The following conversation between Gareth Millward (Millie) and Jordan Cooper is a transcript from Part 5 of the audio compliment for Communication and Psychological Warfare ’10. Both of them sit down to discuss the finer points of Squad Gelling and how it is essential if you are looking to gain long-term success at any level. Gareth explains the importance of gelling regarding your tactics, the personality of the squad and how you interact with them to get the best out of your squad of players.

Jordan Cooper: Now the match is a very important center piece of how you should be focusing your motivation, your morale, your team talks towards; but a lot of the overall sense of how your team gels as a squad comes to the day-to-day morale maintenance, and dealing with transfers, dealing with tutoring, intermixing players together, and that will basically set you up for making matches so much more effective where you don’t have to deal with a lot of major things in order to be successful on the pitch.

I know that we’ve highlighted a bunch of times that in Football Manager 2010, they still haven’t introduced the fact that you can’t really criticize or talk to your players like a real manager would like in the dressing room or on the training pitch; everything has to be done kind of through the public. But you do highlight the fact that maybe that’s why it has such a big morale boost because when you go to the tabloids with an issue that you have with a player—either positive or negative—that obviously in real life is going to have more of an effect than if you just pull them aside on the training pitch.

Gareth Millward: Yeah, definitely. I think this is one of the things that Matt vom Brocke or ‘The Next Diaby’ was really trying to point out when he did CPW back in 2008, and it’s something that he’s brought into CPW ‘10 as well is this idea; but doing it through the media, it’s probably one of the reasons why it has such a big effect. If I were to go down the route where you could criticize in private and praise in public then would that send mix messages? It certainly would make a very interesting system but it would make it far more complicated to play properly. It’s definitely something to be interested in.

And the other thing of course is that we can criticize a player if he comes out and demands more first-team football through the press. We can criticize him for going to the press without coming to see you first, but it doesn’t really work the other way around which is quite an interesting aside.

What you’re saying about squad management being the long-term issue in Football Manager is definitely true. This is the thing that you do as an ongoing strategy in order to build squad gelling, in order to bring through youth players or slot in immediately into the squad, bring in players who are likely to strengthen the squad mentally as well as technically. These are the sort of issues that you really need to be thinking about when you sign players when you’re looking to develop youths, and when you’re generally just looking to get the team to play together better.

Jordan Cooper: Commenting on a player’s form—the easiest way to superb morale. So how easy is it?

Gareth Millward: Well, through testing, it’s actually one of those things where once you get to know your players and you get to know how the interaction system works, it’s actually very easy to use over time. Easiest might be a good word for the tagline, perhaps most effective way to superb morale is probably the other way of looking at it because you can boost a player from a reasonably low morale to superb morale literally within 24 hours.

From the minute you make the comment to the minute it lands, the morale can boost straight up. And if you get it right, you can pretty much constantly keep your first 11 at superb morale. Of course if you get it wrong then you end up making them much less confident. But definitely commenting on a player’s form is perhaps the headline thing that you can do; if you don’t do any other form of squad management other than team talks and player interaction, these are the two things you definitely should do in order to keep morale high which will have a direct bearing on match-day performance. This is not the short to midterm effects. It’s these two—team talks and commenting on player’s morale—are the things that you really should be looking at, at least using for the major occasions if not using all the time.

Jordan Cooper: I find that commenting on a player’s form, like you should probably do as much as possible. I think you’re absolutely right that you could boost people’s morale so fairly easily just by paying attention to their last five games and then gearing your comment towards what type of player they are; because obviously as you say in CPW, that an average performance for a super star may actually be a bad thing. You’d want to say, “Well, I don’t think he’s on form.” Yet for maybe a wonder kid or a very developed player or rotation player, having a 6.8, 6.9, or one 7, maybe it might be worth to say, “I really like your form,” yet for a super star that wouldn’t be the case.

Gareth Millward: Well, definitely. I wrote an article for the Football Manager Britain main site about my time as the manager of Hinkley in Football Manager ‘10. And I found with my squad that actually quite average performances such as a 6.5, an average performance was something that I should say, “Yeah, you’re doing pretty well. Keep it up.” But if I’d been manager of Manchester United or managing Chelsea, one of my first team players like Frank Lampard or Wayne Rooney put in that kind of performance, I would have been absolutely really quite angry with them for performing so averagely. It definitely depends not only on the player’s expectations, but the club’s expectations as well.

You want more from your best players, and your more professional and your more determined players want more for themselves by working out what they want and what they want to hear, and what you need them to hear. After awhile, although you will probably make a lot of mistakes, I continue to make mistakes. Every time I join a new club I always get quite a few of them wrong, but after a few months with pretty much commenting as much as I possibly can on their form to try and keep the morale boosted, you soon learn what you need to say to each of the players to get the most from them.

