It seems that midway through the life-cycle of every Football Manager game there comes a time for change. It is usually when long-running saves start feeling stale. And a new challenge is needed to keep the game fresh. Sometimes it is a matter of changing up the tactics. The recent major Match Engine update has made me realize that my tactics were not doing what I wanted. We were winning games, but not in the way I wished. So I…
Or how to use Club DNA to keep your FM20 save interesting The influence of Total Football has been far-reaching in both time and place. Since its dramatic entry into the world in 1974 it changed the face of the sport as we know it. Marcelo Bielsa, Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola were all influenced by Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels in 1970s Netherlands. If not for them, Spanish Tiki-Taka would not have existed. In this followup to my last…
Is it Possible in a Football Manager Game? 1974. To some football enthusiasts (and Ajax fans), this was the year when football reached its apotheosis as a sport. The highest point in the development of the beautiful game, when it was the closest it would ever be to an art-form. Some would even argue that the game has been on the downturn ever since, as the sport gets more and more violent and mechanical and VAR discussions dominate the media….
The Hammer and Anvil Tactic (download below) FM20 Followup To: My obsession with overloads first started in FM19 with Roma. At that time I fell in love with this simple and effective strategy. The consistent results it led to with the Giallorossi, made me even more respectful of Pep Guardiola’s football philosophy and his achievements. More recently while researching for my current Young Devils series, I started to realize how much of an effect Marcelo Bielsa’s ideas had on Pep’s…
This year, I think I felt even more underwhelmed than usual. Being able to delegate the role of shouting from the touchline was one of the heights of the FM20 new features announced. Almost everyone I spoke to felt the same way. There wasn’t much to be excited about before the FM20 beta came out, but it was still a chance to start afresh with updated squads. Yet the game feels more professional and realistic. Let me explain!
Last time in the lab, we worked out the attributes that formed the DNA of my hoofball side. In this post, we’ll be comparing FM19 tactics. To do that, we’ll compare that hoofball tactic against a range of others from Dictate the Game in a tactical showdown. We discovered, as a result of the analysis, that for my angry hoofballing side the (common sense) attribute of aggression was not the only key for success. So were surprise attributes like positioning…