As one of the most iconic and game-changing teams in footballing history, the style of play of this great Dutch team is extremely unique and hard to replicate. Here is how you need to set up your custom tactics sliders if you are wanting to get as close to playing like this brilliant side, you want to set your side up in the 4-3-3 (2) formation.

Build Up Play: Speed – 36; Passing – 32; Positioning – Free Form.
Build-up play is crucial to this set-up, to allow to the free form positioning to ‘kick-in’ you have to be patient and work the ball around the pitch is short, sharp passing angles. As Holland did, you want to be playing shorter passes than longer, so this reflects on the 32 in passing. Very often you’d find players in completely different positions to the ones they started the game in so this is why we have the free form positioning as it will allow your players to interchange. The movement will confuse defenders and leave space for players to exploit, much as this amazing Dutch side would do. (it should be mentioned that by using lots of 1-2 passes (L1) for us, this will add to the movement of your players and will get your team playing more like this team).

Chance Creation: Passing – 59; Crossing – 53; Shooting – 68; Positioning – Free form.
Passing should be set just above the middle range of the slider settings. This will mean that you have plenty of short options to get the sharp passing operating smoothly but also allow the movement and angles needed to play this style. The crossing should be also in near the middle range, this team did cross and would look to get many players getting into crossing area. For shooting, we recommend that you set this at the 68 marks; this will mean that your players will look to get in and around the box for scoring opportunities, they scored goals from all over the pitch so this setting will help and once again, positioning should be set to free form.

Defending: Pressure – 41; Aggression – 45; Team width – 52; Cover.
To defend like this Dutch team you have to look to pressure the ball around your halfway line, the team would often look to retreat once they had lost the ball to get some of their team shapes back so the slider settings need to be as we have suggested above. It must be said that if you play this style and give the ball away you may be left exposed at the back if you cannot do this effectively, this is how they played though and with the talent on the pitch and how comfortable all the players on the ball were, you can see how effective it was. We would play the cover system rather than the offside trap due to the fact you need to allow players to retreat back to their positions. If you love the rest of this set-up but would prefer a slightly different defensive option of pressuring the ball a bit higher (as they sometimes did), then you can just change it but to truly play like this side, you need to play the cover system and look to drop slightly deeper. The pace of the game in general, when this team was around, was much slower so dropping deep was a little easier. If you’re playing FUT then the pace of the game is generally a lot quicker so you may need to adapt to this.

Defence
Defensive style – Balanced
Width - ★★★★
Depth – ★★★★★

Offense
Offensive style – Fast build-up
Width – ★★★★★★★
Players In Box – ★★★★★★★★★★
Corners – ★★★★
Free kicks – ★★