Tactical Bible: Squad Management III
Staff, Media and Player Interaction

Revision one - February 2008

Staff
Using and ‘abusing’ staff

Whoever you hire as staff at your club, most likely their wages are peanuts compared to the money you spend on player wages and on the transfer market. Spending millions for promising players while having lousy staff and awful facilities seems to be a mere wasting of money.

A good assistant manager can be incredible helpful if he has high values for judging players’ potential and ability. You will be able to rely on his judgement when starting contract talks and his reports on players will be much better. Also he might occasionally watch players for you, if you are in the process of deciding about new signings. However, even the best assistant manager will fail to help you significantly with developing your youth team (see Squad Management I). Other key stats you will want to look at are motivation, man handling and tactical knowledge, especially if you intend to go on holiday or hand over your reserve and youth teams completely to your assistant.

If your assistant manages the reserves and youth team, he should not only have good tactical knowledge and working with youngster stats, he should also know how to use subs, which is unfortunately a hidden stat. Otherwise many of your reserve and youth players will end with no chance of getting any match practice.

If possible, you should try to get as many staff members with high judgement stats as possible, especially for youth coaches. Yet it should be noted that any comments of the coaching staff about your own team can be misleading since the own players are often heavily underrated. In FM 08, you can easily see how the comments by coaches and scouts on your own players will differ heavily based on their ability to judge ability and potential of a player. So you should always stay reserved about your staff judgement and form an own opinion on the player, especially if you are using players out of position, they may receive a heavy knock-down by your staff while they do perform brilliantly in this role. This also is important regarding the development of your youngsters. If they do show brilliant performance, you should stick to them even if their predicted potential is not very high. Your staff may not always be correct with their judgement of young players.

Since the number of physios is always limited, it is always worth to look for the best available physiotherapy stats. Even if you have three perfect ones, it will be worth to ‘upgrade’ the fourth to see a reduction of injury time and better condition after returning from injury.

The stats for scouts are obvious, but you can use them for a different purpose as well. They will compare the scouted player to the player considered best in your team. Often you can judge your players’ progress by these reports. Suddenly there may be different players mentioned as best, or scouted players are no longer ‘twice’ of your player, but only ‘a lot’ better. This is a sound indication about the progress your players have made by matches and training. Also, you may rely more on your scouts than your own coaching staff when it comes to judging your own team, since often they will have better values for judging ability and potential of your own players.

When scouting players you are interested in, you should always consider that several scouting trips give best results, especially if you want to get information on character and weaknesses of a player. There is no scientific proof, but match scouting should be rated higher than a short scouting trip, if available. If you want to avoid errors, you should also take the regional knowledge into account and send several scouts if possible to verify the results. Still the club reputation does play a certain role, and the same player may get a higher recommendation once he has joined a club with e.g. world-wide reputation.

Player Interaction

When interacting with your players via media and team talks (unfortunately there are no internal talks, but the media feedbacks can be seen as something similar), you should always think about how you would want to be treated as a player. You can build up and you can destroy players, and a large number of player under-performances must be related with the way some managers treat their players.

As mentioned in Squad Rotation, Team Gelling, Team Talks, there are always options to improve a players morale and performance. Use them wisely and you will see many more constant performances, less cards and errors and you will enjoy your time at the club and playing the game at the same time.

Media feedbacks

Feedback options

• Delighted with recent form. Generally only for a run of extremely good performances. If you have been spot on, the fans will support this praise. If you are talking about superstars, it should be something like a 9-9-10 performance to praise them so highly. For a part-timer, perhaps this could be a string of 8 performances with maybe one 9.
• Pleased with recent form. For a very solid to brilliant run, most players will be encouraged and stirred up to go on, looking for more praise.
• Recent form is acceptable. Just like the word says. Not really brilliant, but the player may feel your support and perform much better soon.
• Recent form is below par. For most normal players, anything below 7 can be singled out for criticism, especially after losses. Tell them and watch the next games. In FM 07, 7-7-7-7-7 for most superstars already was notable, however this may have changed for FM 08. Many of them will see this as harsh, but also react more favourable to praise.
• Disappointed with recent form. Usually most performance around a 6-6-6-6-6 should be ranked here, except for extremely unambitious players.
• Deeply upset with recent form. The ultimate measure for a series of under-performances and losses, most time those players will have made errors as well and need the hairdryer treatment.

If you are using feedback for a while, you will notice that they have a huge influence on your players, often reflected in the game’s comments. You can help your players to maintain good form, stir them up to improve even further, and also shorten individual dips of form. My impression is that it really helps coming back from a series of losses and lousy performances.

Another benefit: if your praise or criticism is spot on at several occasions, the players will be grateful and show you as favoured personnel. If you have enough players having you as a favoured personnel performance is likely to remain high.

If you need to get a key player back on his feet, you should also think about letting him play a number of reserve matches. This often works real wonders.

Please refer to part IV of CPW for more information

How to adjust to different player characters

Different adjustment in FM 08

I have been using a similar line as Millie in FM 07, criticizing superstars for a constant 7 form but already praising usual, less determined players. For FM 08 things now seem to look different, but the 7-7-7-7-7 line still should be the measure. Most players including superstars will not refuse an acceptable praise for this. The personality now is more reflected in how harsh you can be with dropping below this line or how much praise you have to give if performances are above.

This is slightly subtler and it takes more efforts to separate the fractions, however you may call them, be it praise vs. criticism, sissies vs. tough guys or whatever you are up to. It is slightly more realistic since there always have been more then just those two groups and many players in between, so these categories are only very rough approaches to the multitude of player characters. But you should keep the 7-line in mind as basic adjustment.

The enquiry made by wugster may be very helpful to adjust to your player character:

Player Interactions and their effects

Media Spotlight

Always use it when the media praise your players

If you are asked about a player’s performance, you can select one of these options, and you should choose your reply based on your knowledge of his personality.

• • Don’t get carried away. Especially for youngsters and at start of the season, also for key players who definitely can do better. Usually results in a very high motivation.
  • Pleased and hope to maintain his form. Most likely this will spur the player on to perform much better in future.
  • First name on my team sheet. Only use it if you run out of words and it hardly can come any better. Some players will feel pressured.

Please refer to part V or CPW for more information.

Helpful Links
Communication and Psychological ‘Warfare’ 08 (CPW) - Full version
Player Interactions and their effects
Using the media to manipulate morale, another in-depth experiment run by wugster.

Tactical Bible Credits
Revision one: Revision: crazy gra, Millie, JP, wwfan, Abramovic, Asmodeus. Written by the next Diaby. Please refer to extended credits in CPW 08.
First version: Written by The next Diaby. Editor: Millie