[dunc182]

This is a pretty damn long and slightly mathematically complex article, so get comfortable. :)

Every manager has their own favourite style of play and tactic that they believe to be the most effective. For some, it will have taken them a long time to hone down all the settings to the perfect combination. Others will have struck lucky early on. However, it may be stating the obvious that your team instructions are one of the most critical aspects of the game. The way you tell your team to play will, at the end of the day, decide the outcome of a game over anything else you can change (Besides picking your strongest squad.) However, some managers will believe they already have the best combination of settings and use it without fail for every team they manage. But there is a problem with this: no matter how good your tactic is in theory, it’s only as good as the players that use it.

For example, you could be playing a great combination of a high tempo, direct ball game which devastated all teams in your previous game. But the fact is, if you have players with low overall stamina, pace and heading, and especially if you are playing a team with much greater overall stats in these departments, then you are going to get out-run, out-jumped and out-played all game. You are, in effect, playing the game their way, and rubbing their back without them rubbing yours. You will be left wondering what is going wrong with the tactic that has previously been flawless for you, and perhaps start making radical changes, such as push up the tempo near full as well as the length of your passes. This would be disastrous, even according to SI: ‘Constantly changing your tactic and making dramatic alterations to the style of play will not help your players settle or find their rhythm and is likely to have an adverse affect on the team's performances.’ I know I have been guilty of doing this, and after a few matches of being destroyed by mediocre teams, I have given up on the game.

Now, the purpose of this article is to help you to straightaway find the right settings for tempo and passing style, the settings that your players will play best at. Now I feel it is important to mention one of the hints the game gives you while processing. It goes something like this: ‘Passing style and tempo are linked. A short passing game works best with a slower tempo, whilst a direct, counter attacking style needs to be swift and quick.’ This is very true, and there can be no questioning SI on their opinions of how the game should be played. But as you will see, no matter how much you want that quick and swift, direct style, and even if your team is very pacey overall, it’s no good combining that tempo with direct balls when your team never win aerial challenges. A better effect would be achieved by keeping the players running fast, and playing short, accurate balls. Your passing style is key to the amount of possession you have, and the more possession a team has, the more chances of a high percentage shot on goal there will be. This basically means: More possession, more goals. So firstly I will cover how to pick the correct passing style for your team.

Passing Style.

Now here’s where the Maths comes in. I’m a great believer of never using too much: always use just the amount you need. This method will have an outcome like this; your settings will never be very far from the centre, and therefore passing style and tempo will never differ disastrously, and so will not upset SI too much. The correct passing style to use will be decided by using a simple set of formulae which anyone should be able to carry out. To prepare for them, go to your team page. Set the order that they are shown in as ‘PKD’ (Click PKD until your starting GK is at the top of the list). Then go to the ‘Views’ drop down menu. Firstly, select ‘Attacking’. You should be looking at the column with ‘Pas’ for passing above it. Now, take the average passing stat for all your starting outfield players (add them all together and then divide by ten). You should have a number between 1 and 20 and it shouldn’t be at either extreme. If it is, do your calculation again. Here is mine:

http://i469.photobucket.com/albums/rr60/dunc182/passing.jpg

I came out with an overall passing stat of 14 for my team. It was luck that it happened to be a whole number, but I can’t complain. Next, choose ‘Technical’ from the dropdown menu and look at the column with ‘Hea’ for heading above it. This time, we will take the average for anyone in front of your defensive line (including DMs) as these will all need to head the ball in a direct passing style. We ignore defenders, as they head the ball all the time anyway, and they make no difference to passing style when it is direct:

http://i469.photobucket.com/albums/rr60/dunc182/heading.jpg

Then you should do a similar thing for the ‘Jumping’ stat under the ‘Physical’ view. Then add this average jumping stat to your average heading stat and divide the resulting number by two to get an average. Mine happens to remain at 12, as Jumping and Heading are very closely linked. Yours may differ though, so don’t be afraid to have an ugly average like 12.341. It is important you keep at least this length of accuracy (3 decimal places.)

The stat for overall heading ability is 12 compared to 14 fior overall passing ability, not a great deal of difference, but it proves that my team would work better with the ball on the ground. The question is, how far should I move the Passing Style bar to the left? Well, obviously not too much as the overall stats are so similar. There are 20 different possible settings of passing style, and for this I’d leave it near the ten, but I can use some simple Maths to work out which the best setting should be. The two overall stats add together to make 26, but ideally, we would want them to add to twenty to make them easier to judge. There is a quick way to do this:

1. Take your passing stat (14), and divide it by the number the two stats add together to give (26). (I get 14/26 = .539).
2. Multiply this new number (.539) by the number that you wish the stats to add to (20). I get 10.8.
3. Round this number up or down to the nearest whole number (round up if at point 5). I get 11.
4. The number for heading will be 20 minus 11, which gives nine. (You can test this out using steps 1 – 3 for heading if you wish, but I promise you it works.)

