Eskozia La Brava | Does Misfiring Matter?

We're the fourth top scorers in the league, that's not exactly misfiring is it? I'm not talking about the team overall, I'm talking about an individual.

Last summer, I was delighted to bring Eddie Nketiah to the club on a permanent deal. See, look how I excited I was.

Fast forward a half season from his arrival and he'd scored one goal in 15 appearances. The switch in tactic helped him in the second half of last season and he finished on eight overall. Moving into this season, he's made 17 league appearances and has scored zero goals. Yeah, that says zero. Across his two loan spells at the club he scored 40 goals in 63 appearances. Since his permanent arrival he's got nine in 65.

It looks so poor when you type it out.

Am I The Problem?

Maybe I'm just making Nketiah a bit of a scapegoat. Here's what I said in my post looking at the switch to the 4-1-2-3.

“I’m also still undecided on the role for my forward. I want him on the end of our chances, but I felt he’d be cutting a lonely figure if I picked an Advanced Forward or Poacher. Complete Forward feels like it should be the role. Getting on the end of chances and being involved in aspects of the build up play too. Support duty feels like it should be the setting too, with him dropping in a little bit more to create the space for the IFs to move forward but I’m not seeing it as much as I’d like to be.”

— FMSamo

I also said I would be patient and try and stick it out with the CF(S). I did... until this season where I've switched to a DLF(A). I want my forward role to do everything though. I want him contributing to build up play. I want him taking on players. I want him running on to through balls. I want him getting in front of defenders and on the end of crosses.

Am I being impatient? Am I expecting too much? Am I putting Nketiah under too much pressure? Am I forcing him to do something he can't? I'm arguably doing all of these things. I think I'm tweaking it too much.

(FM) Pressure

He's putting pressure on himself too...

I think pressure is expected here. I've already mentioned those 40 goals he scored across his two loan spells, he was brilliant in tandem with Amang. It led me to splash out £13m on him, which was, and still is, our record transfer fee. Huge for a club of our size.

What's also huge is his wage. I made him the highest paid player in club history when he joined, earning £65k a week. One good thing from his lack of goals is that I'm not spending £11k each time he scores and his bonuses of being top goalscorer in the league (£120k) or scoring 20 goals in a season (£160k). There's expectations on him to lead and be our star man. He isn't delivering on that. Is something underneath the surface affecting that?

Judging Ability

Thinking back to this brilliant post on coach reports from Ondrej/FMRensie, I thought I'd take a look at the opinion of my best coach for judging ability. It's not often I really seek the advice of my backroom staff for second opinions on players once they've been signed. Alberto Giráldez is my Head of Youth Development and has 18 for JPA. He's telling me that Eddie:

• Enjoys big matches

• Is fairly consistent

• Is considered a smart player

• Is currently playing close to his potential and is a decent player for most LaLiga sides

• Most suitable role is an Advanced Forward and is rated the third best striker at the club (behind Amang and Sowden, who've mainly been supporting Eddie from out wide so far this season)

Great, I'm not misjudging him. He's a good player and importantly he's considered consistent and doesn't shy away in important matches. The only negatives highlighted were around his poor crossing and being poor in the air. Does that tell me something? Lone strikers should probably be able to hold their own up there. Let's look at his attributes again but highlighting the ones relevant for a Complete Forward this time.

At 5'9" he's not exactly a commanding presence up top. We're not a long ball team though, we're direct. His speed and movement should suit our style. If you're thinking elite strikers then you'd maybe like to have the finishing, composure and technique up at least another one to 15, throw decisions in there as well. Like Giráldez says though, he's a decent LaLiga striker. I know there's goals in his game, but are goals the be all and end all?

The Decoy/Integral Cog

I think the biggest thing is getting over the expectation that strikers need to be the main goal threat. Strikers need to be the ones scoring, every single game. They don't if your system is good enough overall. I'm sitting here moaning about my striker when we've had the best first half of a season in my time at the club so far.

Nketiah, and the forward role, is the enabler. I'm not going to say it's like playing with 10 men because it's actually a vital part of the system. He is the system, much like Firmino at Liverpool, according to the coaching staff at Anfield. He got man of the match in a 2-2 draw away at Espanyol, laying on assists for both goals. He had the lowest number of touches throughout the side, but covered the third highest distance across the 90 minutes.

He shows strength beyond his 9 attribute here to shrug off Cedric Kipré (18 strength), move into the channel and play a lovely cross for Amang to do what Amang does best (defy his finishing attribute).

I love this little one-two touch to give it back to Sowden and then to occupy Kipré again to make the space for Sowden to come inside and delightfully finish past Axel Werner.

Nketiah is actually our top league assister (four) and to further highlight his role in the side our top scorers are Amang and Sowden, playing mainly in the wide forward roles. Amang has 11 goals while Sowden has eight, starting life at Eibar well after his superb season for Tenerife on loan last year.

What am I going to do?

