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As anybody who has viewed time spent on games in my Steam profile could tell you, I have a serious problem, and that problem is Football Manager. Initially, it had to be imported from Europe, a somewhat-difficult process without today's specialty import websites and my trials in this area were only relieved by a co-worker who had a European contact who would buy copies of the game and FedEx them to us. For a while, Sports Interactive made an America-only version of the game called Worldwide Soccer Manager; however, it was treated as the red-headed stepchild and usually involved a certain amount of finagling to get to work properly and in the end, it was easier to still import. While many in Europe and elsewhere were upset that Football Manager eventually required Steam for installation, having our addiction available on-demand was a great boon for American players.

As it turns out, FM is a great game for those of us with small children. It can be easily played with only one arm available, which means that we can cradle infants and still play. Better yet, it doesn't require any sort of reaction time, bar the reflexes necessary to pause the game mid-match in order to make tactical changes. You can get up and leave the game running to go deal with spills, diaper changes or midnight terrors safely, which is, in all honesty, the main reason why my Steam hours played are so horribly bloated, as it's really just recording how many hours I've had the game loaded, not how often I've actually been playing.

Perhaps at this point I should bother to actually explain what the game is for anybody curious enough to have read this far. Football Manager is, unsurprisingly, a game where you play the manager of a team that plays the sport of football (soccer to Americans, "kickdaball" to my two-year-old niece). When you load up the game, you're prompted to create your virtual identity, with name, birthdate, nationality, optional photo and reputation level (starts off at "Sunday League footballer" and goes up to "Recognized International" -- this is here to represent that it's easier to get a job managing if you were a famous player beforehand). You then choose how many leagues that you want to play with -- there are 117 playable leagues in the game (7 of which are English*) and even choosing a small amount of them will create a player database with tens of thousands of players (you can vary the size of the database, more players is more realistic and means slower game processing). You then choose a team from the leagues that you've chosen, or you can start unemployed, which means that you'll sit around clicking Continue a lot until a team sacks (fires) its manager and decides to give a chance to interview for the position**.

Once you've actually created your persona and picked a team, you are dumped into the FM interface and expected to figure which of a roughly billion different menus and screens are going to be the most important to turn your team into a rough, mean, football-killin' machine.

* - Football leagues generally (although not in all cases) have a similar structure in that each country has a series of leagues that are connected to each other by a system of promotion/relegation. So if you finish at the bottom of the top league, you are relegated -- sent next season to play in the league below that one, while the teams that placed at the top of that division are promoted -- brought up to the league above. This is how England has 7 leagues -- The Premier League, The Championship, League 1, League 2, Conference National, then the Conference North and Conference South -- the final two leagues are regional, so the league system bifurcates at that level, with two leagues being equal rungs on the ladder. Please note the ludicrous naming convention ('League 1' used to be the name for the top division in England -- it is now the third division, please drive through) and for further shits and giggles, the actual "English League" only comprises the Championship and Leagues 1 and 2 -- the Premier League is actually its own individually administrated entity and below League 2 is "non-league" and has its own administrative groups.

** - Interviews are something added in the most recent edition of the game, previously you were just offered the job, now you have to do a fairly piecemeal series of dialogue choices (not even trees, really) about whether your financial expectations line up with the board/owner (the group of people who ultimately run the team) and whether there are any philosophies that you may agree/disagree with -- these have to do with either an expecting play style or team-building methodologies.

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Why Football Manager -- The Stories

If pressed to come up with my favorite games, two that are right at the top are Dwarf Fortress and Football Manager. They're both overly-complicated pieces of software that are designed to produce verisimilitude. They both make me happy in a similar way, by allowing me a certain amount of control over something that I can turn into a story, with success (I managed to build a windfarm; My latest signing is on a scoring streak) and failure (I did not build traps/train troops in time and now goblins have invaded; I bought temperamental Eastern European defenders who failed to gel with my squad and now I'm going to be relegated) and larger and smaller arcs of these successes and failures. Both games are about making history and recognizing that failures and defeats are just as interesting as victories (aside from the mechanical aspect of needing to understand the former in order to achieve the latter).

