Team Report: Sporting CP

Sporting CP, the reigning Portuguese champion, is heading onto their golden era. Guided the firm hand of Ruben Amorim, they morphed into the most rock solid and efficient team in Portugal, while also promoting youngsters into their main squad. In this article, we’ll see at their squad profile, as well as analyzing on how they build back from their title-winning squad and making them even more solid than their title-winning season. We’ll also see on things that they could fix and how they fare with top European clubs.

Players:

Antonio Adan (Goalkeeper): An exceptional shot-stopper and defensive leader, he have been trusted a lot by Amorim. While he is rarely seen sweeping lost balls and building high on the pitch, he is pretty comfortable using his both legs.

Alongside Adan, Joao Virginia (Everton loanee) and Andre Paulo (Sporting CP B alumni) is a sustainable back-up option throughout the season.

Goncalo Inacio (Right-sided CB): Promising defender with lots of rough potential. Still have to improve on calmness, decision making, and positioning, and on the other side shows courage on engaging with the opponents, and neutralizing the numerical superiority on the midfield area.

Sebastian Coates (Central CB): A commanding presence in the backline, whether aerially, on duels, or covering large spaces. As one of the most experienced player in the team, he also is good at picking right passing options, as well as carrying the ball to the midfield.

Zouhair Feddal (Left-sided CB): More controlled and firm on engaging with the opponents’ than Inacio. Alongside Coates, they both exudes calmness combined with robust experience.

Pedro Porro (Right WB): Good at 1v1s and is really fast, as Sporting often try to exploit this by putting a runner to pin the opponent’s right-sided CB, or by opening up space for him upfront. Loves to overlap and cut inside. Might looked too trigger-happy on defending — since he often lost the ball deep as a consequence of him pushing up — , but other than that he’s pretty solid on defending as a mid-or low block.

Ricardo Esgaio (Right WB): A back-up to Porro, Esgaio is a short stride dribbler, which makes Amorim played him high up the pitch in build-ups, to make him directly taking on the opponents.

Ruben Vinagre (Left WB): Currently on loan from Wolverhampton, Vinagre offers a more rounded game, with a little bit of pace. Playing as a back-up to both Porro and Reis, Vinagre puts up some solid performances, other than the Ajax game, where he got beaten by Anthony on take-ons, and playing part in the defensive breakdowns.

Matheus Reis (Left WB): Reliable pass-receiver on overload and underload situations. Have chemistry with the CM and winger, evident on his ability to exploit space created by them. Have lesser ability to penetrate than Porro, but offers a more balanced, all-round style that suits Sporting.

Matheus Nunes (Left-sided CM) : Predominantly used as a free-roaming CM, that often targets opponent’s defensive pockets. His ball retention skills aids his ability to slalom past defenders and creating opportunities on his own. His passing options is in the borderline of doing safe passes and launching a defensive-breaking one.

Joao Palhinha (Right-sided CM): Compared with Nunes, he’s a ball relayer whose strength is on pulling the strings in Sporting’s build-up, as well as bringing calm into an highly-pressured area, because he’s being the deeper player in the pivot. In relation to his ability, he’s uniquely used more as a decoy to attract his marker to open up space for the final third.

Manuel Ugarte (Right-sided CM): A promising midfielder that serves as a back-up to Palhinha. Similar as Palhinha, he acts as a ball relayer.

Marcus Edwards (Winger): A new kid on the block — and a sensational one, Edwards, an Englishman, is having an unorthodox, yet successful career development on Portugal, being the star player in Vitoria de Gumiaraes. A creative player that getting even more mature and sharp as the season goes, seeing him playing alongside Pote and Paulinho next season would be really dreamy.

Pablo Sarabia (Winger): Often acts as a connector between defense and attack, and is the best among the other attacking options Sporting has in this ability. Creates overloads according to the opened space of the second /third defensive line.

Nuno Santos (Winger): The most “wingery” out of the forward’s selection, he’s a fast player with decent ball control and have good ball distribution, albeit aren’t that all-round than his fellow wingers, which keeps him as an important rotation. He also score goals

Pedro “Pote” Goncalves (Winger): Might looked like a heavy output player on sheets, but he really upped his off-ball running during his stint in Sporting. Great penetrator, as well as having that sweet strike when he shoots the ball, he’s an integral player on Sporting’s attacking productivity this season.

