Last time out in my “Training a new FM Player” series I discussed how to build your squad and how to select a starting formation. This time out I want to talk about how to adapt the formation to get the best from the players at your disposal.

Tactical Creator and its limitations

The TC does a good job at defining roles within your team. You can select from a multitude of roles and responsibilities which will be slightly modified based on your overall team settings. The TC is designed for “plug and play managers”. I have been playing FM since yester year when TC was a pipe dream. I am not a “plug and play” manager, however I do use TC as a starting position then adjust settings in an attempt to produce my desired results. The TC is rigid, it does not have the ability to adjust fields based on other roles you wish to use and also doesn’t look at an individual player’s attributes. Obviously this is by design. If it did all these things then the only decision making skills you would need would be who to buy and sell. For me part of the joys of the game are tinkering and procrastinating over player instructions in an attempt to get the best out of individuals’ attributes and create a formation that produces a style of play that will win championships. It doesn’t always have to be pretty but it does have to be effective. The multitude of combinations you can achieve using instructions such as Mentality, Run from Deep, Roaming and Wide play can produce a huge variety of completely different shapes and playing styles within a predefined formation. Knowing how to use these instructions adds layers to a team and can define success or failure. By “layers” I mean combinations of players e.g. Target men, inside forwards and overlapping full backs. All the players in your team need to complement each other.

Understanding the Instructions

Mentality: Defines the starting position your players will take on the pitch and how attacking the passes a player makes will be. The lower the number of clicks, the deeper a player will play and the fewer passes he will play into the final third.

Run from Deep: This instruction controls how early/often your player makes attacking runs when on the offensive.

Roaming: Does what it says on the tin. This gives players the ability to move around freely.

Wide play: This determines what action a player takes with or without the ball. It is a very powerful instruction:

Cuts Inside – the player will make runs infield to receive the ball or with the ball will run inside the fullback.

Hugs Touchline – the player will patrol the touch line and try to run outside the full back to produce a cross.

Moves into Channels – is a little greyer, it appears to be an off-the-ball instruction. However it has been argued that it is the opposite of Cuts Inside, where a player looks to receive the ball in a narrow position and run out wide to stretch the defence.

Mentality and Run From Deep are in my opinion the most important attacking tactical tools. However they appear to be the most misunderstood. Let’s consider the following target man and poacher instructions.

Poacher

This screenshot is the default settings for a poacher. The key points to take from this are the attacking mentality and run from deep settings. They seem quite logical; an attacking mentality that will push the player up against the defensive line and Run From Deep is set to often. This player is meant to break the offside trap, run on to a flick on or pass in behind the defence.

Target man

This is the default instructions for a target man on support duty. Again this seems to be intuitive; a player that plays deep searching for long balls to flick on or to hold up play before feeding his strike partner.

Let’s look at the partnership as a whole. The Poacher is far more attacking than the supporting striker. This is not actually a problem because we would like the target man to feed the poacher. However when we combine the Run From Deep instructions, the poacher and the target man become too far apart and the poacher becomes isolated. The reason for this is that when our team wins possession an attacking move develops. The poacher, already in a high position, makes a run in behind the defence thus forcing himself further forward. In this instance the move has developed slowly and our players have moved the ball around the midfield. The poacher does not drop deep as he is in line with the opposition defence. The target man has started deep and is in a good position to receive the ball from the midfield and in turn feed his striking partner. The poacher, sensing this move developing again, makes a run forcing himself even further away from his strike partner. This breaks the connection between the two strikers as shown below:

The problem with the TC is that the instructions look sensible enough but do not consider the role the other players in your system are fulfilling. Playing players who are overly aggressive with deep players will generally mean your team are very poorly connected.

Adjusted Poacher

Adjusted Targetman

Here we can see how I have adjusted the poacher and target man to improve the connection with the team. The idea behind this is that the target man starts in a more advanced position but does not make runs forward as play advances. He is to remain in position to receive the ball. The poacher is the player that starts deeper, however he is geared to make lots of runs past the target man. The effect of this is that the poacher is in a position to burst past a static defence and link up with the target man. Once the target man has released the ball or play passes him by, the target man will default to his mentality and run forward in an attempt to remain as the highest player on the pitch.

The comparison above shows the heat map from the two sets of instructions (left being the default, poacher is on the right and target man on the left). Ignoring the positioning of the midfield and defence we can see that the Target man and AMC have spent the majority of the game in the centre circle where they are unable to provide support for the poacher. In the second shot we can see that the Target man has moved further forward into a more dangerous position and the connection with his strike partner is maintained. In the first game analysis my team lost 3-0. I put this down to a number of attacking headers and passes being swept up by the opposition’s defenders due to the poor connection. This enabled the opposition to form effective counter attacks. However the second game my team won 3-0 producing a far greater number of clear cut chances and reducing the number of stray passes.

Conclusion

Obviously I’m not saying this is the only solution to the problem, I may have had similar results by changing the Target man role in “plug and play” mode to attack. However if you look at this option you can see that many of the other predefined settings are adjusted. This for me would have modified aspects of the player’s game that I was already happy with. The real point of this post is to demonstrate the relationship that Mentality and Run From Deep have with team shape. To keep the formation you have designed connected I find it necessary to offset run from deep with mentality. If you have a player who you want to run in behind a defence or receive a ball in space and then run at a defence, you should be looking to provide that player with the available options. So if I want an inside forward to cut inside and attack the gap between full back and centre back, he will need to have a low mentality but run from deep sometimes/often. If you want a box to box midfielder who will surge up and down the pitch, you should be looking for run from deep set at often and a lower mentality than a holding player. To reiterate, mentality sets out where your players start from, defining your shape. A run from deep creates the movement required to link up your shape and overload the opposition’s weak points. Being able to manipulate these two instructions is the key to designing a good formation. Learn to use these in tandem and you can design any tactic you can think of.

Thanks for reading

Cook1e_mr