Football Manager 2020

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

11 minutes ago, SquareRootOfSi said:

what tactics are you lunatics using? I'm struggling to stop my mid season freefall that this damn Coventry team go on EVERY season regardless of what league i'm in.

Worth pointing out that at the end of that season, it was basically one big bottling contest out of myself and Arsenal. I should have won the league before it reached the final game.

Bare in mind I'm two games behind but this, which I want to credit to Gazz during his Pentagon run at some point? If not I don't know where I got it from.

And then this for games against specific teams like Chelsea and City who I'd seen from previous seasons dismantle the tactic with ease so needed to throw them off.

[Monkey D. Lars]

So one of my players is not happy with the possession-technical training, so I hired a coach and made it 4 stars because it was 2 stars. He's still not happy. How can I fix this? 

[Arjen Robben]

Knock him out

[Monkey D. Lars]

17 minutes ago, Arjen Robben said:

Knock him out

I'm too small to knockout Weghorst.

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

Sell him, problem solved.

[Gazz]

The 2!

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

10 points in the Champions League group and I have to settle for 3rd, lame. Marked improvement on 4 points and last place the year before though. Might be in a position to advance from the group next year.

I'm kind of stuck at a point where I'm not sure where best to spend budget on improving the team. I've got several replacements already signed and ready to move in - Caglar Soyuncu to replace Mamadou Sakho, Ryan Kent to replace Wilfried Zaha (who needs to hurry up and fuck off to China already...), Harry Wilson to replace Andros Townsend, and Wilson McKennie to replace Luka Milivojevic. Home-grown players are proving a problem so I'll have to scout around for some English talent. Striker-wise I'm lacking in numbers but have plenty of quality - Sorloth, Buitink, and some absurd regen I signed who bangs a hat trick any time I had him in the reserves so had to get called up - but other than that I'm short. Benteke is still collecting a ridiculous paycheck out on loan in France somewhere, it's the last year of his contract so I'll be glad to see him gone.

Free transfers have gone horribly so far. I've picked up Smalling in year one, who only got signed because Soyuncu couldn't get a permit and he largely played as substitute, so he got sick of bench warming and he's now rotting in Stoke's reserves. Son Heung-Min came in year two, then moaned he never got played (because he was consistently outclassed by £5m signing Harry Wilson) so fucked off to Arsenal. Lars Bender arrived this year, and he's not getting any game time either because McKennie, Lerma and Milivojevic are performing too well. Keeping him around as cover for now but can see him heading back to Germany at the end of the season.

EDIT: Totally forgot I get back door entry into the Euro Cup for coming third, bring it on Porto! And fuck Harry Wilson for deciding he wants to go to Spurs now we're out of the Champions League

[Franklin_1]

In my current game I went undefeated with Zeljeznicar, then moved to Inter Miami for a season and took them from last to first, then PAOK where I joined during the Championship group and nearly overhauled Olympiakos who were 10 points clear with 9 games remaining and have since won 2 titles on the spin.  Have agreed a move to Schalke in the summer which will be my first taste of the big time.  I am expecting a significant learning curve there.

[JasonM]

On 29/04/2020 at 15:29, stokeriño said:

Probably have to be a high-level team to have the necessary fitness to sustain this Gegenpress Blitzkrieg mode, mind.

You should flip the Mezzala and BBM around. With an inside winger on the left your Mezzala will roam into the same areas as him, which makes things a bit congested.

How do you find wing backs working, I tried them but they tended to get way too close to my wingers and cause issues where neither had room to play with.

Finally, how do you find the DM as DLP(D) working? I have a 433DM going with the DM being a BWM(S) and the left CM being a DLP(S), and the LCM has a lot of games where he gets 5-10 chances created by spraying passes to the wing or lone striker.

Edit:

After reaching second place AND the Playoffs finals two years in a row and bottling it with sad 0-1 losses. (At least I got good money out of those two playoff ties, i guess), I decided to approach the 23/24 season with a new aim to simply win it all. For the two 2nd placed years I had the best defense in the league by a distance, but despite attempts my offense stayed lackluster. Or at least, simply not good enough for Tier 6 where scoring goals is honestly the be-all-end-all of promotion.