Most Football Manager stories are boring because the majority of the people who play the game are frustrated fans who want to use the game to assuage the feelings that are naturally associated with being a fan -- lack of control being the primary one. Most of them would boil down to "I took control of Chelsea* and bought all the players that I know are great or will be great in two years and I won all the trophies." I don't doubt that there's something cathartic to this; it doesn't really make for a narrative that's interesting on any level except for the person who creates it.

If you want to read a compelling story about Football Manager, you can't really do better than: Run of Play - Pro Vercelli. Run of Play was an essay-style blog about football written/curated by Brian Phillips, who wrote the above series of posts about managing fallen giant Pro Vercelli in Football Manager. Phillips was later headhunted to become one of the staff writers for Grantland, ESPN's entry into thoughtful long-form writing about sport and pop culture. His greatest piece there is probably his take on the Iditarod. That said, I always come back to his Pro Vercelli series. I'm not sure how many times I've read it. The real draw to the Pro Vercelli saga is that Phillips accurately captures the mania of trying to build a team and how important all the virtual people are to that process.

I like to compare FM to RPGs and the virtual people have a lot to do with that, to a degree that's beyond mechanical. Each player and staff member has a personality that comes through your interactions and one of the greatest things about the game is that this is largely unpredictable. Your scouts may tell you that this Slovenian teenage defensive midfielder has the potential to be one of the best in the world; what they don't tell you is that he has a propensity to pick up stupid yellow cards, that he scores from corners at a rate far higher than his stats would suggest and that he will have horrible personality clashes with other important members of your team. This is the joy of FM. If I'm playing Dragon Age and I recruit a certain elf to my party, I can go onto GameFAQs and find out all his little personality quirks and how they interact with the game's mechanics. In FM, I just don't know. I have to gamble and go off my intuition, I have to pore through what available information I do have and try and glean what the future might hold. I am, pretty frequently, wrong. And this is a great part of the dance too.

* - Insert any number of large, money-heavy clubs with legions of overseas fans here.

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I think that's what makes CK2 a lot more interesting than the other Paradox games, which are more about resource management (EU) or tactical/strategic positioning (Hearts of Iron) and yes, the two are somewhat similar because you're dealing with individuals rather than abstracted organizations, although as I hope to touch on in an upcoming post, FM is very much about strategic/tactical thinking, just on a much much smaller level than anything that Paradox has produced (to my knowledge).

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Lick Meth, if true, that's hilarious re: secret nerfs for Liverpool -- I'm on a site where people play FM a particular way (I'll get into it later) and I remember a couple of saves that hit the rocks rather badly once they'd moved to Liverpool, I have to wonder if that was the game messing with them now.

I'm mulling over what to talk about next -- I'm thinking that a brief overview of football tactics and how they translate to FM is the way to go.

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There are two major learning curves/roadblocks associated with Football Manager that would prevent most people from picking up the game and playing it. The first of which is the UI -- now, it's a far cry from something like Dwarf Fortress; still, the sheer amount of menus and the "hidden knowledge" of many options that are not immediately obvious means that for anybody not steeped in a decade plus of Sports Interactive interface design is probably going to hit a point where they want to do something yet not know how to do it or even if it's possible, relatively quickly. The other is knowledge of football itself. Now, I should hasten to point out that you don't have to be a huge football fan to do well at the game; in fact, it should be pretty easy for somebody with almost no knowledge of the sport to do well at the game given a basic foundation of how FM works in terms of positions and formations. Which is the purpose of these next few posts!

Now, one of the biggest sub-sets of football analysis/culture in recent years has been all about Tactics. Tactics is, at the most basic level, what formation each team uses, i.e. where each player is expected to play and what role they perform. The Tactics Bible, such as it is, is Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid, which is a historical examination of tactics worldwide. Also worthy of note is Zonal Marking, a site dedicated primarily to match analysis based on tactics -- the site is pretty dead right now as the author, Michael Cox, is now employed writing articles for major sports sites; however, the archives are extensive and very useful for anybody trying to understand how tactics differ from team to team and what difference they make in the actual game.

Before we get into actual formations, let's do a quick rundown of the basic positions, as FM understands them, there are three basic different positions denoted in Light Blue, with a further breakdown of sub-positions, in other colors:



Goalkeeper - Okay, there are four basic positions. The keeper doesn't really count as he's pretty much outside of the rules. He gets to use his hands (as long as he's inside the 18-yard box around the goal) and everybody uses one and only one, so tactically there's not a lot to play around with there.

