Those of you who followed my Anti-Football posts last season will know that I’m not usually a lover of the darker side of Football. For me, football manager is a playground to experiment with wild and wacky tactics, to find new and interesting ways to play, or recreate great historic systems. This time round will be a little different. Those two seasons at Newport awoke something within me. My taster of the dark arts left me wanting more. I saw…
In the past, I have put a lot of emphasis into playing football “the right way”. In my FM18 save, I played Total Football with Ajax, the founders of the Cruyffian way of playing. A year later, I was experimenting with Arrigo Sacchi’s variant of total football in my save with Uniao de Madeira. In my current Moneyball save I have gone with a spin on the Hungarian Golden Team’s fluid style, an attacking 4-2-4. A change was required. I…
As mentioned in my previous articles in this series, I wanted to achieve success playing pragmatic football. Considering we’ve taken Red Star Wrexham from the VNL to the Championship in just three seasons, pragmatism doesn’t quite cut it as a good description. To use a term attributed to our lord and saviour Big Sam, we can only call it one thing: Resultism. If pragmatism is the acceptance of who you are and making the best of what you’ve got, resultism…
José Mourinho is now well known for his anti-football approach, and his mentality that if you don’t have the ball, you can’t make mistakes. Manchester United haven’t exactly been successful so far this season, sitting 7th in the table after winning only 6 of their opening 13 games. United have come under scrutiny for their defensive, lacklustre performances. Despite always being a pragmatist, Mourinho was not always this negative. This article will show a replication of Mourinho’s successful Inter Milan…