“How would the season have to end to be considered successful?” This is among the most common questions in almost all interviews/surveys around the fans’ scene. I don’t remember, and I don’t know some fans of AC Sparta Prague who would say something different than “We have to win the league title. Nothing more is important.”

I consider myself a Sparta Prague fan too. And I absolutely agree with this statement. Domestic domination was always the most important to me. There’s nothing better than winning feeling after beating the biggest rivals Slavia Prague and Banik Ostrava. Sparta won the league title at the end of the 2022/2023 season in real life, after a long nine years.

Winning one league title in nine years is not a domination. So I decided to play one season with Sparta during the end of the Early Access version and create the most dominant tactic as possible. The save continued even after the full version of the game was released because I enjoyed it + I had a lot of real-life work and I lacked the right mood to start the main save.

Background

I’m sure not many of you have detailed background about the Sparta Prague history and I don’t want to turn this into Wikipedia. The most important thing is that AC Sparta Prague is the most successful Czech club in history.

The club celebrates its 130th anniversary in November 2023. Mainly, the club won the Czech league title at the end of the 22/23 season. After a long nine years of waiting since the last league trophy. It was the club’s 37th league title in the history.

Also, I remember many coaches and many playing styles, formations, and tactics that Sparta has been using during my whole life. But it was Brian Priske (Danish coach) and his colleagues who returned Sparta to the winning days. But they also brought back the winning mentality. And fans are loving it.

They like to play a 3-4-3 formation as the main one with slight tweaks depending on the opponent or competition. It’s an ideal combination for me as my favourite formation is with three at the back. It was easy to create something between real life and the FM universe.

Formation & instructions

The main difference between real life and my formation is that Sparta (or Brian Priske) plays with AMR/AML players. It doesn’t matter if they are wingers, inside forwards or something else. They just use both WBs and AMR/L positions.

I like to use more players upfront while using the three-at-the-back system so I rather use only left and right wing-backs and two forwards. My usual 3-5-2 systém usually contains also a flat central midfield trio but I changed it for this case to use the AM position.

There are two things that took me out of my comfort zone slightly in terms of the player roles. The first one is connected to the roles of central defenders.

I’m not a Ball Playing Defender role advocate too much and I rather used the ‚boring‘ CD(D) role instead in combination with CD(St) – my favourite role of all in terms of central defenders. But I wanted to beat this wall in my head and replicate the back three, at least partly, with a real life. That’s why I decided to use the combination of BPD(D) – CD(St) – BPD(D).

The second role I’m not used to using too often is the Advanced Playmaker in the MC position. Especially when there are only two MC players. If you would wake me up in the middle of the night after a couple of beers, I would always say my first choice would be the DLP(S) role.

It was always some kind of security. Using the DLP(S) in combination with wing-backs was always my first choice.

There’s just one difference between these roles in terms of the individual instructions as the AP(S) doesn’t have the Hold Position instruction. No matter the role description or instructions, my personal feeling about these two roles is (was) mainly about the security I mentioned above. The DLP(S) is the right role for me to sit deeper and distribute. The Advanced Playmaker was always a more chaotic player in my eyes. And yes, there’s also a possibility I set the tactic wrong and I didn’t match the AP role with other positions/roles rightly.

But this time, it was about to try it properly for the whole season. I saw Michal Ševčík as the best-suited player for this role mainly because I wanted to give him enough playing time and as much as possible room for development. He is a real talent and it’s only a matter of time when (not if) he will show it in real life too.

His season’s stats are very good including the „FM Stag Stats”. The fact he was selected to the EURO 2024 Czech squad at the end of the season speaks for itself. He just made a great progress and he had a great season.

The first league round = the first (and last) slap

The original formation included Complete Wing Backs with attacking duty both on the left and the right side. It looked good during pre-season but we played against some weaker sides. And when we lost to Club Brugge in the final pre-season friendly 0:1, it should be some kind of alert to me.

But I ignored it and left CWB(A) in the formation. And it didn’t pay off.

It’s not usual to see Sparta playing against Slavia or Viktoria Plzen in the first league round of the new campaign. It’s usually around the tenth round of the campaign. But I don’t have real fixtures so we played against Viktoria in the first round. As I already mentioned, they are one of the three strongest Czech Teams currently. They showed me I shouldn’t ignore all the gaps behind CWB(A) players.