So I flipped the script, offloaded a few players who I felt weren't doing enough to help the team, and signed even more free agents who wanted to humour relocating to Edinburgh for the club's fifth year of existence.

- Legit, the hardest challenge with this club has been finding players. A lot of Vanarama level players that sign with other teams in the league flatout refuse to do interviews with me because they don't want to relocate from England to Scotland. When I do find some, they ask for ridiculous wages way beyond their skill level.

The results thus far have been impressive.

We are in the third round of the FA Cup (sadly missed out on the gravy train, and have to face less gravy Bolton or Chesterfield), 1st round of the FA Trophy.

Aging Conor Washington came into the club last season and only scored 13 in 48... This year, he's 26 in 18 league games and he only needed 16 league games to shatter the club record for goals in a season!

Just utter mental stuff, if he scores the team wins, as simply as that. He's just banging them in at a shocking rate and I had expected his production to fall off a cliff way sooner, but he's still going strong and chasing Danny Rowe's 47 goal record to utterly shatter it to pieces.

My revamped 433DM to make it happen...

Basically, we aren't a passing club, we aren't even a football club. We're a runners club. We get the ball, and we go forward as fast as anyone's legs can take them. We run at the defense, we pass into open spaces, and we try to get from the back to the front as quick as possible without making sloppy hopeless long ball plays. A blind attempt to overwhelm lower league defenses with relentless and unyielding pace and pressure. In a way it reminds me of old CM0102 Gung Ho tactics, in that the only goal is to get forward with minimal time wasted, more shots on goal eventually equates to more goals. Giving crap defenses no time to dig in gives us the biggest chance to get good quality shots, and Washington has converted a wild amount of them.

Meanwhile the right wing focuses on crossing whilst the IFL and Mezzala create even more pressure. They in turn have the most assists.

Will this work for higher sides? Probably not, because you'll just end up running into defenses with actual talent. And we struggle against sides that start out dug in, but we struggled against those in previous seasons to, so that's just a lack of transcendant talent.

I'm just hoping this year we can make it work, and get the promotion that narrowly eluded us for two seasons.

Edited May 1, 2020 by Jasonmufc

[stokeriño]

1 hour ago, Jasonmufc said:

You should flip the Mezzala and BBM around. With an inside winger on the left your Mezzala will roam into the same areas as him, which makes things a bit congested.

How do you find wing backs working, I tried them but they tended to get way too close to my wingers and cause issues where neither had room to play with.

Finally, how do you find the DM as DLP(D) working? I have a 433DM going with the DM being a BWM(S) and the left CM being a DLP(S), and the LCM has a lot of games where he gets 5-10 chances created by spraying passes to the wing or lone striker.

In fairness to the Mezzala/BBM, the exact roles of the two wingers keeps changing every time that the selection of CHO/Pulisic/Willian/Pedro/etc. changes. Once Ziyech comes in, I'm going to be messing it all around again anyway, so I'll re-evaluate the CM roles too.

Wing-backs have been okay. Difficult to be sure whether the role is great or whether Reece James is just that much of a Boss to make it all work. He and Emerson have been in with a bunch of assists though.

Since my DM is Jorginho he's waaay more suited to being a DLP than a BWM or similar. Even when Kante's in the team I usually play him in the BBM role rather than as DM. If Jorginho's not playing, I usually put Kovacic back in that role and play Mount/RLC/Barkley as the Mezzala.

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

Dortmund are trying their best to make me sell my best striker.

On one hand, he's the top scorer in the league and he gets a ton of assists, he's undeniably important. I have options already signed to replace him so he's not essential, but I've grown to like him a lot. He's only 21 so he could still be hugely important to me for a good few years.

On the other hand, 75 million 

[Charlie Tango]

I'm using a 4-3-3 very similar to stokeriño but I tend to alternate for away games to switch one of the central midfielders to a defensive mid (Segundo Volante and the role that works well with that, I can't remember which one off hand), just to give us a little bit more stability that has previously been sorely lacking. As the years have gone on I've increasingly found that tactics are best used 'horses for courses'. If you want to play three at the back but haven't got the wing-backs for it then you end up getting gubbed down the flanks. You used to get away with forcing players into unfamiliar positions but now the ME is quite unforgiving in that regard. I suppose it's more realistic that managers do have to adapt when arriving at a new club.

