Tifo Football on YouTube has some good tactical stuff, it might be a little more in depth than what you’re after. But they’ll put up videos after big games like “here is how team A beat team B and how their tactics achieved that”.

Depending on how much time you have, if you’re interested in formations there’s a good book called “inverting the pyramid” that’s about how modern formations came to be (the title comes from the fact that in the early days teams would have most of their guys further up the field and less defenders, and that has basically inverted over the years).

Formations in elite level football are super fluid in the modern game though. There’s a lot of content out there, depending on how much of a tactics nerd you want to become. That sort of granular analysis isn’t super interesting to me so I don’t have many recs.

I can give a quick run down of positions… this might take a while, haha.

Goalkeeper: pretty obvious, the person at the back with the gloves and weird coloured shirt who can use their hands. You might hear the term “sweeper keeper” a lot. Basically that is used to denote the “modern” style of goal keeper that comes and “sweeps” up behind the defence and is good with their feet, rather than the old school pure shot stopper. (A sweeper used to be a type of defender who would sit behind the defensive line to sweep up balls over the top and so on, now the trend is for the gk to do that job)

Defenders: you’re usually gonna see it described as a back 3 (or 5…) or a back 4. Back 4 is two “full backs” on the left and right, with two centre backs in the… centre. Full backs can also be “wing backs”, which is a more attacking full back who gets up the field much more to help attack. You usually see wing backs on either side of 3 centre backs (this is where the 3 at the back/back 5 including the wingbacks comes in). Centre backs used to just be big tough guys who could tackle and head the ball, but more and more the trend is for them to be good in possession too, to carry or pass the ball upfield (at the elite level this really goes for every position these days).

So to sum up the defenders you have fullbacks, wingbacks, centrebacks (aka centre halfs, a bit archaic now).

Midfield is where it gets complicated. For the sake of brevity I’ll try to keep it simple. As far as central midfield goes, you can have more defensively skilled guys who will sit in front of the defenders and win tackles/cut out passes etc, as well as start attacks if they’re good at carrying the ball or passing themselves. These are the defensive midfielders. Then you have true centre mids, which are weirdly kind of rare at the minute. You’ll also hear the term “box to box” midfielder. It’s because that’s where they do their business, between the boxes, winning that midfield battle for their team and setting up attacks. Then you have your attacking midfielders. The traditional centre attacking midfielder is a skilful guy who threads passes through to the strikers and knits attacks together, but now the role is super varied (if a team has one at all). Besides the CDM, CM, and CAM there’s also left and right midfielders, but they’re pretty rare to see at the top level these days because most teams don’t play a 4-4-2 formation. You’ll have attacking fullbacks or even wingbacks doing the job a wide midfielder used to do.

Oh also just to make things super fun and confusing for a newcomer, defensive midfielders also get called “sixes”, box-to-box mids get called “eights” and central attacking midfielders get called “tens” - however this often has nothing to do with what number the player is actually wearing because the way shirt numbers work has changed, but the short hand has stayed the same. You can also have more than one of each (lmao). Like a team might play a “midfield three” in a 4-3-3 that has two 6s and an 8 - or if they’re being more attacking a 6 and two 8s!

Then there’s the attackers/forwards. This sorta kinda includes the aforementioned central attacking midfielder AKA “number ten” from earlier, as you’d expect. In front of the number 10 you have…. The number 9 AKA the striker. The guy who sits at the tip of the spear whose main job is to score goals (except when it isn’t, but hey this is a simplified explanation here). The attackers on wide left and right are called wingers. Wingers (and full backs and right left mids) used to play on the same side as their dominant foot. So your right winger would be right footed. This was back when a lot of teams played with 2 strikers in a 4-4-2, so the right mids/wingers would be trying to cross into those guys. These days you see a lot of so-called “inverted wingers” who play on the OPPOSITE to the traditional side, trying to come inside and use that angle to shoot with their stronger foot, or play in teammates.

As you can see, with all these positional variants coaches have a lot of options, but they can only pick 10 outfield players. This is where all the different formations come from. For example a 3-4-3 will have the wide play provided by the wingbacks (the outer two of the “four”) while the wingers will likely be inverted (the outer two of the front 3) so those wingbacks have space to work with out wide.