And, yes, they beat us 2:1 after scoring goals thanks to counter-attacks and crosses from the wings where they had enough time as both CWB(A) players were at the same line as our forwards and were not able to track down.

I changed it to CWB(S) after this match and it kicked off…

My favourite role? Box to Box midfielder

One of my favourite parts of this one season-long save was watching the Box to Box midfielder. Maybe it was because of both players I used here but it was really good to watch this role working even harder than in previous versions. Both defensively and offensively.

It worked very well in combination with AP(S) and AM(S). It created a simple triangle in the middle, these three players skillfully complemented each other and at least one of them was always available in the right place to receive the ball.

Also, this goal after a perfect counterattack finished by BBM is one of the best examples.

A typical AM goal

I already mentioned the attacking midfielder several times. There was also one simple change. I had this role with the attacking duty at the beginning but I changed it to AM(S) with Get Further Forward individual instruction. Firstly, it helped with what I wrote above as it created the right shape in the central midfield. Secondly, a player in this role has slightly more room and time to hit the right moment for his run up front.

Like this example…

How did it end for the senior squad?

As I already mentioned, the defeat on the opening match day of the season was also our last domestic loss until the end of the season.

We beat all our rivals in the rest of the matches. We scored the highest number of goals in the Czech League history and set a new record in terms of gained points + a low number of league draws and defeats + most league wins in a season (32), most team goals scored (101), most matches won in a row (21).

The league title was secured just after two matches against Viktoria Plzen and Slavia Prague in the championship group (top 6 teams).

We also won the domestic cup after beating SK Sigma Olomouc in the final absolutely without issues. Domination.

*You can also see the central defender Martin Vitik scored 11 goals. They were all from the set pieces. I wrote about this player recently in the post for the View From The Touchline website. You can read it HERE.

U19s incredible run

One of the things I have liked to do as a Football Manager for many years is that reserve or youth squads are using the same tactic as the senior squad. Like „one club = one tactical philosophy“ but I don’t want to create some super fancy title here. Sparta as a club has the same philosophy set and at least the reserve squad (currently playing in the Czech 2nd tier and currently managed by former Finnish international player Tim Sparv btw.) trying to adapt to the similar principles of the game.

It was easy to set the same formation even for the U19s team. They had no competition in the domestic U19s league but their performances & results in the UEFA Youth League were exceptional.

They had the same group as the senior squad within this save and they lost only to Atlético Madrid 4:5 away from home. But except for 1:0 and 2:0 wins over PSG, they destroyed their opponents in the rest of the matches. Including a 4:0 win over Juventus, a 6:0 win over Real Madrid or a 5:1 win over FC Bayern in the knock-out stage. I decided to go and watch the final match played in Nyon and the U19s team beat Real San Sebastián 11:0. It was 7:0 after the first half. To be absolutely clear, I had to check it in the morning after if it really happened.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, AC Sparta Prague is the most successful Czech football club. It’s my favourite club. I had the advantage of knowing all the players and I knew where to play them. On the other hand, there are still big competitors like Slavia Prague and Viktoria Plzen in the league. Both in real life and in the game. But the domination is definitely underway and this can be always a save I can return to during FM24.

I forgot to mention one thing – transfers and squad policy. I let Tomas Rosicky, the DoF, decide about transfers. We sold a couple of players to Arab nations including Lukas Haraslin who is a key member of the squad in real life. But as I didn’t play with wide midfielders, he was not happy with playing as WB and I had no issue letting him go. And some more. That means I played a lot of games with youngsters. For example Daniel Rus – 17/18 years old striker who, for example, scored four goals in 3 domestic cup appearances or 7 goals in the league. It would absolutely be the best save in terms of developing these talents and dominating domestically.

I know it’s not domination to win the league title once but, in all modesty, I know I would win the league with this formation in the next years too…

You can find the tactic on the Steam Workshop, feel free to try it…

FM Slack alert!

There were a lot of changes within many social media including Twitter (now “X”) and it’s not the same as in the past. We can’t see many things due to the algorithm, weird preferences and many other reasons I don’t even want to know.

There are many Discord servers and I’m sure they are good and useful. But I will probably always be a bigger fan of Slack. Or better worded of the Football Manager Slack. Feel free to join us with this link. The link is also in the picture below.

You will find a short channel summary in the ‘generalchat’ so it will be easier for you to navigate through the channels.

Featured image © AC Sparta Praha