FM24 Heartbreaker - AS Monaco (2008)

 
 

Bonjour tout le monde, 

It was French Noël in the save when I last left readers. Monaco were 7th in Ligue 1 and aspiring to mount a title challenge in the new year. That new year is 2008. Just a reminder, I am playing the FM 2007/08 retro database made available by TheMadScientist (themadscientistfm.wixsite.com). Huge thanks to him and his Danish fingers.

Let’s kick-off right from where we left off…

January 2008 signings ✍️

It is certainly not a ‘war chest’, but €7.5m is a modest amount of money to improve the squad with a couple of players. In fact, I went a bit further than just a couple…

  1. Mathieu Valbuena (€2.5m from Olympique de Marseille)

    In real-life, Dwarf-ish Mathieu Valbuena had a great Ligue 1 career with Marseille. Signing him for €2.5m is a great piece of business, as it not only improves us…it also weakens a geographical and sporting rival. He can play across the front line, but he featured mostly as a Shadow Striker or right Winger in my current 4231. He even scored against his old club too 😀

  2. Bafetimbi Gomis (18 month loan deal with option to buy €3.2m from AS Saint-Etienne)

    Bafe was the original Black Panther, before Marvel got their hands on the rights to make movies in his image. I’m screaming the house down with frequent “Go Miss” as my striker netted 5 times in his first eleven games. Sadly though, a knee injury forced him to call it a season in the final two months of the league campaign. The good news is that I have Gomis for one more season before making the decision to sign him permanently from ASSE.

  3. Michel Bastos (€2.9m from LOSC Lille Métropole)

    I loved Bastos in these early FMs. In real-life he went on to Lyon, but he did not win much in the end there as it coincided with PSG’s real-life dominance from 2012. But he’s quality, and he proved to be a great addition as the attacking Wing Back in my 4231 with 7 assists in 17 appearances.

  4. Yohann Pelé (€3.5m from Le Mans Union Club 72)

    Club captain Flavio Roma got one last dream move in his career as AC Milan opened their cheque book to sign our Goalkeeper for €3.5m. Looking to immediately re-invest, I could have gone big on Hugo Lloris, but Yohann Pelé was the cheaper option (he also isn’t tainted in my mind for one day moving to Tottenham either). It’s worth noting that he’s no relation to the Brazil great, but I hope he will be a solid option between the posts nevertheless.

  5. Guillaume Hoarau (€1.2m from Le Havre, with a 6 month loan back agreed)

    Jan Koller is irreplaceable, but I accepted he would leave me for Celtic at the end of the season. A similar mould of player exists in Guillaume Hoarau. 192cm tall and still only 24-years-old, he will be a decent player in the future. For that reason I loaned him back to Le Havre for the rest of the season to provide him with adequate playing time.

My approach with these signings was grounded in the real-world. I thought it best to go and get Ligue 1 established players because (1) they know French football and (2) they are already physically conditioned into the cycle of the league campaign. I needed new January signings to ‘hit the ground running’, and that’s why I went with these guys. But did they secure European football?

Season 2007/08 - Heartbreaker 💔

“Just about”, is the answer to the previous question. But it could have been so much better!

I usually have a good record of final days in Football Manager games. But this season was a heartbreaker…dropping from 4th to 7th as a result of a 2-0 defeat in the Parcs des Princes to PSG; whilst everybody else won around me. This meant no Champions League, and we relied on Olympique Lyonnais to do us a favour by winning the Coupe de France against lower league opposition (SC Bastia). Even then, Monaco will have to deal with many Euro Cup qualifiers in pre-season just to get a shot at a European campaign!  For the first time in a long while I was left wondering if I was going to get the sack in FM, considering the Board wanted Champions League football.

Alas, they have decided to stick with me for a bit longer…

Target Forward - how did Jan do?

A sprain to Jan Koller’s knee ligaments meant he missed all of February and March, a period which happens to see us drop points in five of eight league games. It is probably fair to say he was essential to how we play, and this is to be expected since I built the team around his presence last time in the blog. If he could have stayed fit for the whole season then he may have topped the Ligue 1 goalscoring charts. Instead, Jan Koller makes do with 19 goals in 30 Ligue 1 games…which is 3rd highest scorer in the league behind Djibril Cissé (20 goals for OM) and Frederico Chaves Guedes (24 goals for OL).

Big Jan is also where you’d expect to see him in the Data Hub too. Decent amount of headers, with a good win rate. Hard bastard.

 
 

But I did see a dip in Jan Koller during the final two months of the season, and his four goals are evidence of that. This could be due to the injury, his upcoming move to Celtic distracting his focus, natural decline as a player in mid-30s OR a combination of all of those things put together. The beauty of FM is that we will never know but it’s meant parting ways with Jan is perhaps right for everybody: virtual him, virtual Monaco and non-virtual me.

