Tactics and Strategy - Some Thoughts

Use Common Sense

I do not pretend to be any kind of tactical genius, and have just used what I hope is some basic common sense. In Football Manager 10, this seems to have stood me in good stead, and as requested I will endeavour to explain how I worked out my tactics. All suggestions are welcome, as I'm sure there are some things I could change to make some aspects of the tactic and strategy work even better.

The very first thing I will say, is that I set everything up using the Tactics Creator Wizard, and have not changed any of the slider settings on any individual players. The only individual settings I have changed have been for some of the player roles when defending free kicks, and for attacking corners.In the team settings the only slider I've changed sometimes is the tempo setting.

Summary of some Common Basic Formations

4-4-2

This is the most common and adaptable formation in use today. The weakness though of this formation is the gaps that you have between the centre backs, midfielders, and the strikers. This requires the central midfielders to have to work hard to provide support both in defence and attack. With this formation a lot is also expected of the wingers in playing a vital role in supporting the strikers, but should also provide some support for the full backs.

This formation can be adapted to a 4-1-4-1 to play an anchor man at the back, though this leaves the lone striker up front. 4-4-1-1 where an attacking central midfielder plays in the gap behind the striker is another common variation.

4-5-1

A fundamentally defensive formation, which can be tweaked to provide an offensive threat. The main qualities of this formation is the 3 man central midfield. With the midfield packed like this, it can upset a strong passing side, and give you opportunities for a counter attack. The lone striker will normaly be a target man, who is dependent upon the wingers to provide him with support.

4-3-3

This formation is in some respects similar to the 4-5-1 in that it has the 3 central midfielders, but here the wingers are encouraged to move up and act as forwards. This emphasises attack a lot more than the previous formation.

4-3-1-2 (Diamond Formation)

The diamond refers to the shape formed by having an attacking midfielder and an anchor man just in front of the defenders, flanked by the two wingers, who can move in field to shore up gaps in the centre. The full-backs are generally encouraged to move forward to become wing backs to cover for the lack of width.

5-3-2

This formation is purely defensive in attitude, which employs a sweeper playing in behind the central defenders. The three midfielders are generally located around the centre. This gives a gap between midfield and the strikers. The full backs in this formation are expected to provide the wing play and in some cases they can be pushed forward to act as wing backs.

Other Formations

To see a bigger variety of formations and some history to it, a look at this wikipedia entry is informative. Some of the formations from the very early days are quite scary, where it appears all out attack was the order of the day.

What formation should I choose?

There are many possible answers, some that will work well, and most assuredly some that will not suit your team at all well. It is worth noting that any major changes to the team formation can take a number of matches to start working well, as players need time to adjust. For this reason I usually only make a big formation change at the start of the pre-season, and make sure we play at least 6 friendlies, to give a chance for the formation change to work. Some small changes can be made with little risk during the season, but any major change can upset the the team a lot.

In Football Manager 10, the first indication of which formation might work best for your team will be given by going to the backroom staff. You may well be given a selection of tactical formations that the team can apparently play well, and it is now up to you check through your squad members to get a feeling about how well they fit your formation.

When I took charge of Q.P.R. I was recommended the following formations 4-4-2, 4-5-1 and 4-1-3-2. After checking that the 4-1-3-2 formation was in fact a DMC and 3 central midfielders, I discounted it, due to the high number of wide midfielders I have that struggle to play in the centre of the park.

The 4-5-1 was of interest, but needs a proper target man upfront, which is something the team lacked. Wingers are in abundance, and so are strikers, but none of them fit the bill for playing up front alone. Given I desperately needed to sort out my full back situation and find a backup goalkeeper, I felt trying to also get a good target man in time for the start of the season wasn't a good option.

This really left me with 4-4-2 as my only option left. I'm sure if I'd looked through my squad long and hard enough, I could have come up with a few other possible formations they could play after strengthening the full back situation. I did give consideration to a 4-2-3-1 formation, with the central midfielders either as DMC's or MC's depending on the situation, but decided I don't really have enough defensive midfielders to cover this option.

That is the process I went through to make what is an important decision, as this will most likely be the formation you will play for the rest of the season, apart from a few tweaks. Some people I'm sure will be more gung-ho and not worry about making a major change part the way through a season.

I think all this really tells anyone is, that there is no simple answer to which formation you should play. In a way 4-4-2 is the safe and boring bet, and seems to require a lot from the midfield players to work really well. The midfield is something that Q.P.R. are blessed with. having many flair players. The choice you make needs to suit the players you have, otherwise it will most likely struggle. It appears to me, but I could be wrong, but the formation you choose to play depends largely upon your central midfielders, and the qualities your strikers have. Your defenders and wides players, or lack of choice, may force you to look at a particular set of formations as well. If you have wing backs rather than proper full backs, you will probably want them to play in that position.

