Football Manager Blog

Type: Physical Training Category: Aerobic Description: The balance attribute defines how well a player can stay on their feet with or without the ball, in situations where they are under pressure from the opposition . It describes how stable they are when turning and jumping and how quickly they recover from changes in direction. Useful for Position: Wingers, Strikers, Centre Backs. Works well with: Agility, strength, jumping and dribbling, a player with good balance is able to ride out tackles and challenges when shoulder to shoulder with opposition players especially if the also have good strength. Pro Tip: Players with high balance and dribbling attributes are good for running with the ball and retaining possession when being challenged, try getting these players to learn the 'run with ball' player preferred moves.

Type: Physical Training Category: Aerobic Description: The agility attribute  ties in with the other physical attributes to  defines how quickly a player can start, stop, turn and change direction especially when a player is running with the ball. Useful for Position: Wingers, Strikers and Goalkeepers. Works well with: Pace, balance, acceleration and dribbling, a player with high agility is light on their toes and is able to dummy and skip past an opponent. Pro Tip: Players with high agility are good for finding space especially if they have a high off the ball attribute, look to play killer ball to these players.

Type: Physical Training Category: Aerobic Description: The acceleration attribute defines how quickly a player can get up to their top speed (Pace). It is useful for getting past an opponent or running into space. Useful for Position: All, especially wingers, full backs and strikers. Works well with: Pace and Dribbling, a player with high acceleration and pace can be devastating for breaking on the counter attack and beating the back line. Pro Tip: Look to play through balls to players with high acceleration so they can run into space and onto the ball.

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...