Děkuju Jan xoxo

Nouvelle Tactique pour 2008/09 🔜

So, with big Jan leaving, the most sensible thing is to adjust the Target Forward tactic. As I alluded to earlier in this post, Guillaume Hoarau is a solid option for the physical approach upfront but I cannot expect the same results as what I was getting from Jan Koller. We will have to play slightly differently, tweaked instructions and perhaps roles/formation too. I will save that for a future post, as I fully intend to play at least one more season of this 2007/08 database in FM24.

Thank you for reading / sharing and caring.

Tony | FM Grasshopper (p.s. now on Bluesky 🦋)

The Ultimate Target Forward in FM24 - AS Monaco (2007)

 
 

Bonjour Readers,

I’m still at AS Monaco, but it’s no longer CM4 and I am no longer trying to be Matthew Perry in ‘17 Again’. Instead, it's a 37-year-old me with FM24 and a 2007/08 retro database (originally from FM2008). This is all made possible by TheMadScientist (themadscientistfm.wixsite.com), a content creator that devotes his working life to inputting past values into the FM Editor until his eyes bleed.

Why AS Monaco, again?

It was probably the FM before it (FM07), where I had Jan Koller doing all kinds of crazy things for a Monaco save played at University back in 2006-2007ish.  Back then, there was a near post bug which meant I could use Koller for 45 mins upfront, see him score a few times from corners…before slotting him back in a back three system to shore up the win. He rarely lost an aerial duel.

Ultimate Target Forward: 20s in Balance, Heading, Jumping Reach and Strength.

Anyway, I digress, the cold Winter nights are back too and I’ve relapsed into downloading FM24 back onto my Mac Mini. Whilst CM4 was good for a one-season fling, it was buggy and I missed Positional Play. Positional Play is the main driving factor for me wanting to play the latest edition of the game again. I cannot say enough good things about its addition this year. It still feels as fresh now as it once did back in October 2023.

I therefore come back to FM24 with two objectives from this save:

  1. Revisit the Target Forward role in FM24, with perhaps the best-ever fit in any FM game: 100kg Jan Koller.

  2. Start with a 4231 base shape (as a throwback to my CM4 series I just did with Monaco)...but get a nice 325 in possession through Positional Play.

The overall aim is simple: match the CM4 playthrough whereby I win Ligue 1 with the league’s top scorer. For a stretch goal, that’s 49-goal Shabani Nonda!

Target Forward - my thinking

Like many other FM writers, I am a huge fan of keeping it simple from a tactics point of view. Jan Koller requires two main things in order to be successful as a Target Forward: Supply and Demand.

Supply - How do we get the ball to our Target Forward?

  • A Target Forward needs a constant supply of aerial balls. The roles that cross often are Full/Wing Backs and Wingers. I’ll take one of each and place them on opposite sides of my tactic to vary crossing location and style.

  • As a result, it makes sense to ask the team to play wide. The theory is to go outside before you supply the Target Forward with a cross.

  • Lastly, we’ll play for set pieces. This gives us a natural reset point for the team, so that we can re-position and once again supply our Target Forward and build off from him.

Demand - Once supplied with the ball, who demands the ball from our Target Forward?

  • The above is all about increasing the frequency of balls into the Target Forward. But I also need to think about the demand from my side when he does have the ball. The Target Forward is a very simple role, it will not pick up the ball and break into the channels. Instead, the role will lay it off to onrushing teammates. This is covered through the use of player roles in my tactic that act as runners off him. This is primarily a Shadow Striker in the AMC position, and the other two advanced attackers: a Winger and an Advanced Playmaker.  There is also a central runner in the Segundo Volante…who acts as a vital link between those at the base of our team and the attack.

  • A Team Instruction added in the preliminary months of Ligue 1 was to bring more demand out of the team via the Counter instruction.  When we have the ball, I want numbers regularly getting forward to benefit from the Target Forward’s hold up play and simple distribution.

The Tactic

Player Roles + Positional Play

Our defensive shape is 4231, two Defensive Midfielders shielding a back four means we are resistant to the opposition trying to play through us centrally. Once with the ball, we morph into a back three where the Half-Back becomes a left sided centre-back.  The knock-on here is that I give an attacking role to my Full Back, knowing he has defensive cover nearby. The same could be said for the Segundo Volante who pushes up to link with the attack with an Inverted Wing Back taking his place to act as a DM pivot. More often than not, we progress to a 325.

4231 DM tactic

4231 out of possession.

