Hey Everyone,
Long time lurker of the forum, been playing football management sims since champ man 01/02. What I wanted to address today following the great work from Mr L and his tactic testing team is a practical guide which asks does the club I'm using have the starting resources to succeed with this tactic? As someone who has been following FM forums for years. You see patterns occur in the community. A promising tactic is made, people have great initial success, it gains more exposure, people start plugging it in to many different teams and then it starts receiving negative feedback and your left with a mixed bag of opinions, repeat this a couple of times over and you have a community divided on what the best tactic is. The answer is their is no best tactic, but their are superior ones and if even one person had great success with a tactic, then their has to be underlying reason why it works for them and maybe not for you, of course we also have to keep in mind the ability of the team you inherit versus the person it worked wonders for. But we are lucky enough to usually have a great amount of collective data from user results, to know that when a tactic works for a lower club team, it's usually going to work across the board.
Now my process every time I start a game is to find a promising tactic and look at the positional ability of the starting squad I want to manage in relation to carrying out the positional roles of that tactic. My theory is quite simple, people fail with these "Superior Tactics" because they don't have players with the right positional ability, nothing that enlightening, common sense really but I still believe very overlooked.
That's not to say I am ignoring all the vast variables, such as quality of training and morale etc but to a certain degree they can be controlled by the player, we can improve the morale with team talks, we can tinker with training. What we cant change so easily is the starting squad we inherit. So when you have comments such as "I played it for 15 games but I just cant get it to work" it's either because they aren't performing the simple things well or they just don't have the players to carry out the roles of that tactic and to correct that could take many seasons.
So Enough Waffling on, I'm going to be focusing in this post today on the Tactic 3-4-3 Watford System, a popular tactic on FM Base and look at the Premier League teams. As in investigation to ask the question which team can realistically play with this tactic from the start. To do this I will be using FM Genie to give me the data necessary too read more into players positional role abilities.
So player roles as seen below for the 3-4-3 Watford System
View attachment 1100844
Lets look at Sunderland to begin with. I focus on the potential starting 11 and make comments on where it wont work or where a transfer may be needed
12-16 mil starting budget (Maybe two to three transfers possible)
Poacher Role - Jermain Defoe (His best role - 82.4 rating) Gotta start him their he should flourish. Backup - Borini (74.1) will do decent job
F9 - Steven Pienaar (75.6) and Adnan Januzaj (74.3) - In this tactic Januzaj becomes redundant in other positions, with training set to false 9, I believe he will do a decent job. Pienaar is a very flexible he could also be employed in the central midfield roles as DLP (76.5) but my thinking is that quality strikers are a rare breed with high costs. So i would train him as a F9 and DLP backup.
DLP - Sebastian Larsson (77.6) He should do a good job in this role - Jack Rodwell as backup (72.0) an okay replacement
BWM - Lee Cattermole (82.8) His best role, no worries here. Backup Didier Ndong (77.5) Great backup to have here as well.
WBL - Patrick Van Anholt (69.0) Pretty poor in this position, he actually employs best as a winger which is no help here. I would definitely dip into the transfer market here and replace him.
WBR - Billy Jones (76.7) Good choice here he can play WBL with a (75.3) rating. But I would personally keep him as WBR and replace Van Anholt instead. Backup Javi Manquilo (72.6)
BDP (ST) Jan Kirchoff (70.3) and Papy Djilobodji (73.4) Decent but considering the squad strength as whole having these two as the best players in those two roles would concern me. I would want to buy at least one if not two replacements.
BDP (CO) Lamine Koné (71.8) Again okay but I wouldn't want to rely on these three BDP's all season.
GK - Vito Mannonne (74.5) He's a good keeper but with the BDP we have he is going to be facing a lot of shots and so I predict will suffer. Michael Domingues (69.4) Wouldn't want to rely on this guy as backup.
Thoughts -
No surprises really that Sunderland have problems at the back. I think going forward Sunderland playing this tactic wouldn't be to bad, Defoe should do really well, with Pienaar and Januzaj who could do a job as F9's. Cattermole a solid addition in the BWM role with Larsson playing DLP. The midfield and Striker roles actually look fairly good. WBL is must buy, Jones is a good addition at WBR with okay backup. Where it get's concerning is the BDP roles, I believe over a season this is where the tactic will suffer. Mannonne is good but needs a good defence in front of him. The transfer budget would need to cover 4 roles (WBL & 3 BDP positions) which would be a stretch with 12-16 mil.
I will post more teams at a later date if anyone is interested.
