Football Manager Blog

Free kicks are one of the hardest things to get right in Football Manager, Especially with lower league teams. The problem you will have is most of your players technical attributes are too poor to get the ball to fly into the top corner like David Beckham. The first thing that you want to do is nominate your free kick taker, I usually pick my wingers for this as they usually have the best crossing, technique, long shots and free kick attributes, but if you find another player with better pick them. I then tell them to aim corners to the far post. You can see below the individual roles I pick for my players, the important ones are the centre backs forward in and around the keeper, one of my centre mids disrupting the wall and another good free kick specialist standing with the taker.   I find this strategy quite successful, but only expect a few goals per season with this. Don't forget to check out my early guides to beginner tactics: Football Manager 2011 LLM Begin...

Now you have your basic tactics setup in place its time to refine it a little bit, lets start with corners. First of all you want you best crosser taking them, these are usually your wingers. I like to have inswinging corners so have you right winger taking the left corners and left winger for right corners. Like in real life you want to get your biggest players in the box that can challenge in the air, this means bringing your centre backs up. See below for the setup I go with. As you can see I aim my corners for the 6 yard box, my centre backs are there annoying the keeper and are big enough to win the aerial challenges, I also have players attacking each of the posts with my best long shot player lurking outside the area. With this setup I am able to get an extra 10-15 goals per season which can make a big difference! Don't forget to read up on the other parts of my tactics training here: Football Manager 2011 LLM Beginner Tactics Part 1 Formation Football Manager 2011 LLM...

Today I'm going to talk about tactics for lower league teams. The key to a successful tactic for a poor technical team is to keep it simple, so I always start with a standard 4-4-2 formation: I then set one of my central midfielders to a defensive role and the other to attacking. Most of your players will be lacking any decent technical or mental skills so you want them to stick to their positions and roles, this is how I setup my team instructions: As you can see I've told my team to play a direct 'hoofball' game with little creative freedom and roaming from positions. This will ensure that your player will be in the right place at the right time more often than not and prevent your oppostion a free run on goal. The idea of playing direct is that your players will not be good on the ball and if they try and play it around the back they are going to make some critical mistakes eventually. Thats it for now, as I said keep the tactics simple to start with and once...

As the manager of a lower league team you need every penny you can get, so I'm going to give you a helping hand with some tips below: Purge your squad of dead wood, all your under 18 team will be useless, get rid of them as well as most of your reserves. Ask your board for a Parent Club, not only do you get good players on free loans, you also get paid for the privilege and a money spinning friendly! Pre-season friendlies - before the start of the season go to your reserve team screen and then their fixtures, here you can arrange friendlies. Arrange a friendly with the most reputable New Zealand teams, make sure it is an away game and you are guaranteed £20K in fees per game. Do this 5 or 6 times and you've got yourself enough money to get your team through the year. Finally put as much effort as you can in progressing through the FA Cup, aim for the third round and pray you get a big away tie with a Premiership team. Cup games split the gate receipts so if you manage to ge...

My first season in charge of Hyde United and I manage to get promoted through the playoffs. The playoff final was tense, but my boys managed to win through with a last gasp extra time goal in the 122nd minute! Check it out: Now I need to spend the summer break rebuilding my team and preparing them for life in the Blue Square Prem, wish me luck!

The Physio is the second most important member of staff after your Assistant Manager. He prevents players getting injured, speeds up their recovery from injury and give reports on how long players will be out of action for. Key attributes for a physio are: Physiotherapy - Determines how accurately a player will be out of action for. Discipline and Determination - Makes sure players work hard to recover from their injuries and return earlier for selection. After many hours of searching this is the Physio I ended up with, as you can see his physio stat is only 10 so he gives me injury times that have quite a wide range, but his other stats mean that the players return at the lower end of those estimates:

So you're now the proud owner of a lower league club with no money or resources. What is the first thing you do? Sack everybody! Your starting staff are going to be complete rubbish and you're going to have to build this club from the ground up. The most important staff member you are going to have is the Assistant Manager, he can do everything: Manages your Reserve and Under 18 team. Scout teams and players. Trains your players. Gives you feedback during matches. Much much more. Your Assistant Manager needs good stats in almost every attribute, now you're not going to get Alex Ferguson so be realistic. After many hours of searching I found Brian Caswell, his stats are all around 10 or so and I think thats the best I'm going to get for a Blue Square North club, he also has some knowledge of a few European countries which can come in handy when scouting players, check him out below.