In possession 325 leading to goal.

Here is the transition from the above screenshots, a goal against ASSE…

Team Instructions - It should be obvious from looking at the instructions as to what I am trying to do. The team instructions I have set all derive from the demand and supply idea for the Target Forward mentioned previously. I want to commit bodies forward and move the ball quickly into our Target Forward. The only slowness of our game is (1) overlapping on the left, to strategically increase the chances of our Full Back getting into good crossing opportunities and (2) playing for set pieces, because that’s a real strength of ours.

Important point - I originally asked the Goalkeeper to distribute long kicks to the Target Forward (especially as Flavio Roma has Kicking 17), but it did not work well and rarely were we able to build meaningful possession from it. Distributing to the Full Backs is way more effective, it allows us to progress beyond the halfway line where we see our midfield and attack take shape.

Player Instructions - I use PIs sparsely. But in this tactic I am asking three players to aim for the Target Forward with their crossing. That is: the attacking Full Back, Advanced Playmaker and the supportive Winger. The instructions, and set piece routines that I document shortly, bring about a style of football that I want to see. Both Jan Koller and a new Shadow Striker (to be revealed shortly) are dual battering rams upfront, and the tactical instructions are seeing them win enough headers in the area of the pitch which is essential (the penalty box + central areas). Here are their headers Vs Auxerre (red is Target Forward and blue is Shadow Striker):

Six headers won in the opposition penalty box Vs Auxerre.

Corners - More often than not, in any FM, there will be a superior corner set piece routine. Whether that’s near post of far post, or something in between. Personally, I love variety in football. I try to get variety in our attacks from player roles and team instructions, and it makes sense to vary corner routines too. I’ve got one Far Post and one Near Post routine for Jan Koller and friends, combine that with inswinging and outswinging and there is enough there to probe the opposition in different ways with each attacking corner kick.

Variety shown in 1st contact in opponent’s box. 37% attacks of near post 1st contacts, far post is similar %.

Throw-ins - The attacking third throwing absolutely has to be ‘long’. I’ve got two players with 15 long throws, and a huge man mountain to aim for. Jan Koller is really effective here, either with flick-ons further into the box…or simply laying it off for teammates. More often than not, we work a chance from this routine and they are varied movements too. I love it.

Corner - attacking near

Corner - attacking far

Throw-in - attacking third, long

Season 2007/08 - Part 1

I was unsure if Jan Koller could stay fit for the whole season, so I wanted another guy that could play the Target Forward role effectively when called upon. I also needed depth in the AMC area, so I was delighted to arrange a season long loan for Antoine Sibierski from Wigan. Signing Sibierski has proved to be a masterstroke, he has 7 league goals in thirteen starts and benefits from some of the team instructions built around the Target Forward. We really are a delight to see us line up in the penalty box with these two jugganauts. The two glaring limitations to 187cm tall Sibierski in the Shadow Striker role are the loss of that ‘explosiveness’ that the role sometimes needs (Acceleration, Anticipation and Pace for example) and also his Player Traits encourage him to do less of what I expect from the role. It’s given me something to address in future transfer windows: find that killer Shadow Striker.

Antoine Sibierski has yet to play for Wigan Athletic.

My Monaco side top the league’s statistics for both cross completion (30%) and amount of completed crosses (161), with the nearest side being league leaders Olympique Lyonnais with 19% and 134 respectively. However, the results have been inconsistent so far (ahem, 1-6 defeat to Toulouse), and we find ourselves in 7th place at the halfway stage. Jan Koller has had a strong start though, 14 goals in seventeen starts means he tops the league’s golden boot after 19 games.

‘Moyenne’.

20-year-old Jérémy Ménez is also attracting interest from some of Europe’s richest clubs like Chelsea. In our tactic he is the right sided Winger and his crossing is 10% above the league average, and he also is the 5th best ball carrier in the league (with 4.57 dribbles per 90). I am expecting many bids in the January window, and I may have to find a suitable right sided Winger to replace Ménez when he does eventually leave for big money. Whether that is this January, or next Summer.

AS Monaco’s starboy in 2007.

Next up on the blog

We have a transfer budget of €7.5m for player transfers, and an available wage budget of €2m for annual salary; should there be a player become available that improves us for the 2nd half of the season. In real life, AS Monaco finished 2007/08 in mid table (12th) and were distinctly average. It looks like I have a chance of Europe but a Shabani Nonda inspired title win, like in my CM4 adventure, really does look a stretch right now!

To see how I do, I will update the blog soon with the outcome of 2007/08 soon.

Thank you for reading / sharing and caring.

Tony | FM Grasshopper (who is also now on Bluesky 🦋)