It’s like Plato and the cave wall, we don’t see the light (coaching), we don’t see the coached strucures, we only see the shadows on the cave wall.
We can look for signs of attacking structure, like #Rozay showed with Guardiola/City, and wether we see them or not depends on our understanding of football structures, how hard we look and what we want to see.
Four things are clear: 1 A highly collectivized team with detailed instructions is easier to see structure in than a team that caters to individualism and creativity. 2 A team good enough to always be dominant (or bad enough to always be underdog) will play with the same structures mire often. 3 A group of players having played together for many years will be easier to see structure in than a newly assembled team. 4 Most importantly, a team that plays well is easier to see structures in.
Guardiola at City is probably the most extreme example of ‘easy to see structure’ in football today. When in Barca, he used to say to the players: I’ll take you to the 30-yard line, you have to do the rest yourselves. Meaning, play was highly structured by detailed instructions in defense and up to the last third, after that it was largely up to improvisation of individuals. At City, with less genial attacking players, he has automated the play all the way up to the five yard line in most cases.
Klopp is ‘known’ for playing style, but if you saw Liverpool last year and so far this year, it was very different to Dortmund and Klopp’s first years at Pool. It was often a case of getting the ball over the half line and open up times on the counter or using the fast interplay of the very well drilled and high quality of Mane-Firmino-Salah, plus they had very much a flow season. This season, when I’ve looked at them, the structure is hard to see because they’ve not managed to perform it with quality, but as we’ve seen Klopp’s teams for so long, we assume there is structure there even when it doesn’t show.
Solskjær is in a different situation. Few here have seen his Molde teams play much and know what to look for. Last season we saw him play first a Solskjær tweaked Mourinho drilled team, then a team set up tactically suited to different on paper dominant opposing teams (Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea, PSG, Pool, Barca), and then a team not able to perform the game plan successfully due to exhaustion, weak mentality, confidence, what have you.
Solskjær haven’t been able to impose an own playing structure before preseason started. After then, there are quite a lot of structure at display defensively, which makes sense, as there are better players there, and Solskjær is building from the back, security first, like most coaches do.
The attacking play, the structure is clear to se up until the half way line. From there on in, there are problems. Are they due to a) attacking patterns taking more time to implement than defensive patterns, b) they’re only getting started focussing on the attacking pattern, c) the constant changing of players due to injury means the relations are not getting developped, d) the players are not (or not yet) good enough quality wise to impose their playing structure in the game, e) there are no attacking structures beyond the half way line, f) there are attacking plans but Solskjær and his coaching team are not good enough at getting them across, or g) there is a plan in place, it’s just inferior to the plans of all other PL managers.
I don’t claim to hold the answer. I just see there are a lot of likely factors to choose from, and it’s unlikely for anyone outside the club to know which ones of these factors are most relevant for a year or maybe two.
As for anyone looking at not finding any signs of structure in our play at all, I think it’s clear they don’t know how structure looks like or aren’t looking very well.