Breaking the Skinner Box

Tips to Prevent Football Manager Addiction

The Skinner Box

Football Manager is an incredibly addicting game.

I know this from personal experience. I’ve found myself absolutely consumed with this game in the past. During the worst days of the pandemic, I found myself playing Football Manager for over 8 hours a day, playing it in the background while attending meetings and ignoring important household tasks.

It doesn’t have to be so addicting, however.

I’ve got a few quick tips here to help you better manage your relationship with Football Manager so that you can regain control.

1 - Don’t Sweat the Tactics

I’m probably the wrong person to provide tactical advice, given how poorly my current save is going.

However, I have learned from experience that you shouldn’t spend too much time fiddling around with tactics. Players in game do perform worse if you constantly change your tactics around, and there is no need for you to perform the tactical experimentation that so many others have already done.

I personally see no problem with downloading precreated tactics for your Football Manager project, whether your project is private or public. The truth is that most “self created” tactics use Sports Interactive’s built in tactical frameworks as a basis. When you think about it, you’ll realize that most Football Manager players are essentially using precreated tactics with minor adjustments. There is no need for the gatekeeping that we see in the community around this issue.

For effective tactics, I strongly recommend reading the posts over at the Tactics, Training, and Strategies section of the official Sports Interactive message boards. Turn off your game from time to time, and take some time out to read some of the posts. Learn from the mistakes and successes of others before you jump straight in.

I also very strongly recommend everything published on View From The Touchline, which is excellent reading for anybody interested in serious Football Manager play.

The more you understand your tactics, the less fiddling you will need to do — and the more control you’ll have over one of Football Manager’s traps.

2 - Avoid Scouting FOMO

Football Manager’s scouting system is designed to be exploitative. The game throws scouted players at you frequently, whetting your appetite for new players and enticing you to spend money that your club likely does not have.

This aggressive scouting system can negatively impact you in two different ways.

First, you might find yourself buying more players than you need for a certain hole in your team. This happened to me constantly a few years ago. I knew that my team needed a new left winger, for example, and would buy every single one that came with a positive scouting recommendation. I would then find myself bewildered when all the players showed up at my club at the same time, and would wind up trapping most of them in the reserves squad, or just loaning them out and forgetting about them.

Second, you might find yourself engaging in your own brand of scouting in hopes of finding wonderkids before you are “supposed” to find them. At my personal most extreme level, I would spend hours “playing” Football Manager by bringing newgens in on loan the day the game generated them. I would sort through them quickly, look for players with high potential and good personalities, and sign the ones who would then turn out to not have consistency or injury problems. I wound up spending more time hunting for wonderkids than actually playing the game, and started playing spreadsheet ball instead of football.

So how do you avoid this? Simple — let your scouting team do the scouting.

The best approach to scouting is to glance only casually at scouting recommendations as they come in. I recommend not even assigning yourself to attend scouting meetings. Let the scouts come up with a large list of players first, and then look at them when it is time to actually buy.

Remember — you want to spend your time playing Football Manager actually playing football, not fiddling with spreadsheets.

3 - Stop Micromanaging Staff

I hate hiring staff in Football Manager.

The entire process is boring and unrealistic. Some potential staff members refuse to take on related roles. Recruitment Analysts who would make perfect Performance Analysts will end negotiations if you demand that they become Performance Analysts. Scouts will demand extremely high salaries even when there are better scouts around who would gladly sign for less. And it’s so easy to find Physios with “20” ratings for Physiotherapy that I question what the point is.

The solution here is simple. Use your Technical Director and Chairman of the Board to do this work for you.

The one exception is the Head of Youth Development. Make sure that he’s got that coveted Model Citizen personality to help your future youth intake out.

As far as everybody else is concerned, the gains you get from having perfect staff are so marginal and inconsequential that it’s not really worth your time trying. Let somebody else do it.

4 - Take Shortcuts

Take shortcuts when you can.

It’s usually not a great idea to have the Assistant Manager do all your press conferences. Just do them yourself. Instead of reading all the lame questions and trying to choose from barely different responses, just choose the second answer from the left. You’ll find over time that it gives you the best possible relationship with the media.

Do your players hate training? Sell them. Experience has taught me that poor training performances usually indicate low levels of professionalism or extremely poor morale. Stop spending time talking with players who don’t want to be at your club anymore. Sell them and move on.

Hate the promise system? Simple — stop making promises to your players. If a player demands you make unreasonable promises before he will sign for you, don’t sign him. There is always a more reasonable option available.

5 - Limit Your Gameplay

This is the one we don’t want to hear.

Stop playing Football Manager for 8 hours a day. Limit yourself.

You don’t have to go too extreme. I’ve limited myself to a single game each day. I spend time after the game getting the game caught up to the next game. This gives me enough time to spend getting to know my players in game to feel that I have a connection, and yet allows me to take a step away and think about things.

You’ll find that the game is much more enjoyable if you take time to breathe and go a bit slower. You’ll also find yourself looking up information about the real life players you coach — and perhaps even creating your own stories about the fictional players.

Football Manager is an incredibly deep game. Slow things down and enjoy it. There is no reason to finish an entire season in a week or less. Enjoy the game; don’t breeze through it.