Paulinho (Centre-forward): Although being the most traditional amongst Sporting’s forwards, he have good reading of the attacking situations, and helps in linking up. Often played with Pote and Sarabia, he could head the ball to one of them, who ran in behind the space left by the opponent’s defenders when engaging on an aerial duel.

Islam Slimani (Centre-forward): Initially a classic target man, he undertake a major change in his game by involving more on attacking build-ups, even reached some point where he’s being the best in Europe to do that. An excellent back-up for Paulinho, and will most likely aiding them on catching Porto in the title race.

The Freshmen (Flavio Nazinho, Dario Essugo, Goncalo Esteves): All three players who plays as wing-backs, Essugo plays with mixture of creativity, intelligence, and physicality. Nazinho is in the mould of Reis; playing with fundamentals and more into being an all rounder. Esteves is an overlapper, like Porro, but still have to work on his positional discipline.

Formation:

Sporting mainly plays in a 3–4–3 formation. This formation ensures more defensive protection at the expense of open spaces on the two midfielders. Amorim uses — with a bit of oversimplification — a combination of creative-anchor pivot, direct-versatile wing-backs, balanced 3 centre-backs, alongside with three forwards that could create separation, opening spaces, as well as creating overloads, and executing killer transitions.

Three backs’ a charm: Sporting’s build-up patterns, individual and collective behavior on the pitch, and overall tactics

When the opposition’s goalkeeper have the ball in his feet, Sporting’s intention is to make the pitch as narrow as possible. In this context, the full-back (usually left) drifts inside to mark a player in the half space, and the CM (usually the one with more attacking threat) moves to the №10 position and presses the deep-lying midfielder.

Sporting’s biggest strength is on their team organizations and the forwards’ movement. They conceded the least combined goals and assists on the Primeira Liga, which could be attributed to their solid ball-oriented defending and ability to regain possession when their defensive organization broke down. In the picture below, the final defensive line are directly exposed by the attacker. Coates overcommitted and Sporting is put on a dangerous situation. Feddal managed to contain and delay the Braga attacker until Inacio could offer help.

They also could adapt to the opponent’s plan to exploit their structure. In this chain of pictures, the winger in the half-space drags the ball-near CB to open up space for the CF. Coates read this and could contain his run, while Feddal covered the opened zone.

When they presses high, Sporting’s first line of press tried to direct them out wide, where a pressing trap is set for them to regain the ball quickly. Against Porto, which sets up in a 2–3 build-up shape, the CF tried to mark out the pivot, while the winger jumps to press the CB, also cover-shadowing the LB. The ball is passed to the second CB, and the trap is set; LW, CM, and WB closing the nearest options.

In terms of their forwards’ movement, it’s usually consists of two players pinning the backline while the player that is more likely to receive a diagonal pass creates an overload on the middle of the pitch. Here, Paulinho and Santos (unseen) pins the defensive line, while Pote created an overload in the middle of the pitch. Sporting’s two pivots are integral in this game, especially to manipulate the marking pivots’ positions.

One of the trademark of these three forwards are their running patterns and space creation, which becomes one of their main weapon in transitions. Creating and exploiting spaces have been a routine for them, and this have been utilized up to the maximum power. In this video (0:34–0:41), Sarabia created a space between the left-sided and central CB, and Pote automatically ran into the space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSpZGZGWUZ8

We could also see some pattern play that Amorim implemented against several opponents’ style of play:

Against a 5-man backline, the main aim is to create overloads in which the winger tucks in and collect the ball from deep. As per the previous picture, the two pivots positioned themselves so that the winger could collect the diagonal pass and increase the tempo of the game.

Against a 4–man backline, Sporting compensated on their lack of central dominance by using their usual scheme of two forwards pinning the backline and one forward collecting the ball from deep. With the CB carrying the ball and the ball-near CM getting close to the ball, this created overloads on the half-space, which in this case opened up space for the left WB.

During the goal kick, rather than making the ball-near WB pushing up while the ball-near CB taking his place — like other teams that uses a 3-4-3 does, Sporting pushes their best CB with the ball (Coates) to the defensive midfielder position. On the second example, Coates acts as a makeshift pivot alongside Pailinha at the right. This created a 2–3 or 2–4 shaped build-up, and the objectives are same: open up space for the three forwards and get the ball to them in the most efficient way.