I swapped Nketiah and Amang for the 5-2 Osasuna win. Eddie on the right, Amang up front. Eddie still played poorly, getting a 6.6 rating. Amang scored a hattrick up top. Two of his goals did come from instinctive play at set pieces, but still.

In the past I've moulded players around systems I've wanted to play. I think I've been quite guilty here of expecting too much of Nketiah on his own. While there was a poor spell on his return to the club permanently where we played two upfront, his goals across his loans came when he was partnered with Amang. Maybe he isn't suited to leading the line on his lonesome.

Amang's superior physical attributes suit him playing the lone striker role better. My starting forward line for the second half of the season will be Amang, supported by Sowden on the left and Nketiah on the right. I can't wait to see what impact it has.

My FM20 Tactic: 4-1-2-3

I initially planned a post focusing on my 3-5-2/5-3-2 tactic which had been part of our Furia identity for four and a half seasons. The key word there being "had". After a difficult first half of the season I came to the decision to move away from my trusted tactic.

It served me well and had troubled our LaLiga competitors but it was time for a change. Things had gotten a bit stale, I wanted to see us do something different going forward, to introduce a bit of variation in our attacking play. Enter a classic 4-1-2-3.

Shift to 4-1-2-3

If I was an actual Football Manager and not a virtual one, 4-1-2-3 would be the tactic I impose on my side. I think it's pretty perfect. You've got a solid defensive base, a midfielder screening that defence too to give the full-backs some license to go forward. There's a central midfield two that you can instruct to do anything you want them to and up top there's a range of options. Is it two wingers crossing for a big man? Does the striker drop in to lure opposing defenders out to create space for runners coming inside from wide? On Football Manager the opportunities aren't exactly endless, it's a game and we have to live within the confines of it, but there's still plenty of interpretations for you to put together.

Here's how my 4-1-2-3 currently looks after a few rounds of tinkering across the second half of the season.

A lot of my thinking when putting a new tactic together is about positioning. I think about the differences in positioning of the roles we can pick from and our expectations of what those roles should do on the pitch. How does the positioning of a Complete Forward on Support differ to that of an Advanced Forward? What about the movement that you can get from the midfield two, if the AP was on Attack would he support the forwards enough in comparison to a Central Midfielder on Attack?

This is how I see the movement and positions changing.

I'll walk through more of my thinking behind it and some of that tinkering in the sections below.

The Forward Line

Our topsy-turvy first half of the season led me to the tactical change and a big part of that was due to my strikers. Thomas Amang had scored seven goals while big money signing, Eddie Nketiah, had scored just one. We were still creating chances but it was all samey. I mentioned before I wanted to change things up and that involved moving away from two up front. It saddened me but going from two to one up front doesn't need to make us less effective going forward, as much as the football da's believe that and shout at their manager to put two up top.

It's only one but it's effectively three. Supporting the man leading the line I've gone for two Inside Forwards. This is for three main reasons:

• I'd usually try and vary the wide roles but I don't actually have any natural wingers

• Thinking ahead to the future, I've got a group of promising young forwards who could successfully play out wide cutting in

• Linking it back to thinking about the positioning of the players, getting the three close together.

Here's our average positions from our 2-0 win over Valencia in the last month of the season. You can clearly see the 4-1-2-3 structure with that three actually almost being three up top as opposed to one.

Width

In my previous formation, all the width came from the Wing-Backs. Looking at the formation here, we've also got two additional players out wide in the forward line, however taking their roles into account they vacate the wide areas for the Full-Backs to bomb on and support the attack.

With FMPressure's excellent posts on modern Full-Backs in mind, I tried out a couple of different roles and settled on FB(S) and FB(A) for now. I settled for those roles over others as with the change from five to four at the back we're losing a bit of defensive stability. Full-Back's primary function is to defend but also to provide that width and support going forward. I see that as important, especially with them being our only width but it's something I also see me continuing to try out and test as time with the tactic goes on.

One day I hope to see far less examples of this and more of them actually crossing the ball. Look at how much time and space Porro has to cross it here but he chooses to dally and lose the ball. So many examples of this every single match.

I do love that tiny delay from my three forward players when he receives the ball though. Like "oh, will we go into the box or not? Yup, let's go in." Does Porro really have anyone to aim at? No, he doesn't. Just get it fired across there though, I keep saying to the lads that anything can happen.

Midfield Mix

As part of my three-man midfield in the previous tactic I'd taken to playing two playmakers. This is maybe something you see often in tactics which claim to win all the things and have every single team instruction selected, but it's not something I see us FM bloggers incorporating into our tactics that often.

I've been a big fan of the DLP(D) role since FM18 where it featured in my Stirling 4-4-2 and was christened the Deep-Lying Destroyer. I've had that in my head since then and to this day continue to play a more defensively minded player in this role to screen the defence, assist in breaking opposition attacks down and then moving the ball forward to the our attacking players.

