Atletico Madrid / Diego Simeone 442 replication - FM18

[MrSixxthsense]

After spending a few hours of research and playing, I have come up with a tactics which is a very close replication of Atletico Madrid / Diego Simeone 442, before he decide to dismantle his own team for some unknown reason. 

I selected Burnley FC as the team in FM18 because they have decent players in average and high work rate / team work. Little did I know they are so prone to injury, even Marco Reus seem like a reliable player for your starting line up.

The only thing I added to my tactical instruction was 'get stuck in'. I didn't want to set this as standard due to my U23 and U18, which has the strength of Victor Lindelof. Translation: losing any challenge to anyone with a body mass. Therefor the risk of injuries was to high in my opinion

 

 

Ideally you want a quicker striker to play as AF together with the DF. When Barnes have a decent acceleration / pace as DF, it worked great with Vokes / Wood as TM-a, as you get a lot of physicality present on set pieces. Both offensive and defensive. 

The set pieces are important. Here are the routine I selected trying to replicated how AM was setting up. Just mirror instruction for the left side and the different variants

Attacking:

 

Defensive:

 

Also corners plays an important part on how AM set up tactic. This replication seemed to work wonders, especially on the defensive as I can't remember the other team scoring against us.

Attacking:

 

Defensive:

 

This is the throw in set up I used:

 

Results were extremely good. However, this is not a real run of games as the injuries comes so often with Burnley there is no chance to see if the tactic would work, if I didn't save the game after matches and re-uploaded after injuries occur.

 

Here is some stats I think you will find interesting:

 

Here is stats from a selection of matches. When looking at the one against Man U, it is worth mentioning the conditions. -7 degrees and snow require real men to play, so the boys from United where taken to school..

 

Regarding staff I have been able to find a few that works well. I hired Eric Black to do training of shooting as I am waiting for James Beattie to not be so concerned about his Blackburn connection as Black then will be set to coach everything except fitness and goalkeeping (all round exceptional with professional mentality). On the fitness I think I have hit home as close as someone may do with a lower reputation team. My two coaches on the first team and the one on U23 have all 'model professional' personality. That seems to have a great effect on all players, especially the younger ones.

 

Both Michael Duff and Neil Sullivan have 'model professional', which I intend to exploit in the future which one can see from my transfer strategy:

 

When the bar for match cohesion goes close to max it will be interesting to see how it effects the play:

 

Have to say thank you to the members of the community for all the information provided on this site. Been reading a lot and received many ideas together with inspiration. One major source to my tactic was by reading this article: Atletico Madrid Tactics (Part 1): How has Diego Simeone set-up his side? • Outside of the Boot Recommend you read all parts, as I think the author have done an amazing job of analyzing the team very accurate to how they actually played. 

For us that remember Cannavaro from Italy, I would say FM18 have replicated his skill set in Ben Mee. Being 1.80m and winning 90% of headers is amazing to register. Cannavaro with his 1.76m looked like he was 1.96m in the duels. It is all about the timing...

Hope you enjoyed reading this and found some inspiration.

Edited December 24, 2021 by MrSixxthsense
removing two pics at the bottom

[carloshcorbalan]

link to tactics ... ???  

[MrSixxthsense]

1 hour ago, carloshcorbalan said:

link to tactics ... ???  

Can't get it uploaded, so you must manually create it from the screenshots

[ta11zx]

Does this work on fm 21

[Nitro871]

Is this tactic for FM22 or FM19?

[Black Africa]

On 03/01/2022 at 02:22, Nitro871 said:

Is this tactic for FM22 or FM19?

Looks like fm18

[MrSixxthsense]

On 27/12/2021 at 05:42, ta11zx said:

Does this work on fm 21

I have no idea. Only play FM18

This was to demonstrate that there is possible to recreate AM's way of play (like they used to do) which a pretty close to real life accuracy - and that people can get a better understanding of what is demanded from your players making it work in a team. If you have a bunch of divas like Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar, then this tactic will not work to the extend like with for example Burnley, which has very high team work / work rate. Additional the goal keeper (Heaton) is great and they have many players with a decent amount of attributes except technical, which is why the AM approach works well as this team only have players in midfield which can do something with the ball

Would be really interesting if someone tried this tactic with AM in Spain in FM18 as the players they have are significantly better than Burnley's with approximately same mental attributes. If anyone do, please share in this thread  

 

On 03/01/2022 at 02:22, Nitro871 said:

Is this tactic for FM22 or FM19?

FM18

[Nitro871]

On 13/01/2022 at 19:46, MrSixxthsense said:

FM18

Ok, thanks. I got it.

[Azrael]

The tactic looks interesting I wish I still had FM18