How West Brom could look if Marti Cifuentes is appointed – 2 changes are likely | OneFootball

Queens Park Rangers boss Marti Cifuentes is reportedly in discussions with West Bromwich Albion after the sacking of Tony Mowbray.

West Bromwich Albion will be heading into their fifth successive Championship since their relegation from the Premier League in 2021 and the Baggies are looking ahead to a summer that eventually marks them out as legitimate promotion contenders.

They sacked Tony Mowbray last week after just over three months of his second stint in charge as they slipped away from the top six and the play-off places and there have been several suggestions as to who the new manager could be.

Over the weekend it emerged that Queens Park Rangers boss Marti Cifuentes had been in talks with another Championship club with that side now being revealed as West Brom.

The Spanish coach, formerly of Hammarby, has reportedly become frustrated with QPR and has ambitions of taking a team into the Premier League with those ambitions lining up with the Baggies’ hierarchy.

If appointed at The Hawthorns, though, there are still a couple of things that he will need to address and change if West Brom are to mount and sustain a serious promotion challenge next season.

Back to tactical pragmatism at West Brom

When Mowbray returned to The Hawthorns in mid-January, it was a fairly big tactical shift for the Baggies to make in their pursuit of a top six finish and the play-off places.

That isn’t necessarily because of too much of a shift in the system or even in the style of football that Mowbray intends to play in comparison to his predecessor Carlos Corberan but more because of the freedom that Mowbray wants to play with.

Mowbray, more of a tactical ideologue, offers freedom to his attacking players to express themselves with fewer concerns with regards to the stability of the side and that is perhaps why he thrives with young players.

Carlos Corberan, on the other hand, is a lot more pragmatic and system-based over putting more, or too much, faith into individual personnel so that is what made it surprising that Mowbray was sacked by the end of the season without being able to have a full summer to get what he wants, which is very different to Corberan.

Cifuentes, though, is more in line with the Corberan philosophy and more wedded to the system and the jobs of each individual position rather than moulded by the players at his disposal.

That return to a more pragmatic way of thinking that focuses less on freedom in the final third and more on the process behind is something that may well work well with the squad built by and for Corberan.

Cifuentes’ flexibility within his rigid system

Within his rigid system or principles, Cifuentes has shown dexterity and flexibility with the way in which certain players play or the way in which he gets his team to play.

Rather than, for example, the ideologue approach of it being the same for every game regardless of opponent, Cifuentes is more detailed and thorough than that in terms of his desire to pinpoint weaknesses in an opposition.

That has allowed his QPR side to frustrate some of the better sides in the Championship whilst also able to, in successive seasons, pick up victories against weaker sides to motor away from the bottom three.

Within his system, players, albeit assigned certain and specific roles, do also occasionally rotate within that or adapt to different positions, such as Harrison Ashby, who has played at left-back a few times in the last month despite his preference to play at right-back.

Back in September, Ashby is one player who Cifuentes marked out as needing to ‘learn the system’ more.

In contrast to Mowbray and what West Brom have done in the last few months, there is a bit more detail in terms of their reactivity and that would be a major difference under Cifuentes.