With the addition of a second playmaker, the AP(S), I often see the DLP(D) moving the ball on to him and in turn he'll then dictate the play further up the pitch. He makes things happen with our front three and the supporting midfielder alongside him, the CM(A). Just a classic role. Simple and occasionally effective. With the right player in there you've got yourself a goal threat from midfield. I'm not quite sure I've got the right player to be that yet but he gets in the right positions and that's reassuring.

Match Footage

I changed to the new tactic at the end of January. Two 2-0 wins were followed up by a 1-0 defeat away against Levante, who were languishing down in the lower end of the table. That result could've been the the trigger to throw in the towel for others and shift back to the trusted previous tactic. Signs were promising though, we created a lot of good chances and on another day would've clearly won it. I've seen Amang burst the net before from this kind of chance, though he maybe just reaches this cracking through ball from Burnic, playing AP(S), a little too late.

I'm yet to be sold on my Inside Forwards. They get into some great positions but seem to more often than not make the wrong decision. That could just be the players I have in these roles but it's blocked shots when patience was the preferred option or running into trouble when a simple pass would've sufficed.

Hiroki Abe ended the season with eight goals, but also with less than half of the shots he takes being on target. He runs with the ball often and cuts inside from the left, but as you can see above also just occasionally decides to take a shot at the legs of opposing defenders when he's in a great position one-on-one with them.

I'm also still undecided on the role for my forward. I want him on the end of our chances, but I felt he'd be cutting a lonely figure if I picked an Advanced Forward or Poacher. Complete Forward feels like it should be the role. Getting on the end of chances and being involved in aspects of the build up play too. Support duty feels like it should be the setting too, with him dropping in a little bit more to create the space for the IFs to move forward but I'm not seeing it as much as I'd like to be. Maybe I'm just being restless though as the return across the second half of the season from my forwards was much better in comparison to the first half of the season.

The aspects of Furia are still there in our team instructions and when it pays off and rewards us, it's beautiful.

Our aggressive pressing high up the pitch sees Luis win the ball from Rojas as Girona try and play out from the back. He plays a lovely pass, at the perfect time, to Amang for an easy finish.

There’s still work to do to perfect it, but early indications are it’s a positive tweak to our approach.

My FM20 Training Approach

“How do I want my team to play?”

It’s probably the most important question us Football Managers will ask ourselves. Some find it difficult to answer. We want to set out to win matches obviously but it’s getting to that point that is often tricky. Tactics are obviously vital, the quality of the players slotting in to each of those roles in the tactic are equally as important. What about the work on the training pitch?

The change to the way that training works on Football Manager was a welcome one for me and it was also often talked about and requested by so many other players of the game. Why then, into its second iteration on the game, do we still see so many not taking control of it themselves? I really think it could give you that additional percentage of performance that could lead to your side earning the win come matchday. That’s why I’ve decided to go through the reasons why I’ve set up training the way I have, to gear the sessions towards the type of players I want at the club and how we set up on the pitch come matchday.

Style of Play

I’ve dubbed my playing style on Football Manager 2020 “La Furia”. It’s a bold, brash and direct style of football that’s all about being aggressively in our opponent’s faces. We’re playing a high defensive line and a high line of engagement too, we press hard and we press high. When we lose the ball we try and win it back as quickly as possible and when we win it back we attack the opposition. I’m looking for aggressive, hard working players who’ll fight for the cause and give their all.

That’s how I want us to play. How does that go into the training schedule I’ve set up for my side?

Training to Win

Training is about players working hard to better themselves and preparing for that upcoming match. The beginning of our Monday to Sunday training plan is about recovery. La Liga matches are played out over Friday to Monday, but for the purpose of building my base plan, I’ve chosen Sunday as matchday so our Monday is about a recovery session and a match review session.

Recovery sessions are vital at the best of times but greatly reducing our injury risk, fatigue and improving the conditioning of our players after the effort they put into every match is hugely important. I’d like to hope everyone else does this already, but if you don’t, I would definitely recommend filling up the available spaces in your medical team with the best physios and sports scientists you can find. It’s bound to have a positive effect on your players.

As the seasons have gone on and more midweek European matches have come into play, the time between matches gets shorter and shorter. I’m not shy in scheduling double recovery sessions on a Friday after a Europa League Thursday night match to get the players in a good position and ready to go again for our league match on the Sunday.

You would like to think that all teams now review their previous match and discuss what was good and what wasn’t. I’ve only recently started scheduling in the match review session the day after a match. It’s dedicated to analytically reviewing the previous match (presumably with the data analysts employed at the club?) and it increases our team cohesion, which I’m a big believer in, while also working on our tactical familiarity going forward. It’s a great post-match session that still works on what you want to achieve going forward. It’s so important to get your players all singing from the same hymn sheet.

Once they’re rested and recuperated, the hard work starts all over again. I chose to start off with an overall session. I envisage this as the players coming together and just getting their week of training off to a good start, getting them moving. The description states that it’s a session “where the players put a small amount of work into every area of their game”. It’s good to get each unit together and have them generally working a little bit on each attribute area. It also increases our tactical familiarity, team cohesion and makes the players happier, while slightly increasing their risk of injury and fatigue. It’s a good warm up for them because the second session of the day is physical.

