Delicate Dave

This is a very simple request - When a assistant manager recommends a first-team selection can they please put the players in the right positions when the are two similar positions to fill? Ie if there is a BWM and AP in a two man midfield please put the BWM in the BWM position and not the AP. This happens too with 2 strikers and the CBS. The system seems to like putting them the wrong way around just to see if you are paying attention. Makes me wonder what goes on when I go on holiday :-)

I seem to think if you did well in the Championship you could find a prem club come sniffing or even apply and get one. In 2024 I've done 4 seasons with Cambridge winning Div 1 and getting into the playoffs in the championship twice but this has not been good enough for a job offer from a prem club. Although I've had a few offers from Scottish clubs. How are others getting on in the career mode?

Has anyone ever done a challenge where they can only sign players under the height of 5ft 9ins?

Yes I understand what you are saying. I would say my tactic is not aggressive as I've got the discipline instruction on and the tempo is not high. Although pressing is high I do not prevent the keeper from passing to the defenders - I want them to have the ball and I cut off their route to pass it. ut, it wasn't that with pass in to pass on the static was failing. The problem was shipping goals after dominating the first half and even going 3-0 could end in 3-3, 4-3 or at one time 3-5. I don't know what was happening here but if I was to guess it would be that the pass-into-space instruction controls the amount of running some players do. Losing just half of their energy meant in this situation the one defensive midfield could not cope - I do have him in mid not as a dm, some might scoff at that in FM24 but find the right players and this works well - So as soon as that ball winner can't win the ball the tactic fails. Pass to player means he does less running to recover the ball. That's what I think anyway. Interesting my passion stats have not improved and I still win some games on very low possession but my defence & keeper are very good at this level. And I seem to convert chances.

I think I might well have solved this :-) Well since I made the changed I've played 10 games and not once conceded after taking the lead. That change was removing the PASS INTO SPACE instruction. I thought that was a good option for my formation. But never liked using it as I've not had great success with it in the past.

Well another season, higher division, half the team changed, and the same annoying thing. I think it's probably time to give this up till the next version is out. Played 22 games, Drew 10, and took the lead in 7 of them. 44 goals scored Looking at the data hub it says we are an incredibly hard team to score against.

No it's Adam.

I don't think it's a sort of one one-on-one thing. Ie the player with the ball against the keeper. It's code based on your choices nothing more. If your team choices are so much better than the game's choice any player will score any type of goal. The are a few ways to look at attributes - either on each player level or on a team level. Both have to be good enough for success IMO.

I tend to think the finishing attribute is as important to strikers as the passing attribute is to midfielders. You can have a midfielder with 20 but if their first touch or vision is 5 how good at picking a pass are they? Same with strikers 20 finishing is great but first touch and composure 5 you can keep him IMO.

Ya given away a penalty is another example. I guess perhaps I play more than you? I tend to play on and off but in winter because I'm retired I can play for 4-5 a day. Don't you even see those endless reporter emails with the daft questions? I get them and players going catching flu, colds or virus. Mind you at times it can seem completely random - like the time I went 2-0 after 5 mins, then had 2 goals disallowed, gave away 2 pens, had 2 players sent off and draw 4-4 :-)

I simply don't believe you've never seen an email where a player has gone sick with food poisoning. The next thing you'll tell me is if you've managed a small club Vs a big club in the cup you've never given away a penalty :-) There are many incidents or events that repeat and repeat in FM. To say there isn't a set of instructions that could be defined as scripting is simply hard to believe. I call this gameplay or storyline, I think it's a bunch of code procedures that get called fairly randomly.

If you are not getting success with crosses from the WBs change them to FBs I would. I used to have a lot of problems with WB trying to cross the ball. You certainly can overthink tactics but bear in not one tactic fully suits every game. Although you can win games with just one tactic obvs. So what I'm saying is be flexible with roles but try to keep your team tactics reasonably fixed so the players get used to them. My 2 pence only.

We often get messages about clubs poaching young players but have no real way to do that ourselves without a lot of effort & cost. I think it would be a good feature to be able to tag your scout to be on the lookout to poach youth players. Of course, the consequences of this type of behavior could be upsetting our managers & chairmen. I would like to see this implemented in a way that it runs as an attribute of a scout. So just like any other attribute the higher the number the more sneaky or dishonest this scout might be. And if you have a lot of sneaky scouts you could end up upsetting clubs enough that they won't deal with you. So dishonest scouts could also work against you and in more than one way. By them leaking the names of your best young players to other clubs in gossip or for other reasons :-) Another feature of this is the scout could send emails telling the manager how he managed to find & persuade the player to join the club. This could also be leaked in some way like transfers are now leaked to the press and in this way, you could find out which scout is leaking information and then deal with them.

Perhaps things will change but as we head into better weather I won't want to be inside and the activities I'll be doing outside - Garden, DIY etc - will lead me to only want to sleep when I'm inside. Apart from playing FM that is :-) Pity I didn't think of it a few years ago as I was right into coding & image editing then. Now it's all I can muster to maintain my websites while fixing Laptops as an hobby.