DEFENDERS
Defenders are, appropriately enough, those players whose primary responsibility is to prevent the other team from scoring and are the furthest-back players in any formation.

Centerbacks - Those defenders that play in the center of the field. Generally responsible for "marking" (i.e. being close to and preventing from getting the ball/taking away the ball when they have it/closing down shots and passes) the opposing team's forwards. Tend to be tall, strong, not usually the most skilled players in terms of ball skills.

(Sweeper/Librero) - Technically there is another kind of centerback, who actually plays behind the other CBs; however, they're really an "advanced" position best left to the tactics hipsters with their giant beards and Dukla Prague away jerseys.

Fullbacks - Defenders who play on the sides of the defense, between the centerbacks and the touchline (the sides of the field). While they share many of the responsibilities of the centerbacks, they are also usually expected to get a bit more involved in the offense when the team has the ball, moving up the field in wide positions.

Wingbacks - Wingbacks are like fullbacks, only with a lot more offensive responsibilities -- wingbacks are usually played without any wide-players in front of them and can play either from a more defensive position like fullbacks or pushed forward into an intermediate position between fullbacks and wide midfielders.

MIDFIELDERS
Midfielders are the chaps who sit between the Defenders and the Forwards and whose remit necessarily involves the most variance in terms of duties/sub-categories.

Defensive Midfielders - These are players who sit deeper on the field, just in front of the defense and behind other midfielders. While the historical DM is a destroyer, whose job it is to try and break up the attack, usually via tackling and shutting down the opponent's attacking players, there are also more creative players who operate in the same area and even the all-out defensive midfielder has seen some changes.

Central Midfielders - Those who play in the absolute middle of the park, CMs can have a wide variety of duties, enough so that trying to give a general description is somewhat worthless -- the main thing to know is that players here will be expected to contribute significantly to both offense and defense

Wingers - The winger is a midfielder who plays on the sides of the midfield zone, effectively the midfield equivalent of the fullback/wingback. Wingers are usually players who are expected to attack, although in a variety of possible ways. Wingers can be deployed along the same "line" as CMs or in a more advanced position, more in line with the next position.

Attacking Midfielders - The inverse of the defensive midfielder, AMs operate in the space between their midfield and the defensive line. Players who play here are attacking by nature, although whether that means they're a distributor looking to play in teams or taking the attack to the opposing team personally varies according to philosophy.

FORWARDS
Forwards/Strikers are those that play furthest up the pitch and who usually bear the brunt of the responsibility in terms of scoring goals. Like the AM, there's a wide variety of possible play styles here.

Okay, so now that we know about positions, we can start to try and understand formations, which will be the next post.

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Now that hopefully anybody interested has read the above post about positions, let's start talking about formations. The easiest way to talk about formations is just to have a picture of where everybody lines up, which is how you set your tactics in FM and is a classic representation of tactics interacting:



That's the Zonal Marking formations graphic from Switzerland's (red, attacking from top to bottom) victory over Ecuador (yellow, attacking from bottom to top) in the group stages of World Cup 2014 in Brazil. I picked it because both formations are relatively basic for the real world, as well as providing good examples in terms of traditional vs. new-style formations as well as how notation would be used for these formations. In terms of the latter, the classic method of notation is three numbers which represent the three basic positions, Defender, Midfielder, Forward, reading left to right. Notation has evolved such that now each number refers to a "band" of players, with the WB/DM band, CM/WM band and AM/AW (Advanced Winger) band being denoted separately. Let's break down the two above formations positionally and notationally.

First, let's look at Ecuador. Using the positions outlined in the above post, we can see that they're playing with 2 central defenders, 2 fullbacks, 2 central midfielders, 2 wide midfielders and then either 1 attacking mid and 1 forward or 2 forwards -- even though Enner Valencia is definitely playing deeper than Caicedo, he's operating as more of a pure striker as somebody who drops back into midfield when not in possession. In old-style notation, this would be the classic 4-4-2, four defenders, four midfielders, two forwards. In new-style notation, this could be represented as a 4-4-2 or as a 4-4-1-1, with the latter representing the split between attackers. In my opinion, this probably still a 4-4-2 even in the new notation given E. Valencia's lack of defensive responsibilities.