I could have the players doing one of the more specific physical sessions, such as endurance or resistance, but I opt for the general physical session as it works that range of attributes, a few of which are absolutely vital to the Furia style of play and my own personal favourite attributes. Stamina and work rate are so important to the system as I expect my players to be able to last the 90+ minutes in each match. We press hard and pressure the opposition into making mistakes. Players already capable of that are high up on my recruitment list, of course, but it needs to be worked on in training too to collectively make us even better at it.

Do you use that extra session available to you? I do, daily from Tuesday to Friday. I think our players can take it. Even with their intensity levels being set to double alongside their individual roles and additional focuses added on top of our daily sessions, their workloads are still only medium. The only day when our intensity goes into orange levels is on Tuesday’s with that previously mentioned physical session. The last session on that day is a ball distribution one. Would you believe me if I said the ball retention session doesn’t train passing? We aren’t known as a slick, short passing side, but the passing attribute covers all ranges of passing. While the defensive unit are defending against the attacking one and working on key attributes for that, the goalkeepers are also working on their distribution too, including their passing and kicking.

The next few days are dedicated to the four game situations that are a key component of Tactical Periodisation, the approach to training that I’ve written about previously. These are offensive and defensive organisation and the transition from defence to attack and vice versa. We aren’t a patient attacking side so we don’t train it nor do we play with any wingers so we don’t train overlaps. We do rely on our wing backs for width though so we train attacking down the wing and we’re unapologetically direct so we of course train that. Alongside training key aspects of our play such as off the ball movement, that (direct) passing again, crossing and finishing it also improves the familiarity with our creative freedom and passing style, plus improving our team cohesion and player happiness. Happy players working as a team is what I aim for.

Chance creation and conversion speak for themselves. We want to create chances and score goals so my players need to improve all attribute areas related to those two actions. Then it’s onto our transitions. Pressing is an absolutely vital part of our game, one of the main aims in our style of play is to be in the faces of our opponents. It works on our aggression, tackling, anticipation, teamwork and work rate, all key components of the press. Then we practice restricting the space our opponents can play in when we lose the ball by working on our concentration, marking and positioning, amongst other attributes.

The final aspect of our four game situations is defending. We aren’t the strongest team in the league so I put a bit more of a focus on defending in comparison to our attacking training, meaning there’s three defensive training sessions on Friday’s. Defending from the front is so important in football today and it’s no different in my side. The priority of that session is the forwards working on their tackling, marking, concentration and positioning however it also works on the team’s overall pressing intensity and marking in terms of tactical familiarity.

There’s five defensively focused sessions to choose from from the remainder of the options and there are two final sessions I’ve allocated for our week putting in hard work on the training ground. Firstly, I choose defending engaged over defending disengaged. It works the players in getting more aggressive, one of the key attributes for my style of play. Then I go for wide defending as opposed to ground or aerial defending. The formation we play is a 3-5-2 meaning that there’s only one line of defence out wide. My thought is we need to really put a focus on being strong at defending the opposition’s attacks from out wide, plus, again, it also sees us working on that all important tactical familiarity, team cohesion and happiness.

Preparing to Win

The eve of a match is all about those final preparations. Depending on whether we’re at home or away, there’s a slight difference in the amount of preparation we’re able to do. My priority is always a teamwork session. This stems from previous versions of the game and the previous way you could set up training. As you’ve seen throughout, I’m a big advocate of the team gelling and the teamwork match preparation session greatly improves our team cohesion.

Similar to our post-match session reviewing the match, we work with the analysts to preview the match. This increases our team cohesion, slightly increases our sharpness, works on our tactical familiarity and, in my head, enables our analysts to get the players completely up to speed with our opponents and how they play, devising ways for us to defeat them.

Then, depending on the time of the season and our upcoming opponents, I’ll choose between match tactics, attacking movement or defensive shape. These sessions give us a slight boost ahead of the upcoming match, alongside some additional benefits with tactical familiarity, team cohesion and certain attributes being worked on as well.

That’s how we prepare at our training ground to win our next match, to win three points every week, in order to finish as high up the table as we possibly can. Everyone is entitled to play Football Manager in any way they want, you might completely hand control of training to your coaching staff and still be doing incredibly well. I find I get a much more rewarding experience while I’m playing the game when I’m putting together my training session strategy. If you haven’t done it before, why not give it a try too?

Eskozia La Brava | The Three Pals

I mentioned in my introductory post that it's never a surprise to see tartan, Saltires and Lion Rampants on show when you're watching Eibar play. The ties to Scotland have strengthened since I joined the club. Rather than just loving the country from afar, the Eskozia La Brava fan group now have a number of Scottish players and staff members to adore, including me of course.