Thanks, it's as I thought really, I've done plenty of coding in the past and I used to skin browsers and make things in VB. I don't think I'll have the passion for it now at 64 so I'll leave it to you youngins .

One of the things many people ignore when they manage in the lower leagues is money, trying to generate it. I recently did a blog on how to generate money during the pre-season. Most people seem to think pre-season is all about fitness but I've found that pre-season can be very important and you may be missing a trick ignoring it. If you ignore it pre-season can cost your club money, in fact, it will but if you look to earn money from playing bigger teams the income will help your club, and in turn, that help you. As long as you have a reasonably happy squad the is no danger in playing bigger club pre-season and in fact, it's a fact that when players play against better players they get better. Of course, you don't want to lose five games 5-0 so mix in a few home games against locals who you pay very little to earn from the gate money. As an example - I'm currently managing Cambridge, just took the into the championship but before that, I was earning £300k from the preseason games. This is big money for a club that give you £1k transfer budget :-) Popped a few images on to help explain what I'm talking about. For those that never look at that this sort of stuff, pre-season if you play away you receive a fee, if you play at home you pay the club who come a fee so as long as the amount you pay is less then the gate money you increase club income and the big club games can be picked up by tv which bring in more cash. Don't know if this is useful or not, been playing FM for years but never bothered with forums before.

How long does it take to make a skin? What are tools needed? What are the stages if you broke it down into a 3 to 5 stage process? Might have ago but don't have the time to research much. I'm sure if I got start, with these answers, that might encourage me to do more and drop other things I'm playing about with.

Excuse this old guy buting in but what type of football do you think fluid is? I know over the last 30 years or more short passing has become the type of football that is said to be "total football" but that just a term. Great passing moves that produce goals are just that "great" to watch but football is about more than goals, no ! honest it is. The art of defence is becoming a lost art. Today the defenders are so big & fast for them it's just a case of following orders of where to stand. And this type of football doesn't always bring success, just look at the team who brought us the term "total football" Holland, they never won anything, always coming up short because in fact their football was total it lacked the art of defense. But FM is not football it's a computer football game. So total football in the game probably just means winning everything and I'm pretty sure in FM that doesn't need a great defense. So what you are looking may not exist in a successful way in FM.

I've found working out subs to hold a result is pretty easy in FM and has been for years. Each player starts with a rating of 6.7. During the game the rating goes up or down and all these ratings for your team are added up and compared to the other team. This decide which team is on top or has the ball. If you sub a player on say 7.7 for a new player you whole team rating goes down by 1.0. If you do five subs at once and replace all the best-rated players in your team that's a big drop. So best to try and only replace low-performing players. When you do that you are making the team stronger. I've even replaced five players in the first half if the rating drops low enough, this has turned a game around for me that looked lost after 15 mins.

Well I was going to let this but I thought I would check for replies. I still managed to get promotion so that's good. Will be interesting to see how it pans out in the higher division. The "it's the tactics" thing is interesting. I tend to lean towards the setting in FM that mean at certain time your tactics won't make any difference. Whether this is what some call "scripting" or just that certain events are pushed to the front by the general gameplay coded into the system. The sort of things that crop up are The top team losing 0-3 to the bottom team, the first round of the league cup being almost always a penalty shootout, players asking for new contracts only ending one way in general, giving you the best player a big contract often ends up with the sending 6 months out with injury, putting players on the transfer almost guarantees no one will make an offer for them. All these things can happen and do but not like clockwork. I do hope FM gets the update in need, and I've not talking about graphics, the gameplay is ridiculous now, the reporter's questions, the food poisoning, The are so many things that just need dumping or real work to make them worthwhile.

Ingame tactics, I've never been able to get these to work in any version of FM. It's refreshing to find some who has.

Well anyway, I was only really looking for ideas. I think this thread has run its course. Sorry if I didn't explain well enough.

This is as I said, I've never said it's scripted, I don't even understand what that means. It's interesting that in the two replies I see today in one it says the AI looks for weakness all the time as the game is played and the other says it does not tweak stuff to get a result. The point is both are true all actions are based on values. But no software is perfect so we shouldn't assume just because the values show a weakness it really is a weakness when played out.

Good point, that's the weakness I'm looking for.

So tell me if you click kick-off and then just let the game run till the end how is a result produced if the outcome is not decided before the game even starts? The process continues till you stop it with your changes during the game and those changes will make the system produce a different result than the one is started with. Thanks for the tactical advice, like you not and expert but yes that all makes sense. I'm happy with the results being produced by this team. I don't change the static much but I do change the roles and yes I will drop in a DM if I fear I might let a lead slip. All that has been done and more to stop these strange regular events where my team goes ahead but ships a goal in the second half. Like everything else the has to be a reason for it, I just can't find it. And more to the point I only mentioned it because I've seen those types of results far more in this version than any other I've played. In the past, the weakness has been fitness, stamina, lack of training, or too much training but you can see from the image that is not an issue here. I could go it more detail on what this tactic does and why I think works if you want. I tend to use this formation a lot but you can't just jump right in with a premiership team playing or yes the problem you outlike will hit you hard. But I took West Brom into the prem playing this and using it I won the prem & CL twice on the trot so it can work.