Ryan Mason should make big West Brom change for Middlesbrough match - it may divide opinion | OneFootball

Ryan Mason should make a tactical switch for West Bromwich Albion ahead of facing Middlesbrough this weekend.

Having started the 2025/26 Championship season well, it would seem a bit premature to suggest West Bromwich Albion should make some tactical changes, but that should well be the case for Baggies boss Ryan Mason.

Having been handed his first ever permanent managerial role by Albion in the summer, former England international midfielder Mason has enjoyed a positive start to life at The Hawthorns.

West Brom collected ten points from their opening four matches of the campaign and they went into the September international break sitting in the top two and the automatic promotion spots.

Since then, though, the West Brom squad construction has been fairly considerably altered and they have been beaten by a goal to nil at home by Derby County in a game that perhaps best showed by there could be a few more frustrating performances and results with this squad.

The West Brom squad doesn’t seem to suit Ryan Mason’s style

West Brom have some very solid and good centre-backs, and some very solid and good full-backs – but none of them appear to be players who can get on the front foot and they are a bit more defensive-minded than a team seeking to dominate possession and control the play would like.

Their midfield options, again, are made up of good workers with more than adequate technical ability, but whether the incision is there or not remains to be seen.

This theme is not helped by the sale of Tom Fellows, the main creative spark in the final third, being sold to Southampton before the close of the summer transfer window, leaving the Baggies with a frustratingly bland, for want of a better word, group of players.

So that defeat to Derby at the weekend could well be a sign of things to come if Mason was to persist with the possession-dominant 4-2-3-1 approach in which West Brom managed to have 68% of the ball as well as 595 passes in comparison to Derby’s 297 and 11 corners in comparison to Derby’s zero.

There is now a worrying lack of technical quality and chance creation across the park, and that will be a concern as they move through the rest of the first-half of this season.

Ryan Mason could ensure West Brom lineup differently against Middlesbrough

The back-three system with wing-backs could well be an answer to a question that is only just beginning to be posed on the back of late summer business and an irritating home defeat.

Fellows was the man that pretty much every attack went through and, without him, West Brom are going to have to adapt. A like-for-like replacement in that role, such as Jed Wallace, is unrealistic, but tweaking the system and the style could help.

Their abundance of solid centre-backs, such as new signings Nat Phillips, George Campbell and Chris Mepham, would surely be better suited to a back-three with Alfie Gilchrist or Charlie Taylor capable of being the ball-playing centre-backs, too, on either side.

That would allow 31-year-old Wallace, who still has brilliant quality, to play in more of a wing-back role that could suit the former Millwall man, whilst Callum Styles, despite success at playing in central midfield for Hungary, someone who has thrived as a left wing-back.

Mason would then have the choice to go with a 3-4-3 or a 3-4-1-2 system in which Isaac Price is deployed as a number ten ahead of the likes of Jayson Molumby and Alex Mowatt or one of those two are dropped to play with three forwards.

Playing as a winger in a 3-4-3 system would surely be more suitable for both Samuel Iling-Junior and Mikey Johnston, too, as the system would naturally be more reactive and suitable for counter-attacking play, and those two in transition would be ideal.

Mason’s tactical ideology may be set in stone, and that would be a concern, but it may not be and it may be something he comes back to, and that is reasonable, but, the squad that has been created just doesn’t seem to suit it – and a bit of tactical flexibility and ingenuity may now have to be shown.