Now, for Switzerland. They're playing with 2 CBs, two very active fullbacks/wingbacks, two DMs/CMs, two wide attackers, one AM/withdrawn forward and one pure forward. In old-style notation, this would be a 451. Now a lot would be lost in that notation as you have no real idea how the '5' are set up. At first glance, this would seem to denote a defensive formation when it's actually set up to attack. In new-style notation, you run into the problem that there seem to be multiple possible interpretations: the defensive players could be isolated as a '4' or the full/wingbacks could be combined with the CM/DMs as a 2-4, the attacking four could be split a number of ways, etc. However, I believe the correct breakdown would be 4-2-3-1 -- four defenders, a band of a pair of holding midfielders, and an attacking band of three behind a lone striker.

The key to this interpretation is that the above graphic does not represent both teams in a neutral state, it represents the dominant phase of play in the game, with Switzerland looking to attack and Ecuador looking to sit back, absorb pressure and then attack on the counter -- you can tell this is the case by how much further up the pitch the Swiss are -- check the difference in distance between their CBs and the halfway line and the same measurement for Ecuador. Because of this, this accentuates the attacking nature of the Swiss fullbacks, who wouldn't be playing in-line with the holding midfielders on defense and of Xhaka, whose position can be compared to E. Valencia for Ecuador, as they are holding much the same spot when the Swiss are in attack and the Ecuadorians on defense -- this indicates that Valencia is a forward -- he isn't dropping back on defense and obscuring Xhaka being a midfielder -- when the Swiss lost possession, he dropped back and formed more of a central midfield triangle with Behrami and Inler right behind him.

This example also hopefully shows the problems that both notation and Football Manager have as interpretations. Neither can completely accurately, either in a sequence of numbers, or as an extremely sophisticated simulator, recreate the fluid and often chaotic motion that you see in the actual sport.

NEXT TIME: Player attributes, positional roles and tactical workshopping!

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The tactics have gotten better since they added the Tactics Creator, although the player roles are still pretty abstract and really take some implementing tactics, seeing how they interact in a match, then tweaking again. I think they've gotten about as right to get it so far at least they've created the FM Classic mode for people who just want to fly through the seasons like in the old CMs -- I tend to miss the fiddly bits too much to really enjoy it though.

Training is definitely a lot better -- have you played the recent versions? On FM14, individual training is only training for a specific attribute/learning a new role/learning a preferred move. And with the team training, you just decide how much time you devote to match training and general training on a slider between the two spectrums and then decide if you want to set an emphasis for both. It's so much less work than the old training system, where lots of people would just download the "proven best" training slider sets uploaded by other players because it was such a clusterfuck.

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Now that we have a basic idea of how positions work in FM and how they relate to how formations are used in the game, it's time to tinker with how that actually works in terms of playing the game.

Once you go through the process of creating your alter-ego and choosing a team to manage, you'll go through a brief acclimation process, the most important of which is finding out exactly what you have to work with in terms of players:



This is my current FM14 team, Kayserispor of the Turkish Super Lig, which is the highest division in the country. The most important column here for our purposes* is 'Position', because that indicates where each player can play at their greatest proficiency. FM uses a shorthand for position, where D - defensive band, DM/WB - band between defense and midfield, M - midfield band, AM - band between midfield and forwards, S - strikers/forward band; while L,R,C denote whether the player can play on the left, right or center. So Alihan Simsek, whose position is noted as a D(RL), is a fullback who can play on either side of the defense. If he could play wingback as well, it would say D/WB(RL) and if he could play only wingback on the left and could play both on the right, it would say D(LR)/WB(L).

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to deciding on a formation and a team philosophy -- first are those managers that have an existing ideal in their head and intend to mold the team to fit that ideal. For instance, just looking at this roster, a coach who came in and wanted to play a 4-2-3-1 with attacking wingers would be in a tricky situation -- I have two players who can play AML on the roster, which would be just enough to get by; however, there's only a single player on the roster capable of playing in the AMR spot, which means that if he went down injured/was away on international duty/got sold by your chairman without asking you, you'd have to play somebody out of position. The other school of thought is those managers who see what players on the team and try and form the strongest philosophy they can by playing as many of their best players and as few of their weak players as possible. I happen to be part of that latter school mainly because I find it more interesting to try and mix things up and challenge myself to find something close to the ideal strategy for a team without needing to spend several in-game years building something new.

