Our first transfer window was a disaster. It’s seriously hurt our chances of winning the league. And it’s my fault. All I can do is try to salvage the situation before I wind up—unthinkably—as the greatest manager only of my own lifetime, or of the last 100 years, rather than in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.
I had finally decided, after breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of the squad, that I needed to address our problem at centerback before I worried about the central midfield. (Our other major weak spot, goalkeeper, was out of play as I’d decided to gamble that Marco Palombi could be an inspirational captain this year.) I spent the bulk of my transfer budget on Paolo Mengoni, who, in addition to having the most Soul-Glo hair ever seen on a player from Salerno, looked like an ideal replacement as captain when Marco Palombi retired. I started looking around for bargains on midfielders. Then out of the blue Catanzaro made an offer for Matteo Cognini, our second-best centerback.
I’d had no intention to sell him. But the offer was €50,000—nearly twice what he was worth and almost as much as I’d spent on Paolo Mengoni. I sent back a counteroffer of €65,000 and decided to leave it at that: if they said yes, I’d certainly sell him, because €65,000 plus what I had left in my coffers would be enough to replace him with a better centerback—I’d recently discovered a 17-year-old named Nicolò Martinetti who was making my scouts break out in gooseflesh—while still having enough to buy the midfielder I needed to be competitive. I waited.
Then the reply came: yes. I pocketed the €65k, sent Cognini off to Catanzaro, and swooped in to make a bid on Martinetti, a player who’d be available for around €40,000 and who could possibly follow me all the way to Serie A. I worked out a deal with his club, the cash-starved Legnano, and offered him a contract. He accepted. Then, to my horror, a message landed in my inbox saying that Pro Vercelli couldn’t afford the transfer fee. But we had almost €92k in our transfer budget—I’d done the math myself—and the bid for Martinetti was less than half that!
I raced to check our finances, and discovered that, sure enough, our transfer budget was only €39,880, €53k less than it was supposed to be. The shortfall left us an agonizing €120 short of our agreed-upon deal with Catanzaro, and the board refused to augment my transfer budget by a single lousy euro.
If you’ve ever managed a club in your own right, you can probably guess what had happened. That’s right: the board had capped the amount of transfer income available to be reinvested in the transfer budget at 20%, meaning that while the club got €65k from the Cognini sale, only €13k of that was made available for me to spend on new players. Since our bank balance was several times as big as our transfer budget, I had just assumed there wouldn’t be a budget cap and hadn’t even thought to check.
A stupid mistake. A rookie mistake. And because I then decided to throw everything into trying to save the Martinetti deal only to find that Catanzaro wouldn’t budge on their asking price, I wound up losing my second-best central defender without bringing in a replacement, and without even identifying a new midfielder. I’d started the window with one good central defender, and after all my efforts I finished with…one good central defender. For the first time in my vast experience as a manager, I knew how Tottenham Hotspur felt.
No use crying over spilled milk, I told myself. Napoleon didn’t back out of the Battle of Blaamfinkers just because he couldn’t sign the corporal he wanted, and neither would I. I calculated that the only way I was going to take this inexperienced and mismatched team to the title was to get really serious about tactics. Not “I’ll kick it down the flanks because I have good wingers” serious. “Globally adjusting my staggered closing-down orders by one click for an away match to reflect the fact that playing on a larger field will increase the rate at which my players become fatigued” serious. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but neither is Alan Arkin. And he won an Academy Award.
I imagine every manager has someplace they go when they want to get really serious about tactics—some smoky back room in a little bar where Fabio Capello goes to find out what the old men think of David Beckham’s crossing. For me, that smoky room is a thread called Tactical Theorems and Frameworks, started several years ago by a manager called wwfan and updated, in a variety of online fora and by a growing list of contributors, for each new edition of Football Manager.
The ideas contained in TT&F have had their critics and their competitors, but in my experience they offer the most comprehensive and sensible guide to the possibilities of tactics in the game. I wouldn’t plug their sample tactics directly into my own game, and their approach can get extremely technical, but as an aid in designing your own strategies, it’s better than Sun Tzu.
I found that the 2009 version had been updated in the form of a 50-page pdf. I read it. At Pro Vercelli’s next training session, I tweaked the tactics I’d already devised to reflect some of what I’d picked up: for instance, that the two forwards in a 4-4-2 should have some space between their mentality settings so that the defense can’t stifle them with a single flat line. I also added a couple of new looks, giving me a set of quick choices to draw from in various game situations: an all-out attacking set, a counter-attacking set, a time-wasting defensive set, etc. Now it would come down to my players’ ability to learn the new schemes—which wouldn’t be helped by the fact that I don’t know Italian (and the game does model that, maddeningly-brilliantly)—and to my ability to apply them and adjust them at the right times.
We’re now seven matches into the league season, five matches since I refined our tactics, and the results—predictably, given the youth of the squad and our difficulties communicating—are mixed. We’ve won two huge games against our major promotion rivals: the triumph at Carpenedole that Conchione won with his 35-yard free kick and a tough 1-0 home win against Rodengo, the team with the panda on their shield, on which more later. And we’re sitting in third place in the division, which isn’t a bad place to be given everything that’s happened. But while our defense has held up surprisingly well, only conceding one goal through October 5, our lack of a good midfielder has seriously hindered our scoring, and we’ve eked out three frustrating nil-nil draws against teams we should have beaten.
