[scratchmonkey]

I was reminded of this thread last weekend when West Ham defeated Manchester City, causing noted self-promoter "Big" Sam Allardyce (manager of West Ham) to wax rhapsodic about the essential nature of managers in terms of changing their tactical approach on a match-to-match basis to account for their opponents, an approach which is generally put under the umbrella term of Reactive. I can't find the exact quote now; he put himself and Mourinho into the Reactive camp and Pelligrini, Wenger and Rodgers into the Anti-Reactive camp, basically saying that those other managers have a given approach and they don't deviate from it regardless of the opponent, which, he claimed, makes them easier to beat.

(Perhaps the greatest thing about Big Sam is the Not Big Sam Twitter account.)

This is, unsurprisingly given the source* and context, a bit reductionist. There's an argument to be made that if you are too willing to change your tactical philosophy, you run the risk of not having a foundation to work off of and a team that can play aimlessly against another Reactive opponent. That said, there's something to what he's saying and Mourinho is actually a good example of this as his teams clearly have a core philosophy (formation of either 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 with two defensive/holding midfielders, two inside-forwards cutting in behind a single forward, typically a physical target man, quick, direct attacking play) yet can approach a match completely differently depending on context, especially in terms of facing a "stronger" team, or rather, a team that expects/is attempting to win the game, where Mourinho favors an extremely deep, defensive playing style concentrating on counter-attacking into space, something that has been shown to be the most effective way to play against teams like Barcelona and Rodgers' Liverpool.

Football Manger represents this by having each team have a maximum of three tactics that they can be training in at any given time (you can train in only one or two, if you're so inclined). Each tactic that you're training has a level of familiarity, which can be broadly interpreted as representing how good the team is at playing the roles and following the instructions that you've laid out. Every time you go in and change something, the familiarity drops, although that drop is minimal/practically non-existent for certain changes, including changing a player's role (I believe that this depends on how similar the role was to the previous one, although don't quote me on that) and if you change the overall mentality (more on that later) to a mentality in use for another one of the tactics that you're training in. Change to a mentality not currently in use elsewhere or move players around to different positions and the familiarity starts nosediving as players have to re-learn where they should be and where they should expect their teammates to be.

As for what adjustments you can make, there are very large-scale ones, like changing the entire mentality of your team or your formation; to the smaller ones, like telling your fullbacks to play narrower or for one of your midfielders to shoot more as it's raining and the ball is a little more slippery -- one thing to remember is that tactical changes made outside of the match (pre-Submit Team) remain in place after the game, where as changes made during a match are zeroed out after the match, something that I have a particular problem with in terms of set-piece instructions -- I will invariably note that we are doing something slightly off from what I want at corners while observing a game, tweak it right then, then not change it outside of the match, only to repeat in the very next game.

NEXT TIME: Wot's this Tactics thing all about?!?

* - Big Sam is a fantastic self-aggrandizement machine, my personal favorite being when he said that if his name were Allerdici his coaching genius would be fully recognized and that his natural place would be managing a club on the level of Real Madrid. One of the fun aspects of his post-game commentary is noting how every loss is down to players not following directions and every win is down to his overweening tactical genius. That said, he's got West Ham in the top five, so more power to him for now.

[scratchmonkey]

Tactics.

The sexiest bit of FM. When managing a team, you can have three currently active tactics that your team is familiar with. A tactic is a combination of formation, roles, instructions and an overall mentality that determines how your team will play, or at least how you'd like them to play -- there's going to be a certain amount of individual interpretation by your players.

Mentality is more nebulous than it first appears; however, it certainly affects the following: your formation's starting width, how far up your defensive line is (i.e. the distance between it and your goal), and the overall mentality of your players. It exists on a spectrum that goes like so, from narrower, deeper and less aggressive on the left:

Contain -- Defensive -- Counter -- Standard -- Control -- Attacking -- Overload

The bolded mentalities are the ones that you should use when building a tactic outside of the game -- the extreme mentalities are ones that really should only be used inside the game, for when the only thing your team cares about is not conceding or has an absolute need to score -- these mentalities will not hold up over a full match. Standard is also a bit of an odd one as it's usually used as a litmus test in that general use is to start out using it and then either adjust up or down in the spectrum depending on how the other team is playing and what your goal for the match is.

