Squad Management V: Discipline How to avoid getting carded and having players banned for half a season Revision 1 - February 2008 One of the most important aspects of squad control in Football Manager 2007 is the need for discipline. Over the last few releases Sports Interactive appear to have made a conscious effort to increase the personality of players to the point where unhappy players will now miss training, lash out at opponents during matches and even criticise their manager. A number of people across the FM Community have bemoaned what is, in my opinion, a significant game-play improvement. Their argument being that players do not get dismissed for…

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…

Addendum. Communication and Psychological ‘Warfare’ has been growing enormously since FM 07, last not least due to the huge number of feedbacks, questions and developing squad management as an own category of tactics and training at FM-Britain. This has been the result of many fellow tacticians discovering the essential influence of interaction on morale and consistency of individual players and whole teams. There will be two versions of Communication and Psychological Warfare ’08, this one and a much-condensed version as easy access, in addition to several tactical articles and Tactical Bible topics. It is next to impossible to cover all important facts of…

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…

Squad conflicts, fines, youth development. Squad conflicts There can be many reasons for conflicts in your squad, and you should take them all very seriously. Looking for a speedy resolution can be more then rewarding, especially since these problems can start to affect other squad members as well. If you are having wantaway players conflicts with the more loyal personnel are guaranteed, so it will take some well thought consideration which actions to take. Other conflicts can be easier to solve. Some examples: Tutorship conflicts. Tutoring is an essential tool to achieve or sustain the desired squad personality and to raise quality youngsters. However,…

VI - Squad factors. Team gelling The current level of understanding is more than a neat little feature you can see when looking at your assistant’s team talk feedbacks, this can be crucial regarding two key issues, which do determine your tactical success in the long run: quality of performance and consistency of performance. Both of these factors, combined with the quality of your tactical approach, will decide whether you will succeed or fail at your current club. This may look a little bit keen at first sight, but let me try to give an admittedly very drastic example: you start a game as a quite unknown manager, take over a squad and instantly bring in a…

Media Interaction - Media Questions and Post Match interaction. Media Questions Based on events in the game like new signings, title wins or outstanding player performances, you will be asked by the media to comment on players, debuts, titles and other events. This does more or less cause similar effects as your own statements. Since it is all but impossible to cover every question ever posted in the game, there is one simple rule of thumb, which is valid for almost every aspect of interaction: Stay positive, but also remain moderate in your response, and things rarely will go wrong. Of course there are always examples proving the opposite, and sometimes an…