NineCloudNine

I'm managing Roma in FM at the moment, which ofc meant Mourinho got sacked to make way for me. I've made an enemy of him in the game and take every opportunity to wind him up and put him down. Needless to say he reacts to everything, which makes it all the more entertaining. He got the Napoli job in early 2024 and we've got quite the rivalry going now.

I'm afraid that's even more of a fantasy than your list of hopes for FM . Aside from the discussion about his tactical acumen, his behaviour is toxic. He has fallen out with players, management and fans at his last five jobs. Bayern is massively ego-heavy and political. He'd clash with his bosses from day one and the players would not put up with his management style. The football world has moved on and Mourinho has been left behind. None of which alters your original correct point that it should be possible to play defence-first football in FM, even if the realities of the modern game mean that this will always be a difficult path to tread.

How so? 10-20 years ago Mourinho was a breath of fresh air, charismatic and tactically innovative. He transformed Chelsea and Inter and took them to trophies they would not otherwise have won. From Real Madrid onwards he has not adapted to the changing modern game and has increased the toxic and deeply unpleasant behaviour as he has become more and more bitter. It's very sad actually. At Roma he won a 4th-tier tin-pot trophy no-one cares about and lost one of the ugliest finals in European football history. His berating of the referee after the game should have seen him banned for a very long time. Roma's league position didn't improve under him and they played ugly, negative football. I don't disagree with you about the loss of variety in the modern game and there should be a place for defence-first tactics. But basing that argument on Jose Mourinho being a misunderstood modern football tactical guru doesn't help make that case. The game has left him behind. There are much more interesting examples of defence-first modern managers.

Mourinho was fired by Roma a few weeks ago and has been replaced by Danielle De Rossi, who has immediately increased the tempo and attacking intent of the team. That's what you saw against Inter. It is correct that while at Roma Mourinho was restricted by severe financial limitations and was overly dependent on injury-prone players like Dybala. However, he also perseveres with very negative tactics which don't bring results and eventually alienates the fans even before he starts to bring the toxic behaviour. He's at least a decade past his time.

If you are expecting any of this to happen in the upcoming patch/update then you are in for a crushing disappointment. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that "roles that perhaps are redundant the in modern day" should be made relevant in a game which is intended to be a reflection of...modern day football. There are no Enganches (for example) in modern football. Such roles and styles like Catenaccio are in the game as historical relics. I wish that wasn't the case because as mentioned above I think modern football lacks variety and flavour. But it is and it's right for SI to reflect this. Your wishlist goes beyond the dominance of gegenpressing in FM24. You don't just want FM to be different, you want football to be different. Or at least, for FM to give you the ability to play in a world where football is different. I respect that, but your quest is doomed to fail. The simpler task of reining in gegenpressing in FM would be achieved by implementing realistic injury and fatigue rates. The problem isn't that gegenpressing is OP in itself, it's that FM allows any team to gegenpress with no negative consequences.

Your club’s reputation and probably the player’s reputation went up. Reputation is used crudely in several parts of the game to trigger behaviour and decisions which in real life would be much more nuanced. What we can’t see is some number going up gradually until it hits a threshold which triggers a demand or an unhappiness or pre-concern notification. That always feels like it has come out of the blue but in fact will have been building unseen for a while. It’s a reminder that we are playing a massive spreadsheet with graphics, not real football. That said, while some of the details you describe might be silly, the overall picture of promoted clubs struggling with wage bills is definitely real. Do you pay wages at the level of the division you are in, or at the level of your income? This is a genuine challenge.