The first Scots to join me in Eibar were on my backroom team. It's always important to have staff members you trust that can speak your language. Billy Dodds, Duncan Shearer and one of the most talented Scottish players ever, John Collins, joined the club not long after me in the summer of 2019. Dodds is working with the first team squad, while Shearer and Collins are working with the Eibar youth players. Collins' managerial credentials have been questioned over the years but his experience in the game, and model professional attitude, means he's someone I want working with our players on a daily basis.

In my third season at the club, Grant Murray joined the u19 coaching team while ex-Hibs Director of Football and Celtic scout, Graeme Mathie, joined to be our UK scout.

His scout reports backed up my feelings when we were looking to bring Scottish players to the club. The first of those was Ryan Porteous from Hibs just a few weeks after Mathie's arrival.

This isn't the first time "Porto" has played under me on FM, he was the captain of my Stirling side on FM18. Remembering that my recruitment policy is looking at players capable of slotting into our Furia style of play, his aggressive and hard-working nature means he is the perfect fit for us.

If I was being fussy, I'd love his personality to be a bit more suited to Furia and he lacks concentration at times too, but his no-nonsense and tough-tackling performances saw him cement a spot in our three at the back formation last season and play regularly for Scotland too. His form has continued this season so far and he's been joined in the first team by two other pals this season.

I'd been tracking Porteous since I joined the club and while I had to pay slightly over the odds to sign him (a potential eventual fee of £7.5m), another player I'd been tracking for a long time that I didn't need to pay over the odds for is Ross McCrorie. He was inexplicably released by Rangers in the summer and I jumped at the opportunity to snap him up.

His versatility is something that attracted me to him, obviously alongside those key Furia attributes again. He hasn't quite been able to hold down a regular spot yet but he's been fine across his 10 appearances so far this season. He'll get there.

The final first team Scot is Allan Campbell. He also arrived in the summer on a free transfer from Motherwell. He faces a huge battle to break into the first team ahead of some of my regulars that've served me well so far, but he's a Furia warrior. He's almost perfect for that Deep Lying Destroyer role I've been a fan of incorporating into my sides over the years on the game.

Alongside the Three Pals in the first team, I've got a couple of younger Scottish players who are out on loan this season gaining vital first team experience. My coaches rate Nathan Cooney very highly. He joined for £300k from Dundee United but is spending this season on loan in the Segunda with Cultural Leonesa. If Stephen Jordan has a good season in the Segunda with Numancia, he could well break into the first team on his return next season. He joined for £350k from Graeme Mathie's old side, Hibs.

It might be a stupid thing to some or a small thing to others, but I see these little aspects you can bring into your save as the things that keep you going. Those role playing elements that whirl around your head as your clicking continue through the game.

Eskozia La Brava | What Kind of Club Are We?

Heading into my third season I began to question what kind of club we actually are?

What Kind of Club Are We?

We've got a defined and unique style of playing. La Furia has been embedded into the club culture, but when it comes to a recruitment plan, there isn't really a specific one in place yet. In the early years of a save, it's all about getting by and getting the best out of the talents at your disposal. As you establish yourself, and get a bit more money in the bank, it opens up avenues and opportunities to shape things the way you want them. What are Eibar's options when it comes to this?

Talent Production Line

We compete in a difficult region to identify and bring through our own promising young talent. Athletic Club are the biggest and best club in the Basque Country with their unique selling point of only playing Basque players. Their ability to produce talent is ridiculous.

Our standing in Spain, and Europe, means we can't expect to keep any exceptional talent that we do produce around for long, specifically young players if they show promise. This has already been the case. Carlos Calvo who came through in my first youth intake got snatched away for £1.2m by Sevilla.

Do you plough funds into improving the first team or do you spend money improving your facilities as a priority? So far, I've gone down the former route. We're currently not set up to successfully develop our own Eibar youth players. Our facilities aren't up to scratch, with average youth facilities, adequate academy coaching and good youth recruitment.

Am I planning to invest in improving our facilities in the next few seasons? There's money in the bank to (£44m at the time of writing) but developing homegrown Eibar talent won't become the focal point of my time at the club for now.

Sign to Sell

This approach to managing a club and signing players is ingrained into me, and a lot of other FM players, I think. Sign a player, usually on a low fee, give him a platform to play and perform, let him move on for a profit, rinse and repeat.

Luis' agent offered him to us after he'd been released by Brazilian Serie C side Sampaio Correa. He joined in January last season and spent some time in the u19s. Atletico Madrid had a £5m fee agreed with him in the summer before his step up to the first team, but he rejected that move and I was able to agree to increase his release clause up to £7.5m. He did make that step up to the first team and has appeared 13 times over the first half of the season.

Dzenis Burnic is a Dortmund youth product that never made the breakthrough at the Signal Iduna Park. His contract expired at the end of last season and he joined Eibar on a free over the summer.

Does the free transfer list get overlooked? It shouldn't. I was delighted to spot Dzenis on there and he's had a great first half of the season, scoring twice and laying on six assists in his 21 appearances.