Alright, that's probably enough preamble. Let's dig into an actual tactic, one that I use for the majority of my matches in my current save:



Formation/role-wise, moving from the back, there is:

Standard Keeper; two Central Defenders set to Defend, two Complete Wing-Backs set to Attack; a Half-Back set to Defend; two Box-to-Box midfielders set to Support; a Shadow Striker set to Attack; and two False Nines set to Support. Some of these roles are a bit obscure -- the Complete Wing-Back is a player who is expected to cover the entire side of the field, playing in a fullback's position on defense and then breaking into a winger's role on offense. They can only be set to Attack because that's their focus, to quickly break forward. Half-Backs are defensive midfielders whose two main duties are to drop back into the defensive line and sometimes even behind it while also serving as a quick outlet for passes. Shadow Strikers are midfielders who aggressive try to move into goal-scoring positions on attack and False Nines are forwards who look to drop into midfield and then play in players making attacking movements from deep.

The Mentality is set to Counter and the Fluidity is set to Fluid, which means that I'm encouraging a fair amount of freelancing from my players in terms of drifting from their preset position/mentality -- I have a lot of pretty creative, aware players and as such I trust them to be able to deviate from instructions if they see something that needs to be exploited/addressed. Also off to the side you can see Team Instructions, which has too many entries to be displayed in the tactical view, so let's drill down:



Now that we know the formation, roles and team instructions for this tactic, we should be able to determine how I want the team to play. First of all, it should be noted that I set the team mentality to Counter and then put in instructions to Push Higher Up and Play Wider. So why not play with a more aggressive mentality in the first place if I'm going to change the fundamental shape of the team? In this case, the overall mentality determines where the team is going to start pressing/closing down the opposition, i.e. at what point are my team, when playing defense, going to aggressive move towards opposing players with the ball, with the idea to either take the ball away from them with a tackle or force them into a bad pass that we can then intercept. With a Counter mentality, you really don't start pressing until the other team carries the ball into your half of the field. So while I want my team to be playing with a high defensive line, catching the other team offside if they try and play through/over it and playing wider than they normally would when looking to Counter, I want them to hang back in their own half and invite the other team to come forward. Then I want them to press aggressively (Hassle Opponents) without lunging into stupid tackles (Stay on Your Feet) to avoid players taking themselves out of the play/picking up silly bookings.

The other instructions relate to how we play when we have the ball -- Shorter Passing should help retain the ball, Pass Into Space means that we should look to hit through-balls behind the defense whenever possible, Working the Ball into the Box means taking shots from closer in rather than blasting it from long-range, Drill Crosses means crosses should come in low and hard, Run at Defense so that we can utilize our impressive dribbling abilites, we want to Exploit the Middle because we should have more players there than the opposition and we want to play with the Highest Tempo possible because the concept is, they turn the ball over and then we attack as soon as we possibly can, before they can get back into a defensive posture. Also very important here, and not visible at all, is that there are Player Instructions on the two False Nines which are for those players to mark the opposition fullbacks.

Putting all of this together, we should get an idea of how the two shapes of the team should look like, those being when we have the ball and when we don't have the ball. On defense, the team should sit in a narrow band in their on half, a high line exposing space between the defenders and the keeper, with the idea being that playing offside (and the relatively high speed of our defenders) will mitigate that somewhat. Once the ball is carried over the halfway line, the team will aggressively close the ball down and try and force a turnover. Once we get the ball, we will try and quickly break downfield -- since the False Nines were marking the opposing fullbacks, they should be starting our offensive move in deep, wide positions, which does two things -- one, even though the formation is narrow by design with the only wide players being the wingbacks, who will be back on the defensive line, both forwards will be standing in wide areas, giving us potential pass outlets in those spaces and two, potentially dragging central defenders toward them, creating space in the middle for our Shadow Stroker to run into, supported by bursting runs from the Box-to-Box midfielders. Meanwhile, the Half-Back will actually retreat, with his Defensive duty placing him roughly in line with the two Central Defenders. If you were to take snapshots of the team on defense and on attack, the former would look like a 4-6-0 and the latter like a 3-4-3.

