José Mourinho’s recent unveiling as Real Madrid manager has united possibly the most self-aggrandising manager with the most self-aggrandising club. After success in Portugal, England and Italy, the ‘Special One’ will go to Spain to attempt to win a hat-trick of Champions League medals and to break the dominance of FC Barcelona.

Which got me thinking – how will Mourinho manage at Real Madrid? How will he get a team of big stars with even bigger egos to work together. Can he, indeed, improve upon a very impressive 96 points in the league and deliver a quarter final or better in the Champions League? And how well does his style of play from Internazionale fit the personnel available at the Santiago Bernabéu?

The Proposal

I’m going to take control of Real Madrid using the 10.3 data update and attempt to manage roughly in the style of Mourinho. That will involve a few key themes:

• Quantity of possession is not important. My tactics should be designed to allow the opposition to play with the ball providing they can’t do anything dangerous with it. In retaliation, the team should be able to make quick, incisive breaks.
• Defending is a team exercise. If I’m playing a heavy pressing game, everyone should press. Yes, that includes you Kaká. Similarly, it is possible to defend by keeping the opposition penned in for fear of the counter-attack. Especially against smaller sides, keeping players forward makes them fearful of the counter attack; and therefore means they will attack in smaller numbers.
• Winning is more important than style. Sure, I don’t want players suspended every other week. Nor do I want to accept an abject performance just because we fluked a 1-0 win. But efficiency is far more important than getting pretty passing play. Mourinho proved at Chelsea and at Inter that beauty can often come from appreciating the skill and unity of a well-executed tactical plan.
• No egos. Only mine. If anyone starts causing dressing room unrest and agitates for a move, then fine – off you go. Samuel Eto’o was perceived as a lazy poacher at Barcelona with a disruptive effect on the dressing room. After 12 months at Inter he was willing to play as an auxiliary left back when needed. I will mould the players to fit what I want them to do. If they cannot or will not, I can always cash in on them.

The Game

The gameworld will run the four biggest leagues down to their lowest divisions (England, Spain, Italy and Germany) with a small database. I will then try to manage in a style similar to Mourinho and keep you all informed of my progress. Whether or not I succeed will be debatable. But as time goes on it will explore how far these sorts of things are possible in Football Manager 2010. Before trying to get into anything like playing mind games and winding up the press, though, my first challenge will be to get a working tactical plan based on the principals of Mourinho’s time at Inter Milan.

One further point. I’ve seen a number of people complain that the game is too time consuming and requires constant tweaking. So, I have decided to run all of my matches on key highlights only and the only revision of matches I will do is to grab the screenshots to show you what I’ve seen. This game doesn’t require endless tweaking providing you understand what’s going on. I completely agree that this learning curve is steep, but I want to stress how you can, with a very good side, play with only the essential changes needed to win a match. Onwards!

The Tactics

With this in mind, the first stage is to build a tactical plan. How will we play, and how far can the tactics creator help me do it?

I went for a cross between a 4-4-2 and a 4-5-1 formation. This is reasonably similar to the system employed by Mourinho at Inter Milan against Bayern Munich in the 2010 Champions League Final. You should definitely read Zonal Marking’s review of that final to refresh your memory.

Kaká will play Sneijder’s role, pushing on from the midfield to assist the lone striker when in attack, but dropping deep ready to receive the ball to start counter attacks when our own possession breaks down. Ronaldo will play the role of the attacking winger (similar to Eto’o), but will also be asked to track back when possession breaks down. Drenthe will perform a similar task, but will be stationed naturally deeper and with more defensive duties. The reasoning for this is two-fold. One, Real’s squad does not have a great left winger in a similar mould to Ronaldo. But two, this will help add greater defensive stability, adding more cover should the opposition break quickly. This role is a slightly more attacking version of the role played by Chivu in the opening stages of the semi-final second leg against Barcelona.

On the defensive, we have Xabi Alonso playing deeper and starting passing moves from the midfield (similar to Cambiasso), with Lassana Diarra playing a more destructive role as the holding midfielder. The full backs will be encouraged to move forward and support the attack, but will ultimately be utilised first and foremost as defenders. So that just leaves our two centre backs who do not have sufficiently exotic settings to be of note at this juncture.

So, using the creator I have created a tactical file with the following settings:

Team Instructions
Philosophy: Rigid
Starting Strategy: Counter
Closing Down: Stand-off more

All other settings on default.

Player Instructions
GK: Goalkeeper, defend (First choice: Iker Casillas)
DL: Full Back, automatic (Álvaro Arbeloa)
DCl: Centre Back, defend (Pepe)
DCr: Centre Back, defend (Raúl Albiol)
DR: Full Back, automatic (Sergio Ramos)
DMCl: Anchor Man, defend (Lassana Diarra)
DMCr: Deep Lying Playmaker, support (Xabi Alonso)
ML: Defensive Winger, support (Royston Drenthe)
AMC: Attacking Midfielder, attack (Kaká)
AMR: Defensive Winger, attack (Cristiano Ronaldo)
FC: Poacher, attack (Gonzalo Higuaín)

Also for “defending corners” all players with the “back” instruction were changed to “man mark”.

Moving forward

With this done, I made some personal changes to the backroom staff and set my scouts to scour for talent – but essentially that was all I needed to do on the Mourinho front. I played a few friendlies to get my bearings and found that the formation performed reasonably solidly, albeit against pretty poor opposition. A 3-0 loss to Peterborough confirmed that certain marking duties would need to be forced, so for all games I will use the opposition instructions to always close down and always tight mark the opposition’s full backs and wing positions. Then, with the summer over it was time to test these tactics out in anger.

In the next article I will explain in a little more depth how each of the settings is supposed to work, how it actually works in practice in the Football Manager 2010 match engine, and what changes I felt I needed to make to get it to work in the long run. First game of the season – Barcelona at home. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end, eh?