For signing to sell, the nationalities are certainly something I'd factor in. Of course, if a player is hugely talented clubs will be interested regardless, but Luis and Burnic being Brazilian and German, two nations high up on the country coefficient list, should see them attract interest down the line and make us a good bit of money.

Talent Developers

The situation the club currently finds itself in means that there's a lot of excellent footballers out there who we currently can't afford to purchase. This is where building relationships with other clubs comes in, especially bigger clubs, and having them trust us to be the destination they want to send players to in order for them to get game time and develop.

Just £26.5k per week wages is no price to pay for someone so talented as Eddie Nketiah. He's got 13 goals in 18 La Liga appearances across the first half of this season. We had Konstantinos Mavropanos, a rock at the back, from Arsenal last season too. It benefits us, and it ultimately benefits their parent clubs too.

Across the last two seasons we've had players in on loan from Barcelona, Real and Atletico Madrid too. It's highly unlikely that we'll ever overtake these three clubs and they have a wealth of quality available to them. I'm not complaining if they're happy to provide some of that to us.

A Home for Experienced Talent

Alongside naturally gravitating towards signing players to sell them on, it's no secret I can usually be found purchasing younger players rather than chasing more experienced heads.

While the oldest permanent player I've signed so far in my time at the club might have been 25-years-old, that's not to say I don't have a bit of new found appreciation for an older player.

Gonzalo Escalante is in the peak of his career at 28. He's our captain and Furia warrior in the middle of the pitch. He's contracted for another couple of years yet and I can see him continuing beyond that to be the perfect tutor for some of the younger players to learn from.

Escalante is part of a group of cultural leaders at the club that includes Paulo Oliveira (30), Sergi Enrich (32), Marko Dmitrovic (30) and Sergio Álvarez (30).

So we're doing a bit of all four at the moment. It's never just one to be fair, a combination of a couple will probably be the route I eventually pick to go down. Are there any I've not considered? Let me know how you like to shape your recruitment.

Eskozia La Brava | The Jamie Vardy Problem

"The Jamie Vardy Problem"

"Why don't these things happen more often on Football Manager?" "There should be some kind of dynamic potential ability!" It's been a common discussion point since Jamie Vardy's rise through the English leagues to firing Leicester to their surprise Premier League title. Few saw Andy Robertson's meteoric rise from amateur at Queen's Park to Champions League winner with Liverpool coming, certainly not Rangers while playing against him in Scotland's fourth tier.

I'm not here to offer answers to those points, you can search on Google and the SI forums for the debates on them, I'm here to show you Thomas Amang.

How many of you would look at Amang and pass on him because he's barely got any technical ability or his composure and decisions is too low for a decent striker at LaLiga level or equivalent?

This is the beauty of focusing on a set of specific attributes you're looking for in each of your players. I saw Amang as my perfect Pressing Forward, harassing opposition defences with his 14, 16 and 17 for my La Furia attributes of Aggression, Determination and Work Rate. He's also a physical specimen with 16 strength at just 5'9" tall. What a guy.

Who could have predicted when I plucked him from Gimnastic in the third tier of Spanish football for £475k that he'd fire in 16 goals across his 38 appearances this season? He was our top league scorer with 12 but he finished just behind Sergi Enrich overall who once again top scored, this time hitting 18 in total. Only 11 of those came in the league though, six fewer than last season.

The difference in the second half of the season, where Amang amassed 13 of his 16 goals, was that I moved him away from his Pressing Forward role over to the Advanced Forward role, and did away with the PF completely, swapping it out for a Deep Lying Forward. I wanted to see more linking between the midfield and attack, but keeping it on an Attack duty sees him carving out opportunities for himself along with creating them for others. Similarly to the tweaks I made previously, I had Amang and Enrich swapping positions and roles during the matches too, again creating uncertainly for opposition defences.

Amang's speed and power makes him a frightening prospect, if he could improve his finishing ability (which I'm working on) he'd take himself to that next level up. Where Enrich got 55% of his shots on target this season, only 49% of Amang's did. We saw the best and worst of him in our 3-1 win against Zaragoza where he had a whopping 11 shots.

Here he is as our DLF using his physical attributes to good effect pouncing on a good ball in behind the defence from Alvaro Tejero. Just 10 for composure and 10 for finishing and he slots it past Zaragoza's goalkeeper, not bad. I love that extra touch to the left he takes. Then he missed all of these.

There's a lot of chat at the moment around strikers, one-on-ones and clear cut chances. Amang scored one in this match, he could've had another couple at least judging by a few of these above. I do think there's a lot of improvement to be made on this at the moment, it's surely got to be toning down the number of one-on-ones or clear cut chances because I don't see them making a tweak that'll have strikers scoring hattricks every match. I'm convinced SI are on it. I'm hoping so after this miss...

Eskozia La Brava | La Furia

It's time to get down to business in the Basque Country. I've reached the halfway point of my first season in charge of Eibar on FM20 but before I go into how we've done so far, I want to talk about the unique identity I'm looking to implement at the club from the get go.

