads and exploit isolation

Creating surplus situations in different zones around the field is what football is all about. To do so, you need to work on your team’s possession, include overloads, practice individual play with the ball and out of it, secure the pass and employ constant movement and then you’ll have something, to begin with for working on exploiting surpluses.

World’s best teams like Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, Hans-Dieter Flick’s Bayern Munich and Thomas Tuchel’s Paris Saint-Germain all base their tactics on the exploitation of overloads and isolation making them the key parts of their attacking gameplans. This coaching tactical analysis will bring you three drills that could help you isolate players with more ease and secure numerical superiority situations by working on them in beforehand on the training ground.

Overview

The thing about isolation is that it mostly benefits the fast transformational teams, the ones that are quite good with the ball at their feet and to the ones that have creative and technically gifted individuals who are good in direct face to face duels against their guards. The key principle of isolation is to overload on the opposite side, which demands a high-concentration of players in the restricted area of the pitch, so their teammate(s) could have the wider space on the opposite side to exploit if the ball is directed towards them.

Working on this type of play requires working in tight areas with a number of players, with ball security under-pressure being one of the main factors for success. All of the shown exercises are the mixture of multiple coaching segments that are necessarily closely related to creating isolation, such as position-holding, off the ball movement, defensive communication, and plenty more.

Rondo-transformation game

The first drill we are going to talk about is the one that is very good for the opening phases of practice, because it has a lot of basic movements, but can also be very useful in the closing stages of training if you are in the lower-intensity period. The setup for it is very simple, a classic rondo box set about 20-25 meters from goal, with two wide cones on both sides of the playing square. Eight players included in the game are divided into two teams, with four attackers (red markers) keeping the ball inside the box against the two defenders (blue markers), whose two players are positioned outside the cones.

The initial task for the possession team is to get to ten passes inside the box, after which one of them breaks into 1v1 finishing situation against the goalkeeper. The blues need to move constantly to try and win the ball and prevent the opponents from getting into goal scoring situations.