Real-World Example

The tactic is named 'KayLVG' for a reason -- the team I'm coaching is Kayserispor and LVG are the initials for the maverick Dutch coach Louis Van Gaal. Van Gaal has a long and impressive history, with perhaps the most impressive moment being his excellent flying jump-kick demonstration during the Champion's League final:



Tactically, one of the many feathers in his cap was the Oranje (the Dutch name for the national team, as they play in that color) coming back from a goal down to completely stuff defending world champions Spain in the most recent World Cup. They did so by playing a tactical system that heavily deviated from the traditional Dutch 4-3-3. A system that is very similar to the tactic above, especially in terms of how the front three operate.

Okay, that's probably enough to chew on for now, please let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

[scratchmonkey]

The above tactic is one I use a lot, for about 90% of road games and 30% of home games. This is because, as astute readers may have noticed, that an unmentioned prerequisite for the tactic functioning as intended is an opponent willing to come into my half of the field*. While you can win a game against a team that is also sitting back using this tactic, it's a lot more difficult. Therefore, it makes sense to have another tactic designed specifically trying to break down a team whose primary goal is to prevent you from scoring (a good rule of thumb is that you're always going to be playing teams weaker or stronger than you at some point, so you should have a tactic ready for either situation). Such as this one:




Both in terms of formation and instructions, it's not really that much different from the KayLVG tactic. There's the half-back dropping into a back three, two wing-backs providing width and the only real major difference formation-wise is that one of the False Nines has been replaced with an extra midfielder and we're playing with two DMs instead of two CMs**.

THe big difference in terms of Mentality?instructions are the following:

- Attacking Mentality
- Much Higher Defensive Line
- Roam From Positions
- Very Fluid Fluidity

Attacking Mentality means that the team will naturally defend extremely high up the pitch...and I want them pushed up even more. Not only that, I also basically want the players to feel free to abandon their roles, to not be thinking "I'm supposed to mark this guy/I need to attack this particular space" -- I want players to swarm the ball on defense regardless of who they are or who has it and then to break into vulnerable positions regardless of what their nominal position is. I've gone with Higher Tempo instead of Much Higher Tempo because this tactic is designed to win the ball back much higher up the pitch, meaning that when we force a turnover, ideally we're on top of the defense already instead of having to hurry the ball upfield during the attack.

Real-Life Examples

And now we head into prime Football Hipster territory! The inspiration for this tactic is of course, Gegenpressing!

The Crown Prince of gegenpressing of course, is Kloppo:





Jurgen Klopp is the be-spectacled post-rockish manager of Borussia Dortmund, the only German team lately to really push the money-bags traditional powerhouse of Bayern Munich (not to be confused with Bayer Leverkuesen, who are missing the 'n' because they're actually just owned by the Bayer family). Dortmund have been successful despite being overall a smaller, less-expensively-assembled squad than Bayern because they have an overall ethos and philosophy, that being gegenpressing.

The FM translation of this tactic isn't entirely perfect of course, as there just isn't functionality to allow you to create structure like the "five-second rule". That said, it does translate relatively well, so long as you make sure that you need to pick players who can play the style well -- players must have good Workrate, Positioning and decent Physical abilities, as this style is incredibly demanding both in terms of mental acuity and physical fatigue.

* - FM teams follow real-world team mentalities in that teams generally play more attacking at home and more defensively on the road. There's no real agreement as to whether there's actually any reasons why a team would play better at home; there you are though.

** - I'm actually highly likely to change this when I get a chance, I first came up with this tactic when the team wasn't as developed as it is now and as it's a little more capable, I'm going to move one of the DMs forward and go with two Box-to-Box midfielders and I'm also going to switch the False Nine to an Advanced Forward, who won't drop into midfield and instead will play off the shoulders of the defenders looking for through-balls and drift out wide to try and whip in crosses.