Routes of Progressions

In positional play teams look to systematically break down their opponents through creating superiority and control. It is important for teams when doing this to maintain versatility and an element of variety in their play. In order to ensure this teams will often use Initial Concepts and Alternative Concepts. Initial Concepts are the concepts the team will try to use to progress the ball first. Alternative Concepts offer variety to a team’s attack and are concepts to progress the ball that are used less often than the Initial Concepts.

The very best teams find ways to apply concepts in which concepts are connected with one another. A great example of this is overload and isolation. The initial concept would be trying to advance the ball through a given area using numerical superiority while the alternative concept would be taking advantage of a qualitative superiority on the weak side. Taking this a step further teams (if they have propper in game thinking/accurate scout of the other team) can have different sets of Initial and Alternative Concepts depending on the defensive marking system a team can change their approach to take advantage of the weaknesses within a marking system.

To illustrate the idea of Initial and Alternative concepts being linked while taking into account the defensive marking system we can work at a few hypothetical situations with different concept pairs and their application within a match. The first concept pairing will be overload and isolate as previously stated above. Next we will look into the concept of in to…