Still, it’s hard to get too frustrated considering the resilience our young players have shown in big matches. Carlo Saba, the 20-year-old left winger who I think is the key to our promotion chances, spent the first five games of the season on the bench. In the sixth, the crucial match against the pandas of Rodengo, I sent him on despite his being seriously unfit, kept my fingers crossed, and watched while he broke through the defense, held off a late challenge, and created the winning goal:
You can learn a lot about our team from this goal: the initial confusion of Maicol Musumeci, our 17-year-old center-forward, as he fails to notice the unmarked Saba, tries to find Conchione (his mentor, whom he always looks to when he’s in trouble), and kicks the ball right to the defense; the tenacity with which he gets it back and, catching sight of Saba just before the latter goes offside, finds him at last with a brilliant leading ball; Saba’s gritty run leading to the best cross any of our players has managed all season; and our right back, Giuliano Tufano, finally realizing that I want him to press forward on the attack and appearing in the box just in time to head Saba’s cross into the goal.
I may have pulled a Walter Colombo on the transfer window, but we’re getting closer, I think. I just hope we can learn how to score in time to catch the league leaders before their points advantage grows any further.
Read More: Football Manager 2009, Pixel Dramas, Pro Vercelli
by Brian Phillips · December 8, 2008
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Jesus Christ.
Too much?
So because of this site and your Pro Vercelli story, I decided to download Football Manager. Jesus Christ, that game is hard (probably it’s because I’m used to Fifa and my being able to control the players overrides my lack of tactical skill). I had Queens Park (not QPR), the Scottish team. Anyway, there is a question in all this rambling:
How the HELL do you change the player’s mentalities? I use the default 4-4-2, and my wing backs are constantly burned by players nowhere near as quick, and my forwards always clog the same areas. How can I get my wingbacks to stay back like yours, and force one of my 2 forwards (best passer on my team) to be a sort of hybrid AM/CF? Any advice at all is appreciated…I’m tired of losing by 4 at home.
No Brian. I’m just…flabbergasted. I played this game under such duress, it brought out the worst in me, impatience with tactics, inability to be assertive on the transfer market, kowtowing to the whims of my staff.
It’s awe.
I’m having basically the exact same experience as Sen. I’m only playing the demo, but dear God this game is incomprehensibly hard and thus I can’t stop thinking about it as I attempt to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I can’t sign anyone for the life of me and I’ve got a team full of guys with poor morale for no apparent reason. Argh.
Is there anything out there for complete FM idiots?
Aw good I love this game. I am going to quickly dash off some shoddy lectures and half-arsed exam papers now so I can spend the rest of the afternoon trying to work out a system which can incorporates my two frustratingly similar central midfielders, who are both quite defensive, but are far and away my best option despite their similarities.
it looks as though you are doing well. be warned, this will eat your life.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by football manager . . .
Ursus — Heroin is the methadone of this game.
Sen & Max J — The best advice I can give you is to expect to lose a lot when you first start playing. My first season, I lost 14 of 15 at one stretch with Raith Rovers and wound up with a sour feeling toward Partick Thistle that lives with me to this day. It just takes a while to get a feel for what the different tactical options do, and since your team will go through an adjustment period after getting a new manager and won’t be at their best anyway, you’ll have some dark times.
A couple of general tips:
* Try to get the best staff you can. It’s easy to find out online what the most important stats are for scouts, coaches, physios, etc. If you’re playing a lower league team, your current guys are probably terrible. As soon as you can (they’ll accept mutual contract termination for a price, but don’t blow your whole bank balance on it) get rid of them and use the staff search screen (F5, then click “staff”) to look for better helpers. Then use the scouting screen to send your scouts out to as many places as possible, and check their reports frequently for good transfer candidates.
* If you’re playing a lower-league club, use the board request screen to ask for a parent club. They’ll pay you a fee every year and may also send good players your way on loan.
* Click around on the interface. There’s a lot of useful information hidden on non-obvious screens. For instance, if you have a decent assistant manager, you can find out how well your squad is blending together by clicking “assistant advice->team talk feedback” in the squad screen.
* Starting out, the most important tactical options for your players are mentality and forward runs. You can change these on a per-player basis by clicking the arrow next to a player’s position. If your full-backs are getting caught out too often, change their mentality to be a little more defensive, and change their forward runs to “rarely” or “mixed”. If a player has high creativity and decision-making skills, you can authorize them to depart from your instructions when they see an opportunity by increasing their creative freedom.
* Sen, to make a forward play in a deep-lying role, set his forward runs to “rarely” and reduce his mentality a few notches. If he high passing and anticipation, set his through-balls to “often”; if he has a good long shot ability, set his long shots to “often” or “mixed”. That should be a good start.
Beyond that, there are many, many forums and guides out there that can help. If you have the patience, read the TT&F guide I linked to above; it’s long but hugely informative. Some of the more useful sites include the FM Britain forums, the forums at Sortitoutsi, and the Dugout forums.
Spangles — Good luck with the defensive-minded midfielders. Maybe you could incorporate this conundrum as an example in one of your lectures?
Oh, and Richard — Sounds like it’s time to give it another whirl [laughs maniacally, brandishing pills and Metallica records]…
Whoa! You can click on the arrows!?!?! Thanks for these tips Brian, they are really helpful and I had no idea you could do any of them (other than getting advice on the team talk). I’m going to look up some of the online tutorials as well. If only my (real-life) Spurs’ defensive line could get an online tutorial.
Thanks again. And this is a great site, by the way.