Valverde could use something like this to have a 3 man midfield with Messi a little more central. This way you could have Messi in his new fav position and somewhat hide his lack of legwork.
Though there are some issues.
1. How good would Iniesta be in that role since he does need to cover some decent acres of the field, both in attack and in defence? You could mitigate his work in defence by being able to use the press again and retrieve balls high up the pitch. Messi needs to do some running for that to happen.
2. The fullbacks are the most important pieces in this formation imo since they need to control large parts of the field and stretch the pitch. Otherwise we don't have any width whatsoever and teams will cram in the middle again. They need both intelligence and stamina for that. Alba must elevate his game to pre Enrique era to be any useful and the RB should
be prime Alves able to understand and execute the triangles with Messi/Iniesta/Busquets and the advanced press. And i don't really know who that RB is. Maybe Semedo from what's i've seen.
Something like Spain's NT, although, by having Messi/Neymar/Suarez there, you have way more creativity and goals between the 3 of them than Spain.
This isn't perfect by any means since there is no Xavi in there to boss absolutely anyone. That's why having 2 guys in front of the defence will be able to protect the back 4 in case we can't control the game to the same degree.
Of course, this is all w/o any players we might buy this summer but i don't know what this board is capable of so yeah.
Just throwing some ideas out there. Hopefully Valverde gets all the players he wants and we can see the full extent of his ideas. Good luck and let's win some damn silverware.
