Pelligrini-esquei Tactic Project

[peteb66]

Hey Guys

Well I am a total relative noob to FM and a fairly tactically inept person in general. However after watching Manchester City's football this season I have been in awe at their attacking prowess and how fantastic they play football. In my opinion they are playing the best football in Europe right now in terms of pure attacking class and quality (Tika taka is nice but a full flowing quick attack is so much easier on the eye in my opinion.

So to the point been tinkering around with A career mode on FM and thought Id have a go at making a Pelligrini-esque tactic in terms of lightening quick attack gung-ho football and most importantly aethestically pleasing to watch on the screen ( a tall order). Just wondered hwat you guys think of how it's going so fair in terms of instructions and to implement it into football manager. Please feel free to constructively criticize my tactic ( Im not a dedicated FM player) and thought it would be a good idea to fraw upon the plethora of knowledge availble in order to fully assemble a tactic which can closely resemble how city play in real life as much as possible. (bearing in mind I understand the FM enginge can be an akward bugger). So here goes I went for a Attacking strategy with a fluid philosophy 4222 formations. (was thinking Very fluid but I know the whole specific roles conundrum and how it affects transtition play ect). In terms of team Intructions I went for Short passing ( City dont tend to whack the ball up) push higher up, work ball into box, be more expressive , roam from positions and a few others as you can see. However could do with some help regarding wether City exploit the middle focus on the flanks and how they focus regarding that aspect of Play

I thought a standard GK on defend would do the trcik nothing too fancy just your average shot stopper. I went for Complete wing backs on both left and right wing in order to attempt to recreate how both Zabaleta and Clichy/Kolarov bomb down the wing and overlap Silva and Nasri. 2 central defenders are my bog standard CB's on D however I feel this part of the defense is something whihc I could use a bit of work on as defensively I am weak tactican. Midfield I went for an Anchorman as fernandinho usually does ( hard to swap the Anchoman and regista around as City do with fernandinho and toure) I went for a regista for the Toure role ( read a few posts regarding how its much more suitable than a box to box midfielder in thre DM role) and impresed with the forward runs made by my players. In the wings (inverted attacking playmakers) I went for two AP on attack duty ( my thinking being that support AP's dont seem to attack as efficently and do the odd sidewise pass or drop too deep to be effective). Also my thinking behind the flase nine role for one of my strickers was that it put a little more pressure on the opposition midfiled and allowed my players to link up and use the flase 9 to score goals or create goals ( hard to create that Dzeko/Aguero role) in the last role I went for the Advanced forward role ( however I am pondering wether to change this to a complete forward A in order to get the player involved more with build up and help the flase 9 out a tad more) in order to fufill the Negredo role. So thats it basically and yeahthis is only a template I am lacking in terms of individual player instructions howver I get my AP's to sit narrower and roam even more and my Anchorman closes down less in order to hold postion more and provide my defence with a barrier to help quell counter attacks. Thats about it really, please bear in mind I am a total tactical novice on this game and any advice/ constructive criticism would be great and If I am getting the tactic totally wrong feel free to blast me haha

Thanks Peter

Link to picture of the tactic

https://imageshack.com/i/n1iawjp

[JD nawrat]

There's a thread with a similar goal to this here - http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/381423-Creating-Man-City-442-Tactic - which has seemingly died unfortunately.

I briefly experimented with the idea but grew bored of it. I played a similar shape to yours except I had a CF/S instead of an F9 (whoever drops deep still gets forward, something an F9 won't do as much as a CF/S). I didn't like the idea of APs out wide (I can never make them work) so I changed to IFs instead, which isn't too dissimilar depending on how you set them up.

I'd say your instructions are mostly correct but I would remove Higher Tempo - playing Attacking mentality already, by default, has your players at a higher tempo.

I'd also suggest pushing much higher, the City defence often gets into the opposition's half and they're also comfortable passing the ball around, so it's not something to worry about if your team is high up the pitch. There will always be a willingness to pass into them if necessary.

I would also suggest 'Look for Overlap' and consider changing one of your two wide men to a Support role, just for a variance of roles.

[peteb66]

Yeah I thinks AP's outwide are poorly implemented into the game and yeah I just dont want to compromise my defense if I push too high up, and maybe Id try a CF S but I think the flase nine is better at dropping deap and making those passes just the defense needs sorting out my weak point really

[Gimme]

In my opinion there are too many Specialist Roles for a Fluid system. With a Fluid Philosophy the maximum Specialist Roles you can have is 2 so that might cause a problem. You have 5 (RGA, A, 2 x AP & F9), excluding the CWBs which are considered as 'Can fit in either Camp'.

