January 14, 2008

Manager relationships, Attracting players.

Manager friendships and feuds

Making friends

It is always good to have some friends in the game, especially if you are a small club looking for loan players and you don’t have the money to offer 100% of the wages. Your transfer and loan offers might simply be accepted because of the good relationship you have with the manager and this can save you millions. As you are probably aware, some players will lose morale if you praise other managers. Ignore it, they don’t pay your wage bill and transfer kitty.However, you should pick your favourite team carefully. Rivalry is considered here as well, so it will be hard to make friends with Benitez, Grant or Sir Alex if Arsenal is your favourite team. If you are keen on loaning players from all English top four teams, you should pick something neutral. It is possible to have good relationships to two clubs who are fierce rivals, but my impression still is that it does take many more efforts to keep these friendships in a good state.If you are playing annual friendlies against your favourite clubs, this is a good opportunity to cultivate your friendship and exchange respectful comments.

Making enemies

For FM 07 I was advising to keep the feuds at a minimum, knowing that they can be a very entertaining factor in the game. I still would see it this way, but of course you also can look to assemble a squad meeting your demands if you really enjoy this kind of game. In the first place, it is nearly impossible to have good relationships to any rival, and some of the most stupid comments are hardly to stand without an answer. If you like to engage in media fights, you will also note that certain players really do enjoy this and it should be possible to assemble a squad responding very well to this kind of media strategy.My guess is that you may succeed more with this strategy at lower league clubs and smaller clubs since this seems to be related to professionalism as well. The downside of such a strategy however is that players with high professionalism are most of the time those who are able to lead a squad if combined with high determination and work rate, so in the long run, you may get problems to find good captains for this kind of ‘PR-strategy’.If you need more ideas how to enjoy such an engagement, there is a decent and entertaining hint in ‘matches build-up interactions’…

Attracting players

Yes, these transfer speculations can get on your nerves. However, don’t ignore them as soon as interesting players are concerned. Sometimes you really get them unsettled this way. If I want to lure someone away who might be interested to join I start this way: praise him and wait for a response, then declare interest. Sometimes this can help.It can help to praise players who are on your long-term list. I never managed to buy Micah Richards for any acceptable amount of money, but at least my praise brought me on his favourite personnel list. So it might be useful if he ever gets available and it should save me some money on wages too.

These old methods working in FM ’07 are still valid, but as always, there is room for improvement and refinement. Usually I do have some long shortlists after some months of playing, but only comparatively few players that I really want to buy (the very hot shortlist). During the transfer period it can be fantastic, to farm out any other then those to an inactive shortlist, and you will exactly get the rumours you are looking for. This can save you a lot of work!

The last and meanest trick to unsettle a player if the AI again is doing stupid transfer negotiations and you are sure (!) he wants to join you: make one of the good (!) offers close to the sum you are negotiating, but set it as non-negotiable. This can cause a no, and a player reaction, which is the important part of it. I know this is very mean, but every transfer period again you will see that it is not gamey and not even slightly unrealistic since it does happen all the time.