Player Retention and Recruitment

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I want to bring "the rage" to Eibar. The first part of that is ensuring the players we have at the club, and future signings, fit La Furia style.

I'm looking for hard-working, aggressive players who are determined to do their all for the club. That sentence probably gives you an indication of the attributes I'll be looking at when it comes to the ideal type of player I want at Ipurua. Players getting stuck in, working at full capacity, going beyond the call of duty, that are committed to succeeding and doing their best.

Players like Pape Diop and Iván Ramis might not play every single minute of every single match, but they'll be important figures to have in and around the club. Players that I think will have a big impact on the pitch for us this season are Gonzalo Escalante and Sergio Álvarez. They're in the prime of their careers and they'll be vital if we're to achieve what's expected of us this season. All four are the types of personalities I want at the club too.

This all being said, I'm not going to completely restrict myself on these three key attributes. They'll certainly be preferred and if it's a choice between two players and one has the edge on them, I'll go with him. I'm not going to suddenly rip the squad apart and get rid of all the players who don't have a certain base level for their Furia. Sergi Enrich is nowhere near the type of forward I'd ideally like to have leading the line, but he's the most talented striker at the club right now.

Paulo Oliveira is another similar to Enrich. He's got a great personality, great determination and is pretty hard-working, but his aggression is low for what I'd ideally look for in my central defenders. This being said, he's currently the most valuable player at the club and he's certainly the most talented defender we have. I'd be crazy to cast him aside if I was regimentally sticking to looking at those attributes only.

Right now I don't have the financial freedom to be scouring the globe for players to fit this style or to completely overhaul the team. There's very little in the way of wriggle room in the budget. There might be £5m in the overall balance and the projection come the end of the season is that'll increase to £14m, but with how little we'll make off the pitch this season in terms of season ticket sales, match day income and sponsorship in comparison to some of the other clubs in the league, I need to approach our finances, recruitment and squad management in a much more sustainable way. There's no point going gung-ho.

On the pitch

Direct and aggressively in your face, here's my interpretation of La Furia tactic.

Firstly, the formation. On analysing the squad, I felt our wide options in midfield weren't quite up to my standards to merit playing with wide midfielders. Pedro León, Fabián Orellana and Pablo De Blasis are still good options to keep around the club initially as cover to slot in if needed but I won't be looking to renew their deals that are expiring at the end of the season as they all approach the twilight of their careers.

Our central midfield is strong, as I outlined with some of the players in the previous section, so having a three in there gives us a very solid core, especially so with those three central defenders behind them as well. The wing-backs are key to giving us width both offensively and defensively.

Then we come to my favourite role on the game this year, the Pressing Forward, who partners an Advanced Forward. It's key to the Gegenpress system, chasing down loose balls and harassing opposition defenders. The duty of my PF changes in different circumstances. More often than not he'll stay on attack and look to score himself too, but I have tweaked it to support or even defend too at times to get him closer to the supporting players to act as more of a link man.

The only change I've made to the Gegenpress preset tactical style is to have us playing slightly more direct in our passing. This, coupled with us passing into space, sees us taking the game to the opposition and getting their defence turned. From there, if we don't have control of the ball, we're engaging them as high up the pitch as possible and pressing them extremely urgently.

It's glorious to watch at times and when it works perfectly it's majorly satisfying. One of those instances happened when Real Madrid visited Ipurua.

We restricted them to over half of their shots being long, and blocked five of their 12 too. Luck was of course involved, with Dani Carvajal being sent off but it was seconds after our opener that the numbers on each side were leveled up. I didn't anticipate Thibaut Courtois would make such a big error for our second goal, but I like to think that our high energy pressing and preventing short goalkeeper distribution had an effect too.

We made a huge 24 interceptions during the match, with Pedro Bigas making eight himself. We attempted 31 more tackles than them and completed 205 less passes. In your face and direct, love it.

¡Aupa Eibar!

Eskozia La Brava

SD Eibar shouldn't be in LaLiga.

If we move the town's tiny 27,000 population and their tiny ~8,000 capacity Ipurua stadium to one side for a second, there are other reasons why they shouldn't be competing against Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain's top tier.

For most of the 21st century so far, Eibar were where they probably should be, yo-yoing between the Segunda División and Segunda División B. That was until the 2013/14 season where they achieved promotion to LaLiga, winning the Segunda, after having been promoted from Segunda B just the season prior. Never mind how they compared to their future LaLiga opponents, they managed to win the Segunda with the smallest budget in that league too.

So they were heading to LaLiga with a tiny stadium and not much money, but as it turned out due to an absurd piece of Spanish law, they needed more money and fast. In order to prevent relegation back to Segunda B they were required to raise €1,724,272.95, quadruple their capital at the time. This was despite the club being awarded for their Modelo Eibar, recognising superb financial management as one of the few Spanish teams not to be in any debt whatsoever.

