Direct Football
Yeah, it's a thing
Direct Football
It turns out that Football Manager will drop hints if you’re doing something wrong.
This popped up after our most recent defeat:
It took me a while to figure out that we should probably move away from a short passing game.
Now, this is confusing — and I’ve seen the confusion on numerous message boards. In the logic of Football Manager, “direct passing” is the opposite of “short passing.”
The idea behind the “direct” game is that players loft more long balls down the pitch in hopes of finding an open man on the other end.
The short game is more conservative, and is better suited for more technical squads. The direct game, on the other hand, is a bit more free flowing, and works great if you’ve got really fast guys who can score.
We’ve actually got a fast team, relatively speaking:
It’s a little hard to see, but our acceleration stats are higher than any other team in our league, and our pace stats are among the highest. I’m trying to focus our new signings on players with high acceleration and pace ratings, too, to try to exploit this advantage even more.
Anyway, I decided to have us pass slightly more directly, and told the players to play with a little more creative freedom.
Our next match was at home against Al-Ittihad, a Saudi side that are certainly doing better than we are financially.
They called us comfortable favorites, but I wasn’t so sure. We’re still missing Grot, and it would have been nice to have Diego and Tatsuta active again in the back.
But, man oh man, that direct approach worked. It worked wonders.
Takamine scored a hat trick from defensive midfield, and we made them look simply awful.
Now, I should note that 3 of our 5 goals came from corners. It’s not necessarily true that the more direct style suddenly opened the game up.
But it certainly didn’t hurt.
We’re climbing up the league table slowly. We’re in a promotion position, which is good, but I’m worried about the teams behind us.
Hopefully we can continue to win from here on out.