I've Decided My Formation, Now What?

Once you've spent time looking at your team and deciding which formation you think they will be able to play with the players you have, and/or the players you will be bringing into the squad, you are presented with the options for playing philosophy. This determines how much creative freedom your players have, how rigidly they stick to their own position, and how much they are expected to contribute to other phases of play outside their own role.

Once again you need to understand certain qualities of your players. The reports from you backroom staff can give you some clues, such as tell you a player has fairly poor intelligence, and other information like that. The more creativity and flair you feel your squad has, the more likely you will want to head towards a more fluid playing philosophy. I feel this could be a bit tricky with some sides, as they might have a few flair players, but also some with little creativity. You need to work out the balance between sticking to a rigid strategy, where players keep the formation in a tight fashion, or do you play like Brazil with a very fluid game, but can therefore get pulled way out of position. On the whole, probably the lower down the leagues you are the more likely you are to go towards a rigid philosophy. It could however be, you're managing a Blue Square Premier side with a few players that have reasonable flair and creativity, and you might feel brave enough to go more fluid.

The only way you're going to know if you've gone too fluid with the philosophy is by playing and seeing what happens. If you find your players are giving the ball away by trying too many clever little passes, back heals and other odd little tricks, then you probably need to ease back the philosophy a bit. Also if your formation is being dragged out of shape far too often, that is also a sign that things aren't quite right. Experimenting with this setting is again probably best done when playing friendlies.

For my Q.P.R. side I picked a fluid playing philosophy, as we have a quite a few flair players. Having watched the way the side move the ball about, switching positions and working hard to create a space for a player to get in behind the opposition defence I'm happy that this setting is just about right for the squad I have.

Playing Style

The next tab, brings us to playing style. This covers a number of things, such as Closing Down, Creative Freedom, Roaming, Crosses etc.

I personally did not even change these at this point, and have waited until my team have played a few matches. They can be changed later anyway, and as a base setting I like the idea that they are set as default. These are settings you can change while a match is going on, so you can guage what effect they have. It might be you find that your players only ever seem to connect with crosses if they drilled into the box, in which case you go back and change the setting so that they only drill crosses in.

To be honest, I haven't changed any of these settings even later on. The way the team was playing didn't seem to be improve by changing anything from the default. You will only find this out through experimentation though.

Player Roles

The above shows the roles I picked for each of the players in my 4-4-2 formation. I have both my wide midfielders pushing up as wingers, and set my central midfielders as Ball Winning, and Box To Box. This seems to give a reasonable amount of agression, but with some defensive covering from the midfield. At this point it's hard to be sure how suitable the individual roles are for individual players. Once the tactic is complete, it's worth clicking on each player in the formation, and seeing what are the important attributes for them according to how you change their role.

Player Duties

The only setting here I changed from the default settings was to make both wingers have the attack role. There isn't much to say here, as there are limited choices for each position. Again this doesn't give much away about the suitability of a player for a particular position. More about this later though.

Starting Strategy

I have this set as Standard, because this is a safe setting to take, and means if you do forget to change this before starting a match when you meant to, you at least start in a balanced manner.

This really sets how deep you defend, or how agressively you push up the field, the width of play and the tempo of you passing. Defending too deep can make you more vulnerable to a striker who has plenty of strength and good heading ability. However pushing too agressively up the pitch can leave you open to a counter attack if the opposition have fast players that can run past your defenders.

How you set this for an individual match really does depend upon the players your opposition have. When I recently played Manchester United, I had little choice but to play a defensive strategy. If we'd have tried to push any higher up the pitch, we'd have most likely been murdered at the back with Rooney running onto lots of throughballs. This also had the effect of compressing the midfield battle, making it hard for them to create many good chances.

However, in a match which I have played since my previous post, against Bolton, they came with a 4-1-4-1 formation looking to defend. Their lone striker was strong but very slow. Their wingers I was confident could be covered by my full backs. I therefore picked an agressive strategy of attacking. All I'll say is, it proved to be quite successful, and for that particular match was absolutely the right thing to do. You'll have to wait though to find out exactly what happened in the match itself.

For away matches I will be more likely to go with a defensive strategy than for home matches, with a few exceptions of course. The strategy you choose for a match is something you'll get more of a feel for the longer you manage a team. Of course sometimes you can be badly wrong, as I was last season when we visited Cardiff. My backroom staff reckoned we should push up the pitch. By half way through the first half we were 2-0 down, and had to go more defensive to stop their pace from beating us at the back again, and never did find a way through them. I found out the hard way, not to always believe your staff. Check out the team yourself, and make your own judgement, was the lesson I learnt there.