As for how to figure out if a team is doing well when they’re not actively scoring… are they having a lot of shots on target? Forcing the opposing keeper to make a lot of saves? Do they have the majority of the ball possession? Are they stringing a lot of passes together and putting together nice attacking moves? Is the game being played primarily in the opposition half rather than their side of the field? Those are all signs a team is on top and playing well.

Really I could take about this shit for hours because it’s fun for me, but I might just be telling you stuff you already know! Haha

Watch games and browse the soccer Wikipedia page.

From a practical perspective, the game is played 11-on-11 where there is 1 goalkeeper and 10 field players per team. These field players tend to be divided between defenders, midfielders and forwards. The positioning is dynamic so players will vary between defending and attacking frequently.

Rules-wise, the ball can’t touch a player’s hands unless it is the designated goalkeeper in the goalkeeper box. A foul (eg dangerous tackle) or handball or other infraction can lead to a free kick or a penalty kick if it occurs in the goalkeeper box. Infractions are judged by the main referee for explicit rule-breaking but also perceived intent which could lead to a verbal warning, a free kick, a yellow card (formal warning; max 1 per game, 2nd yellow card = automatic red card) or a red card (immediate expulsion and team plays remainder of game less one player).

For out of bounds, only the ball can ever be out of bounds and, therefore, out of play. Players can cross lines but it’s only the ball that matters and crossing lines requires the entirety of the ball to cross them (unlike tennis). Sideline (touchline) outs are put back into play with throw-ins while goal line (where the goals are) outs are put back into play with a goal kick.

There are various rules about when a ball or a player is in or out of play for offsides but basically an attacking player cannot be ahead of the second-to-last defender before the ball is passed to them. The position of the ball itself does not enable an attacking player to legally be offsides but rather the moment it leaves the foot of the passing player while the attacking player (target of pass) is onsides.

Theoretically, possession (who has the ball) tends to be very important because it sets the pace of the game and usually the team that doesn’t have the ball doesn’t score.

There’s a lot more but this is the baseline basics.

I'm glad you're getting into the sport! Also glad your watching MLS, I think its a fun league to watch and I personally love how chaotic it is (unless you have to watch NYRB)!

As for recommendations a channel I haven't seen recommended is It's Called Soccer. He's been covering mostly the US National team but recently been breaking down stuff in MLS and leagues. He's also written a book that I haven't read personally, but it's called: The Beautiful Game Decoded: A Guide to Understanding Tactics.

I think the other comments have hit on a lot of the rest of the points. I will say soccer can be extremely complex and nuanced, but if you keep watching the game and picking up what you can it's really not that hard to figure a lot out.

Jump in the deep end and start playing Football Manager. Jk don't do that (yet) unless you want to lose hours of your life lol.

Football Made Simple is a good channel. As others mentioned Tifo Football is a good channel as is their Tifo IRL channel.

Some books I'd recommend:

Football in Sun and Shadow - for an interesting look into the history of the sport

Inverting the Pyramid - History of Tactics

The Mixer - History of the Premier League

Also MLS is way different from how the rest of the world does the sport, with most other nations following the Promotion/Relegation model vs the standard American sport "Regular Season -> Playoff" model. But some nations have varying formats as well, like I know Mexico has two seasons (Apertura and Clausura). There's also different cup competitions for clubs ranging from Domestic to Continental. In the US we have the US Open Cup, and depending where you live your local club could end up playing an MLS club. We also have the CONCACAF Champions League. CONCACAF is the governing body of North American and Caribbean nations (and then also Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana for some reason) and in that competitions teams qualify through their league and play in it.

For books go right now and get The Game of Our Lives, The Ball is Round and The Age of Football. The first one is a History of Football in UK, the second is the evolution of the soccer, us football, rugby, Australian Rules Football and others on every continent, and the last a look at state of league football today. He analyzed literally every country on earth. He's a lefty so you'll get some socialist perspective as well

A hands on way to understand the tactical side is to screw around in a pirated copy of one of the Football Manager games!

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What's your MLS team? I'm a Galaxy fan

Do you have a national team?