Now you have found that out of twenty, heading scores 9, and passing scores 11. This means that you should move the bar so that it is 9 spaces from the leftincluding the first slot, so that the bar only moves eight times, or one space left from the centre. So to clarify, whatever your heading stat scores out of twenty, move the bar that many spaces (minus one, so eight) right from the far left. You now have your team’s overall optimum setting for passing style. For this team it is basically near the middle, but that is because they are good at heading and passing overall. It may vary for other teams more extremely, especially in the lower leagues.

I said that this is the team’s overall optimum stat. You may now wish to look more closely at individual players’ stats for passing and heading. You may have noticed that for my team, Maximiliano Moralez has a very poor heading stat. Therefore I would add that, if you feel that there is a very weak player in your squad at heading or passing, you can do one of two things. Firstly, you could swap the player for another similar player that would work with the ball better in the air. Or, you could move the bar one more setting to the left or right depending on which way that you have already gone, for each player that lets you down. So I would now have my bar two clicks to the left, as Moralez is key to my squad and I wouldn’t dream of swapping him.

It is very important that you keep any ugly numbers going through the formula as loss of accuracy will drastically affect the overall values that you get, especially if you tamper with the averages early on. Calculators were invented for a reason and I was just lucky to get really nice figures throughout my use of this technique.

Phew, so now you should have a really good setting for Passing Style that your team can work with well. As passing style and tempo are linked, I’ll now show you how to get a good setting for tempo.

Tempo.

This should be quicker and less complicated to work out than the passing style. Firstly, get averages of the outfield players’ (starting 11 minus the ‘keeper) Pace, Acceleration, Stamina and Natural Fitness using the methods shown before (add them all up and divide by ten) for each stat. All these stats are located in the ‘Physical’ option of the ‘views’ drop down menu. You should now have four averages. Add these all together and divide by four, and you will have a value between 1 and 20 showing how good overall the team would be using a fast paced tempo. However, although this value is between 1 and twenty, it is not a good indication of where you should put the bar. It will change depending on what league you are in slightly (which I think is a flaw of the game as talent at football is not directly related to your speed or whatever so Championship players should be as fast on average as Premiership players. But as they are not, I’ll take the Premiership as my example). In this league, having a stat below 10 is disastrous. Having a stat below 13 is still poor. Only stats 17 plus are very good, where usually it would be 15 plus. Therefore the spread is narrowed a lot. I will aim to make the scale larger by using a different technique:

1. Take your new number that you have got from averaging the outfield players’ stats for pace, stamina, acceleration and natural fitness, and minus 7 from that number. If your value is already below 8 (Highly Unlikely), then keep the value at 1, do not go to 0 or minus numbers. You will now have a number between 1 and 13.
2. Now, you want this more accurate value to be out of twenty so that you get the correct setting of Tempo. Divide your new value by thirteen, and then multiply it by twenty. You’ll now have a value between 1 and 20. This value is the number of spaces from the left the bar should be, including the first slot.

This technique should make your tempo setting more radical than your passing style. If you prefer them to be closer together, or perhaps don’t mind them being even further apart, then you could use the same technique for your averages in passing style (minus 7, divide by 13, multiply by twenty). This will give you a much bigger distance from the centre as you are in effect magnifying the scale used. I will take you through how to do this as a post script as I understand it may not be fully clear without an example.

Conclusion.

I understand that this might go over some readers’ heads a bit. I have tried to make the steps as clear as possible to follow, even if you have no maths knowledge whatsoever. It should help your team, as in my opinion, these are the two most crucial of the team instructions. If you decide not to go the full hog, you will at least find out whether your team plays better with the ball on the ground or in the air, and how good they are at playing fast tempo, which are useful pieces of knowledge indeed. You should always aim to keep your tempo at the highest the players can play at without being out done by a more physical team. N.b. It is extremely important that you allow your team almost no creative freedom so that your tactics are used to full effect. However, I would recommend giving a MC with a lot of creativity the ‘playmaker’ role and also give him a fair amount of creative freedom to let him deliver defence splitting through balls to your strikers. Even SI agrees with this: ‘Allowing too many players to have a high level of creative freedom will likely see your team fail to adhere to your tactical instructions. Use creative freedom sparingly for full effect.’ :thumbsup:

Post Script.

If you decide to change the scale like I have in the tempo section, it is up to you by how much, as you can decide how extreme you want your tactics to be. For example, I think that 7 is a good number, as the majority of stats will be between 8 and 20. However, you can choose any number. The bigger it is, the more extreme your resulting setting will become. Just remember that the number you choose will alter the number your new stats will be out of. For example, if you choose 5, thinking that most stats are between 6 and 20, your new number will be out of 15, so you will need to divide by 15 instead of 13 before multiplying by twenty. For example, I got the setting for my teams passing style to be 9. This is not very definite, so you may choose to make the difference larger. Say you chose to take 4, giving you a new value of 5. You would then need to divide by 16 and then multiply by 20 which would give you 6.25, which rounds down to 6, a more defined passing style. However, it is your choice. It all depends what you think on average all the players specific stats will be valued between. Say you think all passing in the league’s first teams will be between 9 and 20, you should take 8 away as it is one less than nine, then divide by 12 before multiplying by 20, as 12 is now the maximum stat.

