There is no such thing as a 4-3-3. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2. They are familiar, reflexive. But none of them exist. Not really.
The way a team lines up to start a game, for example, most likely will bear very little relation to what it looks like during it as players whirl around the field, engaged in what anyone who has not watched a lot of mid-table Premier League soccer might describe as a complex, instinctive ballet.