If we were to drill down into one of these players by clicking on their name, we would go to the player screen, from which I've clipped the most relevant section:



This is Harun Colak, a backup midfielder. I've picked him instead one of my stars because he actually has a fair amount of variance in his stats, which makes it a little more obvious what he's good at and what he isn't. First of all, look at all those stats! There are actually even more than that, since there are a number of hidden stats, around 10 or so, that you can only intuit through observation -- for example, I have a pretty good idea of which my players have pretty high Dirtiness stats, as that's one that results in players getting called for more fouls than usual, as well as picking up a ton of bookings.

Player stats are divided into three columns: Technical, Mental and Physical. Colak is a above-average technical player who is strongest at Passing the ball and is weakest at Dribbling with it, mentally, he's extremely brave, has a tendency to attempt unexpectedly creative moves (Flair) and is above-average in some of the "does the dirty work" areas (Determination, Off the Ball, Work Rate). Physically, he's pretty much average (and therefore usually the least athletic player on the pitch in the top division) except that he's got good stamina and strength.

Looking at these stats, a FM veteran would pretty much instantly know how Colak would fit into their formation/tactics on three levels: how he should be individually instructed how to play, what kind of players he should be selected with in his immediate vicinity and how he would fit into a whole-team view.

The first level is what would be covered by Player Role -- each position in the game has a number of Roles associated with it, most of which are unique to that position. It used to be that the only way you could instruct a player individually was through a bunch of sliders that you had to tweak very specifically. Some preset templates for sliders were added, which was helpful, then the sliders were hidden, with the templates become Roles and finally, the sliders were taken away entirely, with a player receiving all instructions through his Role and through specific tactical instructions that you can give the player -- this is just a series of abstractions on top of the sliders that have been completely hidden away; however, this feels much more natural and makes more sense to people not used to the intricacies of the simulation.

So off to the right of the stats you can see the positions where the player is comfortable -- in this case, we can see that he's best playing as a central mid, is slightly worse playing as a DM or an AM and that he can at least fill in as an M(L), although you wouldn't want to rely on him there. Select a position and the Roles that he's best for at that position are shown. In this case, with M(C) selected, we can see that he'd be best at:

Ball Winning Midfielder - Ball-winners are midfielders whose primary job is defensive, to close down opposing players who have the ball and try and win the ball back, either by tackling it away from them or intercepting passes. Colak would probably do well here because he's decent positionally and has the Aggression, Bravery and Strength to take on players physically.

Deep Lying Playmaker - The DLP's job is to sit deep in the midfield, make himself available to receive passes, then look to start attacking moves. Colak's strengths here are his decent on-the-ball skills and passing ability, although he's not going to be a reliable source of game-changing passes as his Creativity and Decisions are average at best.

Box-to-Box Midfielder - The two boxes in this Role's name are your team and the opposing team's penalty areas, with the idea being that BBMs are expected to cover all the ground in midfield, falling back to cover on defense and racing forward on the attack. Colak has the Stamina and is good-yet-not-great at most technical and mental attributes and all-rounders tend to do well in this Role; that said, his lack of speed means that he'd struggle to play as dynamically as this Role requires at the highest level.

So, probably the two roles Colak would be best at are relatively static and concentrated mainly in maintaining a deep or defensive posture. This will dictate what other roles you'd be looking to combine him with in central midfield, which is further complicated by how many other players are playing there and which band they're in. That's the second level. Since he'll be staying put in these roles, it would make sense to pair him with somebody more dynamic, either somebody capable of playing as a box-to-box midfielder, or an advanced playmaker of some stripe, since you could probably rely on Colak to get them the ball safely.

The third level is how this influences the overall team choice -- since Colak is relatively immobile, playing him may mean that you tweak the overall team instructions or change the role of somebody playing further forward or even behind to account for how this might change how the players interact. This is the toughest tactical situation to judge and usually requires a high amount of familiarity with all of your players and how they interact given your tactical instructions.