One thing I have noticed, is that the more defensive a Strategy you pick the slower the tempo you pass the ball around, and the narrower you will play. When I do go defensive now, I tend to manually adjust the tempo back to somewhere in the middle. How fast you choose to make the tempo is of course up to you, but was finding that if I didnt change this manually I was really struggling to move the ball forward without getting closed down. So far I've not experimented with changing the width, and not sure exactly what effect it would have.

Tactic Created, Am I Ready To Play Now?

You might be ready and have exactly the right roles for each of your players. If so, then go and see what happens. However you'll most likely need to check just how well suited each player is to the role they've been given. As an example I've picked out Left Winger, Hogan Ephraim. Select the player by clicking on them in the pitch formation on the right hand side, they will be highlighted and the left hand of the screen will show their attributes and allow you to modify their role if you want.

For each role the important attributes for that position and role are highlighted. Even though his Decisions is only at 7 and his balance at 10, doesn't immediately make him unsuitable. His other attributes are in fact fairly solid, and I've found he plays this role very well. The players preferred moves will also make a difference. Ephraim's preferred moves are "Gets Foward Whenver Possible", "Curls Ball" and "Cuts Inside." This makes for a very interesting combination, because if his route to the byeline is cut off, he will make his way infield, and creating panic there, while looking for someone to offload a pass to. Once you've checked through what seems to be endless combinations, you will finally arrive at your formation. This ability to see what attributes are best for a particular position and role, also mean that if you need to put a different player there who doesn't quite suit that particular role, you can quickly give them a role that is better suited to them.

Remember the players will try to play the role in the way you've told them. This means if you put someone that is poor at tackling as a Ball Winning Midfielder they will most likely commit lots of fouls. For a Box to Box midfielder, playing some with poor long shots attribute will probably see a lot of wasted efforts flying miles over the bar. Be sensible with what you're asking a player to do.

You Are Now Ready

All you can do now, with your wonderfully crafted tactic, is to see how it performs. Don't be too disheartened if it's not quite working right to start with, especially if you've made a big tactical change, or brought in a lot of new players. In fact bringing in too many new players can seriously hurt your performance early in a season, either due to them needing to blend in, or maybe your existing players have got upset by the new introductions. That is however all part of what makes the game fun.

Summary

The Tactics Creator is one of, if not the most important tool that has been added to Football Manager. This has taken the major headache out of setting up the tactic your team uses, and makes the game more realistic. After all in real life the manager will tell a player that he expects him to fullfill a certain role in his position. The manager doesn't have to tell him, every little detail about how to play that position, and if they need to know something the coaching staff will work with the player. That is the feeling that you now get with the game, and sometimes you might gamble on a player taking a role he might not be perfectly suited for, but hope he will still do a good job.


In conclusion, I can't tell you what is the right thing to do, and have told you how I made my own decisions, which I hope have a sound basis. I've done what I feel is right, but if someone sees that I've made a poor decision somewhere along the way, then please tell me. I wouldn't want people to be following some ideas that are not quite correct. I also hope that by explaining things this way it makes people think more about how to set up their own team properly, rather than just blindly copying someone elses tactics, as seems to happen on a lot of the Football Manager forums. If you manage to work out a good tactic yourself, you'll get a lot more satisfaction that way. As far as I can tell there is no magic tactic that will beat everyone, which is good, as football just isn't like that. Even the great teams still have the odd bad day, where for one reason or another they just do not perform. I guess what I'm saying is, one poor match does not necessarily mean a tactic is bad. You can also win or lose matches through little slices of good or back luck as well. If your side look like they're playing good football, and creating plenty of chances, and generally being fairly tight at the back, then you're probably doing something right. If the tactic is working, you can then decided which players you'd like to bring that can do an even better job for you in different positions.

I occasionally look at different forums, largely to see what problems people are having, and complaining about. I've read several threads where people are saying all sorts of bad things about the match engine, where they are having lots of unstoppable throughballs bypassing their defence. I have been caught a few times by throughballs, but so far I haven't seen one where I think the match engine has done some crazy. Apart from a few dodgy offside decisions the match engine seems to pretty good. I can only think those people getting upset by this, are setting up tactics that leave them open to the throughball, and once through the AI rarely shows any mercy. Maybe the role of certain players isn't right for them, but everytime I've noticed us getting caught out by throughballs, it's because we've been pushing too far up the pitch.

I am still in the process of working out player positions for set pieces, to see if we can create a few more opportunities. We also seem to concede too many goals from corners, so the settings their might need to be tweaked too. This is something I intend to post about sometime in the future, if I ever work something out that makes us more consistent at these set pieces.

It would also be good to give an insight into what difference the touchline shouts make, but to be honest I've only used a handful of them so far, so I can't say much about them as yet. However near the end of a match, "Retain Possession" can relieve a lot of pressure if the other side allow you get hold of the ball.