[JD nawrat]

In my opinion there are too many Specialist Roles for a Fluid system. With a Fluid Philosophy the maximum Specialist Roles you can have is 2 so that might cause a problem. You have 5 (RGA, A, 2 x AP & F9), excluding the CWBs which are considered as 'Can fit in either Camp'.

There is no set rule for 'specialist roles' and which philosophy you should play. The thread at the top of this forum is simply a guideline, a theory to help you understand it better. It is not set in stone that if you have X amount of a certain type of role you should play Y style of football.

I play with '4.5 specialist roles' but I also play a Fluid system (even though I 'should' be playing a Rigid or even Very Rigid system). Playing Fluid makes us function better as an attacking unit and enhances creativity throughout my attacks, allowing my defenders and fullbacks to get more involved and help us break down stubborn defences to greater effect. I've tried Rigid and we play stale, boring football with not enough people getting forward to support my attackers.

Generally speaking I would encourage a Fluid system (or even Very Fluid) if I was at a top team with highly capable players. At a lower club, perhaps in LLM, I would encourage Rigid because I'm not sure players can be trusted to be so creative at that level.

I appreciate the theories on fluidity and specialist roles but I do not believe they are set rules and so I mostly don't pay attention to them because playing how I 'should' negatively affects my team.

[Football Manager.]

There's a thread with a similar goal to this here - http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/381423-Creating-Man-City-442-Tactic - which has seemingly died unfortunately.

I briefly experimented with the idea but grew bored of it. I played a similar shape to yours except I had a CF/S instead of an F9 (whoever drops deep still gets forward, something an F9 won't do as much as a CF/S). I didn't like the idea of APs out wide (I can never make them work) so I changed to IFs instead, which isn't too dissimilar depending on how you set them up.

I'd say your instructions are mostly correct but I would remove Higher Tempo - playing Attacking mentality already, by default, has your players at a higher tempo.

I'd also suggest pushing much higher, the City defence often gets into the opposition's half and they're also comfortable passing the ball around, so it's not something to worry about if your team is high up the pitch. There will always be a willingness to pass into them if necessary.

I would also suggest 'Look for Overlap' and consider changing one of your two wide men to a Support role, just for a variance of roles.

I've seen a few of your posts on this and the other thread on city style 4-4-2 and find myself in general agreeing a lot with you.

In my recent save I have inside forwards and a target man attack / complete forward support partnership which worked really well up top. but due to the rest of my set up and my attacking mentality my center backs kept hoofing it to negredo despite short passing and all the other usual suspect shouts. I did however take retain posession off because I was ending up with %70 posession with not as many CCC's and I was happier statistically like this.

With this match engine I'm yet to see any decent Nasri/kolarov moves work well as In cut in from wide take full back inside through ball to overlapping wing/full back and cross for a goal, mainly for me due to the attacking movement in wide areas of my wing backs they seem to wait then cross against a defender for a corner and hardly Ever get a cross into the box however I didn't set float or drill cross in team instruction because I wanted a mix maybe one or the other is better currently when trying to play like this?

Also wide players I was really struggling with Nasri and silva when cutting in from opposite sides to be effective I resorted to leaving them on the natural sides because they kept getting going wide regardless of what side they were on and at least that way they were crossing or passing on their strong foot but it defeated the purpose of what I wanted to do a bit. On a side note the Nasri/navas combination worked well with one cutting in and one going wide.

I'm about to start a save with Southampton playing like this with 3 different formations mainly because I like Southampton and have wanted to do a save with them for a while and I wanted to perfect this tactic before trying again with city. I did win the champions league in my first season but didn't win the league which means it isn't good enough yet. I won I think the first 12 games of the season but hit a bad run of form and tactical changes and squad talks didn't help. Then the second time it happened just set me too far behind. It was clear teams had worked my tactic out a little bit , not enough to stop but if my team were on low morale it seemed any 1-1 would be missed and was almost hopeless considering my team wasn't designed to be good defensivly !

Sorry for the long post had a bit of free time now and wanted to post before I went away hope some of it can help!

Edit:

Just saw your screenshot, you're not playing as city though you're playing as united? To play like city you need to have a team on city's level first mate.