Please feel free to ask anything that comes to mind, or request that I flesh out anything in particular. There's so much to cover, I'm sure that I've missed something relatively basic or am skimming over something that people might find especially interesting.

* - If anybody was wondering about the obvious anomaly in the other columns, my Egyptian CB has an Abysmal morale compared to everybody else's buoyant mood because he recently got sent off in a match and I decided to fine him because of it. Apparently he really really doesn't like that and as a consequence, he hates me and feels alienated (literally, if I clicked through to him it would say (Alienated) next to his mood). His contract is up summer after next and if he continues to hate me after this season is over I will have to contemplate selling him (Fiorentina, possibly sensing a bargain, is interested) if he won't sign a new contract.

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This slipped to the second page, largely I think because:

1) Nobody is really that interested in Football Manager here aside from me, Reed and possibly a couple other folks. (Which is not a complaint so much as an observation.)

2) I'd really gone down the rabbit hole of trying to describe how you play the game, which I've really barely scratched and which I suspect might be a bit boring.

So this post is more going to be about why FM works as a game; exploring what is the ludological hook that keeps me and countless other obsessives coming back for season after season and picking up each new edition of the game (although I always wait until it receives a significant discount in a Steam sale -- the difference between versions is rarely radical and it's usually not worth playing the game before they release the first major patch, as there tend to always be a few significant bugs that can kill off lengthy saves in the initial release).

I've compared FM to RPGs before and if you had to pick a "traditional" game genre that it's most like, it would be SRPGs. Bear with me here: imagine an SRPG that ran on something like FFXII's system, where you tell everybody what to do and then sit back and watch, only if the Gambits were extremely vague and heavily reliant on the interpretation of your characters. At first glance, this seems completely maddening, this relinquishing of control, after all, there are times when your characters do things that are just absolutely stupid. However, when it does work, you feel proud not only of your strategy; you also feel proud for your (entirely fictional and almost certainly less complex than they appear) characters. And conversely, them being completely stupid at times is matched with them sometimes doing the unexpected, combining with the rest of your party in a way that you hadn't entirely predicted, yet feels like a natural outgrowth of the complex systems you put in place.

The bit that I'm convinced really puts it over the top is that aside from collecting the perfect party, making sure that you have all the right roles you want covered, an archer here, knights there, a wizard gradually learning his trade to become the mightiest in the land...is that you have to anticipate first, that you will make mistakes in your personnel decisions, that somebody who looks great will actually turn out to be a dud and second and more importantly, that this game has permadeath. Not in the sense that anybody in the game actually dies dies, no, instead they just retire, whereupon they disappear*.

And before they retire, they're going to decline. Bodies will start to deteriorate and hard decisions will have to be made. You will have a hero who has won countless victories under your banner, who was likely raised from a teenager with your merry band and you know that at some point, if you want your party to remain on the knife's edge of absolute killing power, that you will have to be ruthless and tell him that his time is up. That you will have to have a replacement recruited and ready to go and that you cannot wait too long, linger over yesterday's heroes and allow your new prodigy's skill to stagnate, that you will at some point have to bring out the hook and drag the star off his stage. Now, it's true that some go easily, that they're perfectly happy to play a bit role, to transition to understudy just to remain part of the group. They are exceedingly rare. And that's what gets me coming back, that I cannot build the perfect team for more than a few snapshots in time, before somebody gets hurt, before somebody gets too old, before somebody gets their head turned by overseas riches. And then you'll have to build the perfect team again.

* - Not entirely true -- it's possible for players to move into coaching positions after they retire as players; however, the coaches will eventually retire past a certain point as well. And if either a player or a coach retires while they're on one of your shortlists (a little shopping list, essentially), a dummy record will remain for eternity, without you ever being able to remove it. It's an infuriating bug that's been around forever.

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Winker there's a developer from SI on the main FM site I frequent (very small as these communities go, so he's able to speak pretty freely) and apparently what you're doing is only a minorly more aggressive version of what one of the patriotic Scots at SI is doing already with the vanilla game -- apparently Scotland regularly outperforms expectations the longer you go in the game due to this guy's opinions of their ability to produce talented youth.

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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.