Jordan Cooper: And you also highlight that older and more matured players tend to respond a little bit more consistently to your form comments, and the younger players kind of– I always find younger players sometimes you can never be really ironed down their personality that much because from one day to the next, it seems like they’re manic depressive.

Gareth Millward: Definitely, yeah. But that’s due to some of the hidden attributes and some of the mental attributes that they have which affect their personality. Older players really, they tend to have made it so they tend to be a little bit more professional, a little bit more consistent. They have more developmental traits so they’re more, in football management terms, intelligent players. So they’ve been around a block a bit. They know really what they should be doing and what they shouldn’t be doing; otherwise, they wouldn’t have survived in football for as long as they have.

Whereas with young players, you’re never entirely sure what’s going to happen because they haven’t fully developed a coherent personality. They’re not as consistent because they’re younger; they’re not as professional because they’re younger. Their mental stats aren’t as developed because they’re younger, which is another reason why tutoring is such an important part of the game because you can pass on some of those metal stats to the youngster to make them more consistent in the way they behave and the way they play, and make them more determined to play better.

I think in general you want to praise your youngsters more because they are more prone to lapses in confidence because they don’t have the experience; they don’t have the emotional maturity yet to be able to rant and rave at them just because they’ve not played as well as your well-established, 30-year-old, world-class striker.

Jordan Cooper: Now let’s say you’re in the lucky position of having an entire squad that is on superb morale. Does that mean that commenting on form really won’t do anything or is there some type of benefit even when players are on superb morale to comment? Because there’s no level to go from there; they can’t be overly superb.

Gareth Millward: No, you won’t be able to improve their morale; but if you comment on a couple of players, you may make them more determined for the next game because they’ll be in a better mood in terms of their PR icon. And the reason for doing it, more important is that the more correct responses you get, the more positive responses you get from your players the more likely it is that you will become one of their favoured personnel. And if you’re one of their more favoured personnel, then they’re more driven to play well for you because they see you as a friend, as a mentor; they have respect for you. So they’re much more likely to play well with you; or even if you move clubs, they’re more likely to accept your approaches for them if you’ve got a very good relationship with them.

It’s always important to make sure that you don’t waste an opportunity to build a relationship particularly with your key players because if you can build a good relationship with them then they’re more likely to perform more consistently for you and they’re more likely to stick with the club rather than handing in transfer requests if a bigger team comes in for them. And just generally, you’re going to get a higher level of squad gelling because the player is going to feel far more confident being at a club where his favorite manager is the manger.

Jordan Cooper: And a gelled squad is a happy squad and that’s what the point−

Gareth Millward: A gelled squad is a happy squad, exactly.

Jordan Cooper: –building harmony. And you highlight here when you talk about these long-term planning strategies, that the long term really depends on whatever time period that you want. Some people kind of look at FM Britain and go, “Oh, you guys play 25 season long careers,” but there are plenty of those out there that only play two or three seasons. But the concepts still apply.

Gareth Millward: Oh, definitely. Lots of people want the list of wonder kids. So clearly some people expect to be playing the game for more than a couple of seasons; but if you want to get the best from your wonder kids, then you need to learn how to pass on the right traits to them; how to keep a gelled squad so they’re happy to stay there. And long term really can be anything from a couple of seasons to quite a long way down the line, unless you’ve inherited a squad of complete super stars and you’re only intending to play for one, maybe two seasons with that team. You need to be able to keep the squad gelled and have some kind of longterm goal.

You need to be able to keep the best players at the club. You need to be able to keep those best players at the club performing at consistently high level. So I don’t think you should ever be underestimating the long-term planning that goes into keeping a club solid and on the right track.

Jordan Cooper: Well, one of the first things that you always have to do when you take over a club or you move or you change players around is choosing a captain. And typically, the default reaction is to basically look at whoever has the highest influence and make them the captain and obviously, you can look into determination, team work, and see if they have the hidden professionalism stats. But is it more than just looking at 1-20 type of stats to determine who your captain is? Does the age matter?

Gareth Millward: These are the factors that go into it. You can just pick it on influence because the majority of times if they’ve got high influence then they’re likely to have other high stats mentally such as determination and professionalism and all these other kinds of things.

If they’ve got a high stat influence they are likely to be of a certain age.

But there are other things to look into. One of the factors that we mentioned is seniority which is one of these loose kinds of terms. It is not really something you can pin down; but seniority in terms of probably a first team player or a first team regular, the kind of guy that’s going to play 30 to 40 games a season, the kind of guy that probably is going to be in his late his late 20s or early 30s or maybe even older; he’s going to be the kind of guy that’s been in the club a few years as well. They’re the kind of guys on top of guys that have got influence that you want to make a captain because they’re likely to have friends at the club which means that people are going to respect them more; they’re likely to have other high mental attributes because they’re going to be older because they’ve been at the club awhile that are already gelled and settled which means they’re going to be performing at a consistently high level.

