In Football Manager 2019, I’ve predominantly focused on creating guides, instead of a story or tactical recreations. However, this article will be a combination of guides and tactics; a guide on tactics.
The beta showed us the new tactical overhaul
Now in my previous article on training (that can be found here:)
In Step 1, I talk about building your tactic first, and then your training. I decided to link a few articles from the site for good tactics to use, but what if you want something more creative? What if you wanted to create a new tactic or something unique?
In this article I’ll talk you through how to create a tactic from scratch, from player instructions to mentalities and hopefully it all ties in with the training article and everything becomes a bit easier!
I have been playing Football Manager since 2013 and year after year I still see the same questions pop up regarding Player Preferred Moves (PPMs or also known as Player Traits). Why do they not work how they should? My player has “Plays with back to the goal” but I never see him receiving passes and holding up the ball? How come my centreback with “Brings Ball out of Defence” does not dribble into the midfield? The game engine must be broken right? Wrong, what you see is the divergence between what his role is instructing him (including any idiosyncratic traits he possess) and the general team and/or individual player instructions. This guide will examine some popular Player Traits and explain how they can work together and be applied to a typical 4-2-3-1 tactic to enhance overall possession and scoring.
With transfers already happening all over the World and databases being created daily, it’s time we discussed teams to try on Football Manager using TheFMEditor’s database.
I have seen a lot of tweets recently saying they are bored of this years FM and can’t really get in to a save, I hope this article can reignite that spark with Football Manager and you can enjoy the game before the new one releases.
Livin’ the Dream is the third and final installment following the journey of Mason Bradshaw’s football manager career. His most recent role was with Braintree Town FC, in the Vanarama South, where he managed to keep them up. He’s now down under managing Sydney FC, living on the harbour with his wife Sophie, and young daughter, April.
In this article, we will see Mason play three games, we will also hear from him about a big announcement regarding him and his wife, Sophie, plus Dan Smith, a local reporter, dishes out a transfer rumour about a potential signing.
Welcome to the first part of my new (and first!) series of posts on Dictate the Game. The aim of this is to sift through the major leagues and take a closer look at some of the best bargains available to you when you kick off a new save.
Scoring from set pieces has always been one of my club’s philosophies. Why not tick that box? It can give you extra credit and doesn’t come in the place of another philosophy. Surely, banging in loads of set pieces is doable if you spend a bit of time on your tactic?
It can be hard in some circumstances.
You might like to buy younger players. You might prefer more technical or creative players than meatheads who call themselves footballers. The simple answer might just be that these are all excuses and nothing is working for you.
I know you might feel like set pieces don’t need the attention in your save. Maybe, you’re winning enough games anyway. But you shouldn’t be going a few games without scoring any goals from set pieces and you shouldn’t be scared whenever the opposition has a set piece. Continue reading →
In my recent post about my Golden Generation at Red Bull Leipzig, I’m still churning through seasons at the club. I’m trying to make some progress but as a result of my endeavours, I’ve started to get to grips with the new training system implemented in this year’s Football Manager.
I amazingly ended up signing Jadon Sancho this summer after my board agreed to make the arrangements to complete the transfer!
After winning the league in my second season, we’re looking confident to challenge for the title again. After losing Marcel Sabitzer and Péter Gulácsi we signed Jadon Sancho, Julian Weigl, Timo Horn and Serge Gnabry to pad out the squad for a good cup or champions league run.
As with lots of creative or inventory management games (in this case footballers) there is a ‘golden rule’ for success:
Input = Output
What I mean by this is that if you decide to plug in a tactic from a content creator, leave your assistant to run training and tactics and just meander through the season you’ll probably do alright. Perhaps you’ll do a bit better than expected or maybe a bit worse, but you’ll do alright.
If however you decide to fully invest into the save and create a detailed tactic, scour nation after nation to find the perfect player and micro-manage your imaginary staff to an infinite degree, you might find that results will tend to go your way, and the payoff is ecstatic. You might still do worse than if you coasted through, but you can safely say it was you doing it and can be proud of the commitment.
Training is definitely one of these ‘Input = Output’ scenarios. This year training was overhauled and is now heavily integrated into the tactics system, with the two overlapping constantly. Here are some top tips to bridge the gap and make more of the training features without being completely in over your head.
Welcome back to the third post in my Moneyball series. If you’re new you can check out Part 1 Here.
My first full season at Crystal Palace draws to a close, and with the end in sight, there’s time to reflect on a successful season in the Premier League. We’re going to take a look at how my signings performed in the second half of the season compared with other players in the squad, my results as a whole and a look at inventive ways I’m keeping my expenditure down.
Welcome back to the FM Stats Lab. In our first post we covered how we set up our lab environment to give is as much control as possible over our variables, and we also dipped our toes into the statistical water by investigating what sort of impact the professionalism attribute can have on overall team performance. If you’ve not had a chance to read it you can find it here – spoiler alert though, professionalism can have a huge impact.
Our first post was a light introduction, and the statistics were kept on a leash, but now (for all you fellow nerds) we are going to delve a little bit deeper. If stats aren’t you thing that’s fine, you can still find out our headline results from each of our experiments and there’ll be a little glossary at the end of any statistical terms that get thrown around.
There have been some great suggestions in the comments so in this post we planned to cover two experiments:
The Impact of Decision Making
Physically, Mentally, or Technically good Strikers?
However we went down a stats rabbit hole with the investigation of Decision Making. One that had originally been looked at by another blogger back in FM18 with their original version of an FM Lab. So the striker based experiments will have to wait until next time…
Join Ryan, Eric, Guy, Ihor, and Luke for this week’s Dictate The Game Podcast!
We talk about Sarri at Juventus and what the crew thinks the Old Lady will look like this year. Not only that, but what will Chelsea look like next year including a new manager.
Plus, we talk Shadow Striker and how you can use the position in your FM19 save and make him the goal scoring machine he can be! Don’t miss the end when Luke talks about his new love for the Jonas Brothers!