Cheers
Long time lurker of the forum, been playing football management sims since champ man 01/02. What I wanted to address today following the great work from Mr L and his tactic testing team is a practical guide which asks does the club I'm using have the starting resources to succeed with this tactic? As someone who has been following FM forums for years. You see patterns occur in the community. A promising tactic is made, people have great initial success, it gains more exposure, people start plugging it in to many different teams and then it starts receiving negative feedback and your left with a mixed bag of opinions, repeat this a couple of times over and you have a community divided on what the best tactic is. The answer is their is no best tactic, but their are superior ones and if even one person had great success with a tactic, then their has to be underlying reason why it works for them and maybe not for you, of course we also have to keep in mind the ability of the team you inherit versus the person it worked wonders for. But we are lucky enough to usually have a great amount of collective data from user results, to know that when a tactic works for a lower club team, it's usually going to work across the board.
Now my process every time I start a game is to find a promising tactic and look at the positional ability of the starting squad I want to manage in relation to carrying out the positional roles of that tactic. My theory is quite simple, people fail with these "Superior Tactics" because they don't have players with the right positional ability, nothing that enlightening, common sense really but I still believe very overlooked.
That's not to say I am ignoring all the vast variables, such as quality of training and morale etc but to a certain degree they can be controlled by the player, we can improve the morale with team talks, we can tinker with training. What we cant change so easily is the starting squad we inherit. So when you have comments such as "I played it for 15 games but I just cant get it to work" it's either because they aren't performing the simple things well or they just don't have the players to carry out the roles of that tactic and to correct that could take many seasons.
So Enough Waffling on, I'm going to be focusing in this post today on the Tactic 3-4-3 Watford System, a popular tactic on FM Base and look at the Premier League teams. As in investigation to ask the question which team can realistically play with this tactic from the start. To do this I will be using FM Genie to give me the data necessary too read more into players positional role abilities.
So player roles as seen below for the 3-4-3 Watford System
View attachment 1100844
Lets look at Sunderland to begin with. I focus on the potential starting 11 and make comments on where it wont work or where a transfer may be needed
12-16 mil starting budget (Maybe two to three transfers possible)
Poacher Role - Jermain Defoe (His best role - 82.4 rating) Gotta start him their he should flourish. Backup - Borini (74.1) will do decent job
F9 - Steven Pienaar (75.6) and Adnan Januzaj (74.3) - In this tactic Januzaj becomes redundant in other positions, with training set to false 9, I believe he will do a decent job. Pienaar is a very flexible he could also be employed in the central midfield roles as DLP (76.5) but my thinking is that quality strikers are a rare breed with high costs. So i would train him as a F9 and DLP backup.
DLP - Sebastian Larsson (77.6) He should do a good job in this role - Jack Rodwell as backup (72.0) an okay replacement
BWM - Lee Cattermole (82.8) His best role, no worries here. Backup Didier Ndong (77.5) Great backup to have here as well.
WBL - Patrick Van Anholt (69.0) Pretty poor in this position, he actually employs best as a winger which is no help here. I would definitely dip into the transfer market here and replace him.
WBR - Billy Jones (76.7) Good choice here he can play WBL with a (75.3) rating. But I would personally keep him as WBR and replace Van Anholt instead. Backup Javi Manquilo (72.6)
BDP (ST) Jan Kirchoff (70.3) and Papy Djilobodji (73.4) Decent but considering the squad strength as whole having these two as the best players in those two roles would concern me. I would want to buy at least one if not two replacements.
BDP (CO) Lamine Koné (71.8) Again okay but I wouldn't want to rely on these three BDP's all season.
GK - Vito Mannonne (74.5) He's a good keeper but with the BDP we have he is going to be facing a lot of shots and so I predict will suffer. Michael Domingues (69.4) Wouldn't want to rely on this guy as backup.
Thoughts -
No surprises really that Sunderland have problems at the back. I think going forward Sunderland playing this tactic wouldn't be to bad, Defoe should do really well, with Pienaar and Januzaj who could do a job as F9's. Cattermole a solid addition in the BWM role with Larsson playing DLP. The midfield and Striker roles actually look fairly good. WBL is must buy, Jones is a good addition at WBR with okay backup. Where it get's concerning is the BDP roles, I believe over a season this is where the tactic will suffer. Mannonne is good but needs a good defence in front of him. The transfer budget would need to cover 4 roles (WBL & 3 BDP positions) which would be a stretch with 12-16 mil.
I will post more teams at a later date if anyone is interested.
Cheers
