Wilfried Nancy: Analysing new Celtic manager’s tactics

Analysing Nancy’s attacking tactics should give hope to Celtic fans – even if examples of them working as he would hope have not been common in his early days in Glasgow.

Celtic have improved in their past two games – creating a huge number of clear goalscoring chances in the defeat at Dundee United and then the home win against Aberdeen.

Against Aberdeen, they had 71% of the ball, 31 shots, an expected goals tally of 4.53, and hit the post four times.

Even against a side reduced to 10 men, those numbers are staggering, and it would be fair to say a mixture of bad luck, the quality of the finishing and excellent saves restricted them to three goals.

What bodes well for Celtic is their attacking performances look to be gradually improving under Nancy.

Fans will need to show patience, however, as developing the relationships that enable these tactics to work takes time.

Nancy encourages freedom for his players to express themselves, which has an upside in the long run but takes longer to bear fruit in the short term.

During his time at Columbus Crew, when asked about structure and freedom in his side, he said: “For me, there is no creativity in structure. Within [our] concepts, players can move freely.”