And if they’re performing at a consistently high level then that’s a good example to the rest of the squad. It doesn’t really look very good if your captain is playing 4 out of 10 every week. So you kind of want a player that’s well established at the club. And it’s not to say that you shouldn’t just buy somebody in to become captain because plenty of teams have done that in the past and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But if you’re looking for the kind of ideal archetypical captain, it’s going to be somebody with high influence, high professionalism, high determination, one of your better players at the club, somebody that plays virtually every game, and somebody that’s been at the club a few years and is likely to stay there for a few more yet. That’s the kind of guy that you want as your captain with all things being perfect.

Jordan Cooper: And your selection policy also has a lot to do with how your players react psychologically in the game because obviously usually most players want to play. Almost everyone on your squad wants to play first team football but some people are willing to accept the fact that they’re only going to be rotation players, or they’re only going to be reserved players.

So what factors in the selection policy should you really look into so you don’t get the situation where you have a very valuable rotation player who basically wants a transfer request because he’s not playing first team football?

Gareth Millward: Well this is one of the things that you need to get right and I think that the selection policy is one thing that you do need to make sure. If you are going to play a heavy rotation policy, you need professional players that are willing to accept that they’re not going to play every week; and at the same time, if you’re going to play a heavy rotation policy, you don’t want to be giving 15 players in your squad key player status because you’ve given them key player status because it’s the only way you could offer them enough wages to come to the club. I think we’ve all run into that mistake in the past or at least I have.

One of the things you really need to do is to make sure that you build a squad for the purpose. The easiest way to get a squad gelled, playing well and playing your tactics the way that you want them to play is to make sure that you keep a settled first 11. Keeping a more settled first 11 with a number of key substitutes is the best way to keeping a gelled squad. But obviously, it’s not the best way to making sure that you’ve got a fit squad every single game for a 50 game season. So you need a good mixture between rotating a lot and keeping a settled enough squad so that the entire team gets together and learns to gel.<

It is a difficult balancing act and we do go through it in the guide; but in general, if I’m with a small team in the lower divisions, I will tend to have a smaller squad and try and play my best 11 out of that smaller squad as much as possible, than I would with Barcelona or Manchester Untied where I have the luxury of being able to rest my best players in the run up to major games; or just in general, being able to kind of rotate players in and out, make four or five changes every game.

Consistency is rewarded in the game in terms of the way that your squad gelled together but obviously it can be a problem in that you can end up playing players who are out of form or worst, injured or with low condition.

Jordan Cooper: You highlight a very important factor that people don’t understand as far as tactics are concerned, and I’m not saying that this is the wrong approach to take but a lot of people do play Football Manager 2010 as a fantasy game. As you know, their favorite club is X and they’re going to bring in all of their favorite players. But the downside to that is you may have the best players in the world, but they don’t know how to play together.

Gelling your squad together takes time and throughout that, you will be able to get them to play the best on the pitch with your tactics.

Gareth Millward: That’s definitely a way of doing it and quite a lot of people make the kind of mistake in order to get players to gel, you need to play the same formation every game. And that’s not actually the case in Football Manager that there’s no in-game penalty for changing tactics or for changing formation from game to game. That’s not really the issue but there is a lot to be said in terms of squad gelling for keeping a settled first 11 and keeping those settled first 11 playing in the same kind of roles so that they’re playing in their natural positions.

Now, in effect that means that you tend to be playing the same formation but there’s no real penalty to changing tactics. The penalty really is in a high turnover of players. So, although it may be good to buy the five best strikers for your Real Madrid side or for your Manchester City side, the problem is that you’re never going to get all five of those players gelled into the squad before at least two of them want to leave the first team football.

It is about balancing. There’s nothing to say that building a team very, very quickly of super stars is wrong; it’s just about carries inherent risks in the same way that there’s no way to say that building a squad slowly is the right way to do it, but obviously you’re bored and your fans are going to get agitated if it takes you five or six years to get success of the major club. In fact, you’re probably more likely to get the sack before you even get the chance to build that.

You just need to be aware of risk and reward and that’s really what football managing is about and what CPW is about. It’s about identifying where the risks are and where the rewards are and letting people go, “Okay, this is the way I want to do it.”

Jordan Cooper: And the more that your squad is gelled, pretty much the more options you have to go with that because I believe that if you’re bringing in a lot of players in the beginning of a season that you kind of maybe keep things very basic. Kind of like, “Let’s set up a standard 4-4-2,” or whatever formation that you see fit and then working your way towards playing that free flowing attacking style and making all these changes because once the squad is gelled, I think that they are communicating with each other much better. So you could get away with doing a lot of really interesting cool things but when they’re not gelled, trying to force very advanced “things in their direction,” they really don’t communicate well enough in order to pull it off.