Lower league teams scale adjustment.

This is only slightly more complicated. Say you are managing a league 1 side, and you feel that the average first team player’s passing stat across the league is between 5 and 15, ignoring extreme cases. You should still take 4 from the average as it will give you a minimum stat of one. However, before multiplying by 20, instead of dividing by the expected 16, you should now divide by 11 as this is now the maximum possible stat (15 minus 4). I hope I haven’t made this sound too complicated as it is really quite simple if you take the time to read and understand what I have said. A quick glance will probably put you off this article but I think anyone should be able to understand it fully given a few reads :P

[Rob]

Fantastic guide Dunc lad! I had to read it slower than normal to fully understand what you were trying to say about the Maths parts but now I understand it I will definitely consider using it whenever I have time to play FM again. Really well written and I hope to see more installments :D

[White]

Amazing Dunc. This series of Maths articles are class. What are you going to do next?

[Terminal]

I really like the thought process, work and research that has gone into this. Do you plan on using a tactic in R-League that uses these theories?

[Crane]

Its all good and well writing lots of stuff about it, but when it comes down to it, does this all work? That is what I want to be reading about, some results with different teams would finish this already great article.

[adrian]

Different and interesting take on the game Dunc, keep them coming lad. I sometimes find mixing short passes with quick tempo works better don't know why.

[dunc182]

Cheers for the comments guys. As for the proof of it working, I can't say yet because they are new ideas that have come to me and I haven't tried them out yet. And I'd love to use them in the R League, Terminal. Is there any way you can send me screenies of my teams physical and technical stats? Then I can get to work using them. I suppose if I'm sacked fairly quickly, then there's probably a flaw in it, but I don't suspect there will be! I'm guessing if I get sacked it will be because of the terrible positions I have put my players in :P

I'm going to try to put together similar articles on all variations of the team instructions, where possible, if you will carry on reading them!

[Terminal]

dunc182, on Sep 24 2008, 11:19 PM, said:

Cheers for the comments guys. As for the proof of it working, I can't say yet because they are new ideas that have come to me and I haven't tried them out yet. And I'd love to use them in the R League, Terminal. Is there any way you can send me screenies of my teams physical and technical stats? Then I can get to work using them. I suppose if I'm sacked fairly quickly, then there's probably a flaw in it, but I don't suspect there will be! I'm guessing if I get sacked it will be because of the terrible positions I have put my players in :P

I'm going to try to put together similar articles on all variations of the team instructions, where possible, if you will carry on reading them!

The players in R-L have not been modified from 8.0.2 so you can have a look at players you bought easily on your game.

[Gangsta Diciple]

Crane, on Sep 24 2008, 11:07 PM, said:

Its all good and well writing lots of stuff about it, but when it comes down to it, does this all work? That is what I want to be reading about, some results with different teams would finish this already great article.

Agreed thats a good point.


Really love the article, amazing ideas and very creative tbh :D. I just have one thing to say. I feel the thing about creative freedom is correct, but for some teams the players are so good, or are so creative, that you dont need to give them much advice or tactical strictness. You just tell them to play their game and you give them more loose guidelines. Thats what ive noticed in my games anyway ;).

[dangtfc]

Are there any more of these in the pipeline mate??

Would love to read some more, but as Crane says, would also like to see some results if possible!?

[dunc182]

Yeah I have plenty more ideas waiting. The problem is that I'm at uni where I can't play FM or more importantly take the important screenies that are crucial to the articles. So it's because I think that my articles won't be as good as they could be if I write them here rather than at home in the holidays. On the bright side, it's only ten weeks a term here so I'll be home fairly soon itching to write more stuff down (that should make them better too.) But I'm glad to hear you want to see more. As for the results of these ideas, when I am at home one day, I will run lots of games on holiday and see how it goes with everything the same except the new tactics and see how I perform. I'll then publish the way the seasons went and hopefully find some way of averaging the result of all the seasons with each tactic in place (I'll need to run each a few times to get a fair result) and then we'll see how well it's worked.

[Zabier]

If you need screenies mate just do the writing and send it in a PM to an admin or moderator with the stated screenshots you want taken. We'll then do them for you and PM you back your article with all your screenshot links in it. You can then post it up.

Your choice though but your writing is definitely worth making the effort to accommodate. :worshippyhw3:

[dunc182]

Yeah cool cheers man. The only problem is that for some of the articles, I need to select my own screenie like for the shooting and composure one, I needed to find two strikers before I published that had the same combined composure and finishing. I suppose I could ask an admin to do this too, but it'd take extra time. For my youth squad one I needed to take screenies of players I had bought in the past using the method stated to show improvement. So it would be impossible to get you to take the screenies in that case. I suppose could send you a game file and ask for specific players to be screenied, coz I still have the game files, I just don't have the game with me.