Sliders and the Ambiguity of Management.

Having leant towards the positivist theories of Sir Karl Popper earlier in the thread/article, I hope you’ll forgive my taking a sharp U-turn into the realms of critical management theory. This is the area of management in which I earn my real-life living and about which I am the most qualified to comment. I hope the following section doesn’t come across as self-satisfied onanism and most can read it in the manner it is intended.

I decided to steal Popper’s falsification theory (and slightly misuse it) in order to illustrate how the best laid plans of mice and men may come to nothing due to an event or series of events that invalidates the previously observed data. Taking a scientific approach to tactics, if you learn to recognise the hows and whens of theory falsification you will consistently choose the ‘best’ tactic for any given situation and good form will logically follow. However, management does not follow the practice of positivistic science; it is at best a social science, at its most abstract an art form. Either way, it is influenced almost entirely by language usage and the human responses this usage engenders. Simply put, it contains the full spectrum of human motivations and emotions which can only be made sense of through a complex network of interrelating theory. It is impossible to determine through scientific enquiry why two seemingly similar people react differently when confronted by the same phenomena. For that you need to understand their personal histories, current motivations, future plans, chemical imbalances etc, etc.

If SI were to program FM in the positivistic pattern it would cease to be enjoyable before too long. It certainly wouldn’t be a simulation of management any more. Once the best tactical algorithm has been discovered it would become little more than Player Purchaser 08, because only the quality of player would matter. The tactics would have been solved to the extent that if you knew you had the best squad you would automatically win the league. Previous versions were like this, and were fun, but didn’t portray the real world managerial experience. SI simulated ambiguity in ’07 and emotionally ambivalent reactions followed. Arguably, such reactions suggest SI have finally successfully simulated management.

The most common complaint in the forums for FM07 was the ambiguity of the sliders. People complained that they didn’t know how they worked, what they did, and the plethora of competing theories didn’t help. Indeed, they argued that the competing theories ‘proved’ that the game was flawed. Some even argued that we shouldn’t write theory unless we ‘knew’ we were right; that is was dangerous to do otherwise. However, does this equate to reality? Yes, there is a UEFA Pro-License for managers, but do managers really follow the same practices. Can anyone really argue that Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho, Benitez and Eriksson share the same management style? All are successful, but all undoubtedly put into practice different theoretical approaches to the art of management.

Not knowing exactly what the sliders do allows us to approach FM in a similar manner. We have to use our intuitive experience to construct a style of play and management we are happy with. Some tactical theorists try to use a one-size fits all solution and tweak in-match, others have a home and away package, TT&F employs a five-pack and the extreme tacticians design 14 sets. All work to an extent; all are more or less useful. As in the real world of management, those who wish to manage must choose a system to follow, cherry-pick between systems, come up with one themselves, or combine all three to create a personal best practice. The frameworks and theorems we write about are no more than a series of more or less useful guidelines that the reader can choose to learn from/use/reject depending on how they ‘feel’ about them. It is style over and above science.

Let’s look at an easy to understand slider to illustrate my point, the passing slider. Set it to short and you expect your players to look for short passes >75% of the time. Easy. No problem. But when added to mentality you have a conundrum. My mentality instructions are telling the player to look for attacking balls >75% of the time. What happens if the ‘best’ attacking ball is a long pass? Will he try it? Let’s look at his decision stats. OK, 16, so he should look for the pass most of the time. However, would his low creative freedom setting stop him from even thinking of the pass. Would his passing stats make the longer, attacking pass feasible in the first place? Decisions, decisions!

And then we are back to the crux of the matter. Decision making. We must learn to trust our decisions and the only way we can do that is through experience, literally learning from our mistakes. We must expect to go wrong at times and learn to adjust our decision making process to minimise the chances of it happening again. As things go wrong less and less often we begin to gain in confidence and then can start to experiment in more creative ways. Eventually, management becomes easy because we can no longer be surprised and we can relax. Or does it? The management process can always throw you a curve-ball. In FM07 the curve-ball was the different tactical approach required once your team’s and personal reputation reached a certain plateau. Once at that level, things that worked previously began to fail. Also concurrent with the management experience. Past success must be unlearned when its practices no longer solve the conundrums of the present. People complained of the unrealism of the game when their world-class squad suddenly failed to perform. Instead of asking why, they just cried ‘the AI cheats’ and stormed out of the debate. But the why is simple. The AI changed the rules by consistently playing more conservative formations that required a different tactical approach to break down. The solution was simple and logical, but people became blind to it due to not being able to throw off the yoke of past experience. Spread the play, open up the pitch, become more creative, keep the ball, remain patient. Focusing on this enabled performance levels to remain high, but failing to make that adjustment meant players became frustrated at their constant failure to put the opposition away and became vulnerable to the break. It may be the same curve-ball in ’08. It may not. Only time will tell. But the fun is in not knowing.

FM needs ambiguity if it is to remain a simulation over and above an arcade game. The slider instructions must contain some ambiguity so we can’t take a purely positivistic approach. We must learn to manage. And learning to manage means accepting ambiguity and ambivalence and coping with them both to the best of your ability. TT&F can help but only to a certain extent. The rest is down to you. The rest of this article/thread is our attempt to minimise the frustrations of virtual management. We hope you can find use for it. Good luck and play seriously.