Photo courtesy Philadelphia Union Communications

We have done a deep dive into the formations Bradley Carnell deployed during his record-setting expansion regular season at St. Louis City SC in 2023.

Background

St. Louis of course created their MLS team from scratch and finished first in their conference in the regular season, something no expansion side had ever done if MLS’s very first season is discounted when all teams might be considered expansion sides.

They took a logical, thorough approach to assembling their first roster, signing players well in advance of their first season and then loaning them back out so they would keep playing. Many but by no means all played together for St. Louis City 2 in MLS NEXT Pro, the professional second team that began play a year earlier than the first team.

In 2023, St. Louis’s first team won 17 games, drew five, and lost 12, three more wins than their closest Western conference competitor whom they surpassed by three points. Also, they went 1-1 in the U. S. Open Cup, 0-2 in the Leagues Cup, and 0-2 in the MLS playoffs for a combined record of 18 wins, five draws, and 17 defeats. Totaling all competitions, they scored 71 goals but allowed 60.

They played 34 games in MLS, two in the Open Cup, two in the Leagues Cup, and two in the playoffs totaling 40 for the season.

Tactical formations, aka, shapes

The foundational fact to absorb about shapes is that Carnell was not trained by Earnie Stewart.

Stewart preached the gospel of organizational uniformity as had legendary American football coach Paul Brown who required the 6^th grade team in Massillon, Ohio to run the same plays his varsity used. From the U9s to the first-team starters, Stewart mandated the same shape, the same principles, the same game plan. He thus embedded and enabled “next man up.”

Stewart was Jim Curtin’s first Sporting Director. Curtin had won his Generation Adidas Cup in 2012 and became a first team assistant in consequence. He then replaced John Hackworth in the summer of 2014, becoming permanent head coach that November. Stewart came on board as Sporting Director the following summer in 2015. Stewart mentored Curtin through the early difficulties of his head coaching tenure.

But a major and obvious corollary of organizational tactical uniformity is organizational tactical inflexibility.

St. Louis City’s shapes in 2023 under Carnell

Some readers will know that Major League Soccer’s official website, mlssoccer.com, publishes summaries of all games played. The template for those summaries has remained uniform since at least 2017. One of its features has been and is a diagram of each team’s starting and final lineup. By necessity tactical shapes are also given.

We pulled up every starting and final shape for all 40 St. Louis games in 2023. MLS’s website recorded 62 shapes for the 40 games, so MLS’s analysts thought Carnell changed his shape at least once in as many as 22 matches.  Four were necessitated by red cards. Eighteen times out of 40, 45% of the time, the change might have been a deliberate in-game tactical adjustment.

Of equal interest, the analysts identified eight different formations used over the course of the 40 games. We list them, report how many times they were recorded, and describe where appropriate.

We report further that the unknown author(s) of the Wikipedia article covering St. Louis’s 2023 season states the South African deployed 32 different starting lineups, something different 80% of the time. Transparency requires us to mention that the same players configured differently can be considered a different starting lineup, for example, Cavan Sullivan as the left channel midfielder rather than in the center makes it a different lineup.

Of the 29 players Wikipedia lists as St. Louis’s 2023 roster, every field player had at least  one start. The only zeroes were reserve goalkeepers. We conclude that Carnell will adjust his personnel as well as his tactics.

2025 in Philadelphia

In Philly Carnell is inheriting a roster, not building it from scratch.

He has made principles of play rather than shape his bedrock message, perhaps to emphasize  that 2025 will not be business as it has been. Stewart had made the bedrock message shape.

Perhaps also Carnell has made the change because he intends to adjust his shapes to the anticipated conditions expected from opponents. As mentioned perhaps as many as 18 times in St. Louis he was adjusting to specific game conditions. For example, several of his ten uses of the 4-3-1-2 seem to have been attempts to lock down leads for wins.

As with any coach in any sport, Carnell’s decisions will be constrained by the limitations of his roster, and he is still learning what he has. With only four center backs and one of them green, he is unlikely to start three center backs unless he is playing Inter Miami or Club America or other offensive threats even greater than they. But if the other side’s attack is peppered with elite speed, he may choose to match speed to speed rather than call on experience and guile to negate pace as Curtin always did.

Under Carnell not only will individual positioning display greater flexibility. Tactical shape may do so as well.