Amorim is pretty flexible on tweaking Sporting’s tactics during matches. Against Ajax, he instructed the left WB to tuck in as a makeshift CM, creating a lopsided 3–3 structure, ensuring that there’s no easy options when they switch out-wide, which Ajax exploited for fun on their 5–1 thrashing in Matchweek 1.

Portimonense uses a defensive unit akin to a 6–3–1 to contain Sporting’s openings out wide. Amorim responded by instructing Matheus Reis to underlap and putting Santos out wide, while Pote drags the defender upfront to create space. This is also helped by Portimonense winger’s lack of discipline.

As told by Pedro Carvalho in his post describing 2020/21 Sporting, their most noticeable weaknesses — especially while playing in a 3–4–3 — are central overloads. Although in this season they retained their defensive cohesiveness — and make it even better,conceding cutbacks is still one of their main problem. Porto was chasing a 2-goal deficit, and consequentially they push extra players upfront. If the Porto LB managed to bypass the wide areas, he’ll found 5 Porto players directly facing the goal. This made the Sporting defenders scramble to quickly regain the ball, which opened the wings, allowing a cutback to happen easily.

Taking it to the next level: Sporting’s strength and weaknesses compared to top European teams

Sporting’s scalability (adapting to a higher level of play), at least against a top-5 league level team like Dortmund and Ajax, is pretty questionable. They often sits deep, but not as speculative as other inferior team does. If the momentum rises and the attacking opportunity rises, they will do it, without sacrificing their main plan. This bear fruits against Dortmund, as their counter-attack often ended in dangerous situations due to the versatility of their three forwards, moving in various directions to create space and exploit them.

Sporting’s biggest weaknesses when playing against these teams, however, is the higher level and tempo of play. Against Ajax — probably amongst the best teams in Europe, — they struggle immensely, having all of their plan foiled by their tactics, skill, technique, and cohesiveness.

Overloading the centre of the pitch? Alvarez could mark two players with his eyes closed.

Attempting to contain when Ajax players are directly facing the last defensive line? Antony is so goddamn fast while the forwards drags and exploit Sporting’s defence. Pressing their players, congesting the spaces? They’re press resistant, lightning quick on both making overloads and switching into creating dangerous opportunities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHhR1Hiobq4

Ajax is probably one of the best teams in Europe, partly because of their individual and collective mastery of all phases of play (transitions, build-up, creating superiority, breaking down defenses, counter-press, mid-block defending, etc.) And Sporting aren’t in that level yet to challenge them (missing Coates also didn’t help.)

Against Dortmund, as they often leave big spaces in behind due to putting many players upfront, not as proactive as Ajax on defending, and most importantly, prone to conceding fatal errors, Sporting are able to attack them clinically, and with more freedom. As John Zuidema said on his detailed analysis of Borussia Dortmund:

First is the idea of keeping play in tight spaces. I’m beating a dead horse by now, but in the final 1/3 especially, BVB keep play roughly in one zone to create chances for counter-pressing. This isn’t all defensive though. If you’re a team like BVB, it’s a pretty good bet that your players are good enough to play comfortably in these tight spaces. By using this method, you’re able to draw in opposition defenders, before finally finding the underloaded side of the field with an open man or create a 1v1 situation.

Dortmund’s orientation on keeping the play narrow and through one zone, while often reaped rewards, run the risk of conceding a situation where their last defensive backline are directly facing the player. When the momentum changes to Sporting, the front three will find ways to interchange, in a very Wolves fashion of counter-attack.

However, Sporting struggled to contain their separations, and the opponent’s intelligence in attacking. This could be inferred from the higher ability of Dortmund’s forwards to think and adapt to the situations, in high tempo, and Sporting are more accustomed to a space-creating “playbook” type of attacking that they often face in Primeira Liga, along with lower tempo.

Conclusion:

Being an almost complete antithesis of free-flowing Porto, Sporting managed to dominate the Primeira Liga once again by cohesion, discipline, tactical nous, and intelligence. Currently chasing a 6-point-deficit against the still unbeaten Porto, alongside facing one of the best teams in Europe in Manchester City, Ruben Amorim and his troops will face a monumental task that will test their skills and resilience.