Melbourne Victory did make the top six, we've just won our Elimination Final on penalties and now I think we're scheduled to take on rivals Sydney FC in the semi-final but I'm awaiting confirmation.

[stokeriño]

One thing I have to say in praise of FM20 is that I remember lone strikers being effectively useless in whatever edition of the game I last played before it.

Tammy Abraham scoring 39 goals should be enough evidence for me to cross that concern off, I think.

[Naitch]

1 hour ago, Charlie Tango said:

You used to get away with forcing players into unfamiliar positions but now the ME is quite unforgiving in that regard.

You say that but I've been playing FM05 recently and trying to play Arjen Robben or Joe Cole as an M R (they're both AM LCs) has led to some absolutely awful match ratings. This is despite me setting them to train as AM Rs in the Training section.

[METALMAN]

I remember way back in the Championship Manager days, if you had a player that was marked MC and you played him at DMC or AMC, even if they had the skills for it, the game would absolutely freak out and he would never ever have a good game.. It meant you could never have Jamie Redknapp and a diamond formation. It was very sad.

[Malenko]

The thing is back in the CM days the positional ratings were 0, 1 and 2. 2 meant natural, 1 was already much worse and 0 was like playing Peter Crouch at right back.

Nowadays you get 0 to 20 ratings and even if you have a 0 on it still doesn't affect as much as it used to which is definitely good.

Regardless, players played out of position regardless of their skills should feel the difference (just not as much as they did back in the CM days). It's just a matter of knowing where you should be in any given game situation if you're playing a certain position. I had to play out of position a few times back in the day and I always felt there was too much happening I wasn't used to. I hated it. Granted, I wasn't an example of versatility but still...

[Benji]

Missing the football with the season basically cancelled so bit the bullet and bought the newest game. Suggestions on where to manage? I like playing games where I can start unemployed with lowest experience and get a job.

[METALMAN]

For these things I quite like to go a team from a place that is culturally important but has a shit football team and try to boost them a bit. So in England that could be Bristol or York or Cambridge (or even Durham if you're going really far down). Stirling in Scotland. Bourges in France. Dresden in Germany. Venezia in Italy. That sort of thing...

[Benji]

Y'know, I have actually never managed in Scotland. That's familiar enough but different. Going to go with that. Thanks.

[King Ellis]

In regards to the tactics question, for the first six months or so with Alfreton I was using route one since that seems to be the prevailing thought with all non-league. You don't have the players to try anything as advanced as passing the ball so why bother? Think that was just a boring 4-4-2 at that point with the old 'big man, little man' up top. Then at some point I just thought nuts to it and switched to a 4-2-3-1 possession system that has been pretty much unchanged to this day up in League One. I've tweaked it a bit this season to go with a DLF up top to link up with my SS (Robbie Burton) who is one of my best players. I'd dabbled with that a little bit previously when I had this one striker who was doing OK until he fell on a training cone or something and broke his spine for like a year. For the most part I was using Fidel O'Rourke up front as a poacher but I've loaned him out now, perhaps a little unfairly as he did get like 15 in 30 something last season but he's not amazing attribute wise and I have like 3 really good young strikers I can use instead more suited to the DLF role.

I've started getting interview invites all of a sudden which I've no intention of actually accepting but went along to anyway with an attitude to push my luck and ask for more money, infrastructure improvements etc just to see if they'd give them to me. One was for Lincoln in the league below which I didn't bother with but one was Stoke who were 20th in the PL (not massively out of the running or anything, I think this was about 19 games in and they had 13 points but I think mid table was only around 19) and only like 3m in transfer funds. Then Villa came in who were 21st in the Championship but were offering 36m for transfers and like 1m in wages I think it was. Pretty eye watering sums to me slumming it on like 300k transfer and 40k wage. Didn't get offered either but not bothered since I intend to take Alfreton to the Premier League, eventually. If only because I have a side goal to have one of the starting youngsters (Harvey Grice) score in every league on the way up because I have an irrational attachment to him. He's pants but seems to perform massively above what anyone would expect of him, always trains well and I think he chipped in with like 10 goals last season in League One.