GOALS FROM UNUSUAL SOURCES – THE INVERTED WING-BACK
TIME TO CATCH UP… For the first time probably ever, I went months without playing Football Manager this year. After my FC Volendam save came to an abrupt halt I had a 4 or 5 season personal save with Newcastle and their millions, and then nothing. No desire, no inspiration, and quite honestly no time.…
THE BOYS OF EASTER ROAD
At the start of the Football Manager ’22 cycle I had huge plans to blog my Anderlecht save, which would allow me to only sign Belgian players. That save lasted one season, and just two and a half blogs (the half is sat eternally unfinished on this laptop). We won the league in the first…
MY FM22 EXPERIENCE, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR FM23
Way, way back at the end of FM18’s life cycle I wrote a post called ‘What I learned playing FM18’. Looking back now, it was garbage! (It does still exist on the internet, but I won’t be linking it here 🙈 brownie points if you can find it!) It was a very mundane list of…
CHOOSING THE RIGHT ROLES WHEN USING A DOUBLE PIVOT IN FM22
NOTE: I wrote this piece for The Byline, the official Football Manager blog.Click HERE to read the published version, and a huge thanks to the guys at Football Manager for the opportunity! There’s arguably no position more important in football than central midfield. It’s extremely tough to win matches without controlling the middle of the…
GETTING THE BEST FROM A BALL-PLAYING DEFENDER
Welcome back to On the Break! There hasn’t been a new Tactical Aspects post for 4 months! Time to correct that, I think. This time out we’re going to take a look at one single player role, the Ball-Playing Defender. I use this role a lot, and many others do too, but I think there…
PICKING A STARTING TEAM? EMBRACE THE RANDOM
I know what you’re thinking. Getting your starting team right is huge. You want to start as your favourite team, or maybe you have an FM team that you always start as? Well it’s time to forget all that and embrace the delights of the random. Full disclosure, I run a website – the9llamas -…
APPLYING A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO FOOTBALL MANAGER
Gareth Southgate has now led England to a World Cup Semi-Final and a European Championship Final in successive tournaments, making himself and the legendary Sir Alf Ramsey the only men in history to lead England to the Semis or further at two major tournaments. Surely this makes him a national hero? Not quite.A lot of…
MATCH PLANS IN FM21 – THE ART OF GAME MANAGEMENT
NOTE: I wrote this piece for The Byline, the official Football Manager blog.Click HERE to read the published version, and a huge thanks to the guys at Football Manager for the opportunity! Game management is becoming more and more vital as the tactical side of football continues to develop. For every manager who develops a…
HOW MENTALITY AFFECTS PLAYER ROLES
Welcome back to On the Break! Today we continue the Tactical Aspects series, with a post covering a topic I’d never really considered before – the effect that mentality has on player roles. If you’d like to catch up on the previous posts in the series, you can do so by clicking HERE. It’s hard…
xG AND THE MYTH OF BEING “FM’D”
We’ve all been there. Dominant for 90 minutes, creating chance after chance, but their goalkeeper is having the game of his life; it’s still goalless. Cue the inevitable counter-attack, and a crushing, soul-destroying 1-0 defeat. You’ve been “FM’d”, there’s no shame, it’s happened to all of us. Dig a little deeper though; do the FM…
THE REGISTA VS THE DEEP-LYING PLAYMAKER
Welcome back to On the Break and the second post of my Tactical Aspects series! If you missed the first post where we covered the Defensive Line, click HERE to check it out! This time out we’ll be looking at the differences between a Regista and a Deep-Lying Playmaker; What do they do, how do…
THE DEFENSIVE LINE – HIGHER OR LOWER?
Welcome to Tactical Aspects, a new series of posts where I’ll be looking at individual elements of the in-game tactics creator. I don’t claim to be a tactical expert of any sort; there are far more knowledgeable writers than myself in the community, but I hope that by taking a look at smaller aspects in…
On the Break 