Gareth Millward: Yeah, that’s the major issue. When you’re starting off a club or you’ve got an un-gelled squad then you want to be functional. Your ultimate aim is to make sure that you get the points. And if the best way of getting those points is to grind out draws and wins, then so be it. But once the team gets more gelled and they understand each other, they know where their teammates are going to be so that their passes are more accurate; they’re better anticipating the runs of their own players; and they can play more intricate football. It gives you the opportunities to bring more players in the next summer because you know that even if you are bringing in three or four difference players, it’s not going to completely set the club back to having no gelling whatsoever. You’ve got the time to be able to bring them in.

That’s really the kind of crux of it with an un-gelled squad—you want to be functional. But the quicker you can get the club gelled, the quicker you can go on to do the cool things as you put it; the kinds of things that people are always like, “Oh, I want to play like Barcelona” or “I want these players to play together. I want to play this formation. I want to do this. I want to do that.”

That’s far, far easier to work out how to do if your players know each other than if you’re trying to get a group of guys who have never even seen each other before to play something quite intricate.

Jordan Cooper: For those that like to have a very active transfer policy, to put it lightly, I’ve seen some people that pretty much offload their entire team and bring in a new one. What are the potential pitfalls and things that you should take into consideration when you buy and sell players and bring players in? How does that affect your harmony? How does that affect the morale of the other players on your squad?

Gareth Millward: Bringing in too many players in too short space of time obviously means that you’ve got a load of players at your club that aren’t gelled, and it’s going to take time for them to learn how to play particularly if you’ve brought them in from abroad and they don’t know the language and they come from a completely different football culture. It’s going to take them a long time to get used to the tempo of the game. It’s going to take them a long time to get used to the language so that they can understand what the players are saying to them. Particularly if you haven’t got a particularly high reputation, it’s going to take awhile for them to fully respect what you have to say to them.

Like I said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with bringing in loads of players from elsewhere in order to build a squad, but there are potential pitfalls. There are certain things that you can do to try to avoid that. If you can keep the core of the team together; five or six players who you try and keep for as long as you possibly can; who act as the settled players in the team that can bring other players and to keep at least some gelling and harmony in the squad.

If you can keep a few of the older guys who have got a lot of motivation, a lot of professionalism, a lot of determination, they’re the kind of guys that can pass onto these wonder kids that you’ve brought in or the new youth system that you’re trying to set up. They can pass on a lot of good information and experience to those players. And they can come into the first 11 for a dozen games a season just to add a bit of steel to the side, a little bit of emotional maturity to the team. There are all sorts of ways you can do it.

To completely wholesale, gutting out the team and bringing in a new one carries massive, massive risks. So we do cover that in the guide in terms of the potential pitfalls but also the potential benefit.

Jordan Cooper: So when you do bring in players, getting people that fit the personality of your squad is probably very important because you want to have the same type of players; if they’re professional, they’re determined, you want them together. You want to bring those types of players in.

Now, we’re talking about things like that but obviously, there are players like the Joey Barton’s—the players that may have enough skill—that you almost have to deal with the fact that they’re disruptive. Is there any reason to bring in people that aren’t professional and determined or does it just come down to “They’re just too talented to not take them in?”

Gareth Millward: In certain cases, you might not have a choice. You may have to bring in somebody who hasn’t got the best mentality in the world because they’re the only person available because you’re a smaller squad and they’re the only people you can get on your budget. You might decide that it is worth the risk taking on a person who is obviously very talented even though they might be flaky; they might not perform particularly well all the time; or they might not get up for the big matches; they might not be particularly professional, but you might decide with the position that you’re in that it’s worth the risk.

And exactly the same way that you might thing, well this player has had five long-term injuries over the past six or seven years but he’s so good. I think it might be worth the risk bringing him in and seeing if we can keep him fit. There is always that kind of considerations to make.

I would suggest that if you’re trying to build a dynasty at the club that’s trying to win lots of trophies at the high end of the game; that bringing in a player with a disruptive personality should really be on the proviso that you can get rid off them pretty sharpish if it ends up back firing. And certainly, you don’t want that kind of guy to be passing on those kinds of traits to your youngsters.

There are always reasons why you might go against the perfect personality type and bring in other types of people but it should always be with the knowledge no matter how good a player is technically, if they don’t apply themselves then a player with a CA of 190 who only performs at 50% of his ability is still basically a player with a CA of 95. You have to be aware of those kinds of issues whenever you’re assigning anybody who your scouts or your coaches identify as perhaps not necessarily being a perfect personality type.

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