It’s interesting to watch on forums how words get subtly changed . It was a post of mine you are referring to and I didn’t say that “playing defensive in modern football would be suicide”. I was responding to a poster who had gone back to FM13 and been successful with a defensive mentality, low tempo, sit- back-and-absorb-pressure tactic. He said that such a tactic would be “suicide” in FM24 and I replied that it would be suicide in real football too because the game has changed so much since then. That isn’t the same as saying that “playing defensive in modern football” would fail. Clearly, it is a valid approach. But defensive football in 2023-4 is not the same as defensive football in 2013 (which was the comparison point). Mourinho’s tactics don’t work any more. How many trophies has he won since Klopp started winning trophies? The all-encompassing rise of pressing and positional play has sucked a lot of the tactical variation out of modern football. There are few genuine clashes of styles, just clashes of tactical tinkering on themes of pressing and covering space. FM24’s ME reflects that tactical dominance, which is in one way a shame but in another at least true to real life. What SI have not done is to reflect the downsides of gegenpressing on injuries and fatigue. A combination of physical attributes being overwhelmingly dominant and deliberately reduced injury rates means there are no consequences to all-in pressing in FM, whereas in real life teams trying that would be exhausted by Christmas and have half the squad out injured. The tactical presets and instructions have also not been updated. They include historic styles that no team plays any more. Mentality remains the most confusing and counter-intuitive concept in the game. So I don’t think the dominance of gegenpressing in FM24 is a ME problem. I think it’s a problem of SI deciding not to include the downsides to playing that way, while leaving in outdated tactical styles and inaccurate descriptions. Changing the ME is difficult. Tweaking injury rates is not. There’s a mod for it that only uses the free editor. I have some sympathy with SI’s desire to avoid a tsunami of complaints from players who lose half their squad, but I personally think that would be preferable to the current tsunami of complaints about one style of football obliterating all others.

Reduce those numbers, and/or switch more of it to future instalments and/or reduce the fee and add performance related payments. Then press ‘suggest terms’. If your first offer is accepted, you bid too much. If not, they will cone back with a counter-offer. You can usually go through a lot of rounds of this. You may well not find a deal acceptable to both parties, which is fine. You need to have a very clear idea what you can afford and be prepared to walk away if the selling club won’t agree to that. Future and performance-related fees can punt a lot of the risk into the future, but make sure you can afford them if they come to fruition. The total potential value of a deal with performance-related clauses will be higher than a bid without because of the risk to the selling team.

You have no penetration from midfield or the flanks. Your front three will be getting isolated and outnumbered. I’d suggest giving your CM an attack duty and consider telling the RWB to get forward more. If you want to distribute to CBs then one of them should ideally be a BPD. Or remove that instruction and let your keeper vary the distribution. Pass into space and work ball into box also greatly restrict your players’ options. I personally dislike both instructions for that reason.

My usual thought with similar questions is to remove some of the team instructions. You are being very prescriptive in how you want your team to play. That reduces the options available to your players when Plan A doesn’t work. Try removing the overlap/underlap, move the passing up a notch, allow your team to counter, allow your GK to have more distribution options. You might also step the pressing line back a notch since a very high press just pins the opposition back into a small part of the pitch so there’s no space for you to attack. There’s nothing obviously problematic about the shape or roles, though it isn’t obvious to me why you have made your right FB an IWB. I’d personally rather have them playing wide to support the winger rather than in an already solid midfield. A personal preference of mine is not to give wingers an attack duty because I find it makes them one-dimensional - they get to the byline and cross. That might be what you want, but a support duty might see them choose other options sometimes.

Deleting duplicate post

Yes. Once you figure out what works and how to get the right things in place, it all becomes much more straightforward and less daunting. The opposite is also true - things can spiral downhill very quickly and it can be hard to recover. This may be an accurate reflection of real life football, but it can make for a dispiriting game experience. The challenge is that the game interface almost actively works against you. Lots of system interactions are unintuitive, words don’t mean what you think they mean and mean different things in different places, it’s really easy to miss things and there is essentially zero guidance in-game. I’d love to know what proportion of FM buyers only ever log a few hours. I bet it’s quite high. I think the game is overly complex and I’ve been playing FM since it was CM. Coming to it fresh now I’m not sure I’d persevere.

The things that irritate me about FM24 are the same things which have irritated me for several versions - dumb press conferences, weird player & agent interactions, the impenetrable and sometimes willfully confusing interface, the mess that is the tactics creator. My irritation is magnified by these having been regular complaints for years, yet nothing having changed while the devs are told instead to produce new features that no-one asked for. There is much to like about 24 aside from those running frustrations. Positional play is a joy, the set piece wizard is excellent, transfers are much easier and less frustrating, squad management is smoother. I’m fine with the ME even if gegenpressing and physical attributes do remain overpowered. I have said on other threads that I suspect SI know this and don’t know how to change it because the ME has become a black box that no-one fully understands.

Looks like a bug then. Only way round it that I can see is to use the in-game editor to make yourself unsackable.

