Tactics For True Beginners
Figuring out the best place to start.
Tactics For True Beginners
This is the first post of what will be a series of undetermined length.
It’s also going to seem really strange in the context of my Hexagon Challenge save. The storyline has not yet proceeded to the end of the 3rd season. I’m writing this from right before the beginning of the 4th season with PanSa, when I decided to make a major change to our tactic.
You’ll learn the reason for this change soon enough.
Instead of dumping a huge tactical modification on you all at once, I figured it would be better to go slowly through my thought process.
As I wrote the other day, I’m actually still a beginner at a lot of these concepts. Though I have some experience with studying football tactics, I certainly have not spent years messing around with different tactical styles in different versions of the game. I’m not an expert by any means, nor should I be treated as one.
I just hope we can learn together.
Beginner’s Trap
Now, there is a trap that all beginners will run into.
The truth is that tactical creation looks a lot easier than it really is — especially if you put your faith in content creators.
I spent a lot of time watching Football Manager content creators on YouTube. And, well, I was led somewhat astray by “it’s so easy” videos, such as this one from Lollujo:
Now, I don’t mean to be overly critical of Lollujo — but it’s actually a bit harder than picking a premade tactical template based on the star ratings of your players and making a few adjustments here and there to make things look nice.
If you want to create a tactic, you’re going to have to figure out the type of system you want to play with first. As nice as the default tactic molds are, they’re not going to get you to that point. You need to figure out how to balance offense and defense, how you plan to move the ball up for an eventual shot on goal, and how to prevent the other team from walking all over you in the back.
The Meta
The hardest thing about football tactics for true beginners is that you’re jumping right into a meta.
You’ve got to be conversant with the meta to some extent. For example, you need to understand that you need players to play in the back — that you can’t simply have a goalkeeper with 10 offensive players.
This famous Fumble Dimension video from a few years ago is an excellent example of how not to create Football Manager tactics:
That’s where those default tactics can actually help us, by the way. If you’re completely clueless as to where to start, take a look at some of the default settings and try to figure out how they work. It’s like buying a prebuilt Magic: The Gathering deck: you probably won’t be able to defeat everybody straight out of the box, but it will give you a good starting point.