Just on this, a work client once showed me the basememt where their server/IT architecture lived. The first elements of it were installed on the day the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive in 1968. There were boxes there whirring away and clearly doing stuff but nobody knew what and no-one was prepared to unplug it to find out. To a lesser extent this is true of any game engine. It is built upon and patched and hacked and the people who did the building, patching and hacking have long gone, let alone the people who wrote the base code. Some of the problems in FM are so long-standing and intractable that I suspect no-one at SI knows why they happen or how to fix it. The overpower of physical attributes is, I suspect, one of those things. I have some sympathy with SI here. Many posters seem to think the ME is a mixing desk where everything can be dialled up or down. It’s not. But at the same time SI can’t come out and say “we have no idea why this happens” because they’d be ridiculed. So they say nothing.

I tend to prefer a CF as a sole striker for the all-round contribution. These are often big, strong and good in the air, but are not strictly a target forward archytype. A variation on the HB/CWB structure is 3xCM and two forwards, with no wingers. The middle CM is an AP-A, the outer CMs can be whatever you prefer - B2B, Mezz, Carr or BWM all work. This places even more demands on the CWBs, but has more cover in the middle. In that setup I often use a TF-S alongside a PF or AF. I have never tried a Wide TM. As an aside, I rarely if ever use DLPs. They are too passive for me. If they are good enough to dictate play then I want them more actively involved as a RPM or AP; if they are defensively strong I would rather they play as a BWM or Anchor. And the DM-S is a better hybrid role, IMO.

@Duracellio here are my thoughts on your questions (not in any order!): * Yes any 2xCWB system is heavy on crossing. This is how I intend it to be. * While the CWBs have to be monsters, it is the Half Back which makes the system work. They push the two CBs wide, which covers the CWBs going forward. The HB is simultaneously the centre of defence and a deep playmaker. They see a lot of the ball. * I close gaps by playing a high defensive line and a regular line of engagement, which compresses my team so I do not see gaps in midfield or between lines. * I find that an AP on support in the AML/R slots comes inside to make up numbers in the middle. I like them lurking on the edge of the box for long shots or clever passes. I have an IF on the other side for more offence.

You can use the pre-game editor to make him President starting whenever you like and also edit the club ownership model as you wish, eg term lengths, promises and election date, or change the model altogether. You’d need to change his role scores to make him a ‘Chairperson’ rather than a manager. You can’t make him be a candidate though, or to win an election after the start date of your save.

Players do have some “access” to how good they and others are, for example on the team selection reaction screen you get things like “thinks team instruction to tackle harder is a good match to the standard of tackling”. I think players with good long shot attribute shoot from distance more often and players with good dribbling do dribble more often. However, these are so often coupled with complementary PPMs that it is hard to say for sure.

Ah I hadn’t registered the 6 match point. That’s not nearly enough. Both promises made to players and Board expectations come with deadlines. It’s possible that the bug here is not enough time being available between promise and end date for you to complete it. Or, long shot, were you sacked for failing a long-standing Board expectation to play youngsters rather than for a specific promise related to the facilities upgrade?

It applies for any company that runs on an April-March financial year.

I think you are describing a visualisation error by an outdated 3D graphics engine which is finally being updated in FM25. I tend to ignore player pixels doing weird things.

I suspect they have to be classified as homegrown at club, ie 3 years between 15-21 or similar. I’ve run into this when promising the squad to give chances to young players. Using players classed as club homegrown and with breakthrough prospect status seems to do it most reliably, though it is entirely possible there is some other aspect I have missed as it isn’t clear from the language what exactly is expected.

This largely negates any and all testing of any game system by players. It might even be said to negate all feedback since by definition this will be based on one person’s unreliable experience. It also assumes that SI do in fact conduct such tests, that they do so accurately, and that they act on what they find. I’m sceptical about all three of these assumptions, while also sharing your distate of clickbait testing being done by people with an axe to grind and methodologies that an 8-year old would be failed on.

Very little testing or modelling in any field would account for variables in as detailed a manner as you ask here. An experiment that detailed wouldn’t be a test, it would be the whole game. That negates the point of modelling, which is to look for patterns in a simplified version of a complex reality. You are also using a very human trick to discount something by saying you’d believe it if it satisfied certain criteria, but then setting those criteria at an impossible level. That way you can convince yourself you are being rational, but in fact you’ve just found a neat way to discount something you’ve already decided you disagree with. Turns out you are human too .