Once the socios had had the chance to buy the first round of shares available, after which the club was 28% of the way to their overall social capital goal, the #DefiendeAlEibar marketing campaign began. This second round was available for anyone around the globe to purchase shares in the club and once their promotion to LaLiga was officially confirmed on the pitch, that's when the sale of shares started snowballing from over 50 countries. It wasn't Jota's goal in their 1-0 win against Alaves that officially sealed promotion though, it was the club's oldest socio, Luis María Cendoya, symbolically purchasing the last share required that confirmed their promotion to LaLiga.

They took the first half of that 2014/15 LaLiga season by storm and sat in the top half come the halfway point. The loss of rock at the back, Raúl Albentosa, to Derby County in January took the heart away from a defence which had stood so firm in that rise up the table in the first half of the season. They struggled to cope and slid down the table, eventually finishing in 18th place, the last relegation spot.

However, while financial issues were almost their downfall a year earlier, luck was on Eibar's side this time. Elche had finished 13th in the table but due to an unpaid tax bill were relegated to the Segunda and Eibar were miraculously saved from relegation.

Eibar were in the right place at the right time as luck and money came into play once again in the 2015/16 season. LaLiga changed the way they sold their TV rights and the distribution of the money from those rights became much fairer, following a similar model to the English Premier League. Spain's big clubs could no longer negotiate their own TV deals that were leaving the country's smaller clubs behind. The Modelo Eibar coupled with this change has seen the club comfortably maintain their top tier status since that lucky season, finishing as high as 9th in the 2017/18 season.

Euskal Herria

The Basque Country isn't all about Athletic Club and their cantera approach. Bilbao may be the most populous city in the region and Athletic's San Mamés may be a footballing cathedral where 53,000 Basques, who've been educated on the ways of the club and the region, go to worship, but the Basque characteristics stretch across its seven historical regions.

Basque clubs make up 25% of the 2019/20 LaLiga. Eibar are now muscling in on the traditional rivalries between Athletic, Real Sociedad, Alavés and Osasuna. While those rivalries exist, the atmosphere is friendlier, almost party-like, in nature rather than hatred. They're celebrations of their shared heritage. The four Spanish Basque regions plus the three French Basque regions all come together to make one Euskal Herria.

Politics is not my favourite topic of conversation, but it's prevalent here to mention the historic attitudes of the Basques, and many other regions of Spain, towards Madrid and General Franco's regime. To me, it looks as though being the underdog is a character trait of the Basque people, and that filters down even further to the people of Eibar and its football club. We'll need to punch well above our weight if we're to achieve anything at the club.

Eskozia La Brava

There's always a link to Scotland. Aside from the relationship between those fighting for Basque and Scottish independence (politics...), there's a very strong direct connection between Eibar and Scotland.

Eskozia La Brava, Scotland the Brave, are Eibar's principal fan group. It was alcohol, naturally, that led Eibar fans to seek a closer link to Scotland. La Bombonera, Eibar's previous main fan group, looked at where their whisky bottles originated from and from watching the Rugby Five/Six Nations on television saw how passionately Scottish sports fans turned out to support their teams win, lose or draw. They decided to adopt this same mentality and since the early 2000s it's been Eskozia La Brava who have taken up this responsibility. The group has attended matches all over Scotland over the years and Celtic were invited to play in the clubs 75th anniversary match in 2015 at Ipurua.

Tartan, Saltires, Lion Rampants, See You Jimmy hats and Scottish national team and club shirts are regular features across Ipurua and opposition stadiums when Eskozia La Brava are in town. Away supports are virtually non-existent in Spain, but when Eibar play away there are usually a few, but crazy fans in attendance.

I'll be looking to bring in some Scottish staff and players to keep this connection with the fanbase going.

Modelo Eibar eta La Furia

As I said earlier, the Modelo Eibar is the approach to financial management at the club which has been widely acknowledged as one of the best in the country. I'll be looking to continue this excellent work in-game. I'm going to be judged on it too as the expectation is that I work within the wage budget set out by the board. Even with the tweaks to the way the TV revenue is distributed there is still a huge gulf between the global behemoths in LaLiga and the rest of the league. Despite the loyal core of Eskozia La Brava members, the club still doesn't sell out Ipurua regularly meaning that the financial gulf remains, even to the clubs in mid-table on the LaLiga turnover table.

I'll be expanding the model beyond just our finances too as the board also expect us to sign players under the age of 23 for the first team. Looking at the current first team squad, I'm deeming this essential while the board are only favouring it. My signing policy normally naturally leans towards this anyway but our average age of 29 is currently the highest in LaLiga. An injection of youth is required.

That injection of youth might help when it comes to La Furia. "The rage" was a style of play synonymous with Athletic and Spain, influenced by the British game. It was direct and aggressively in-your-face. Even into the 1990s the Spanish national team still played along these lines with former Athletic man, Javier Clemente, in charge. I'm not saying I'll be thumping long balls up to a targetman throughout the save, but I'll be looking to continue José Luis Mendilibar's high pressing game, getting into the faces of our opponents. This requires a certain profile of player, of which I'll be incorporating some aspects around La Furia into when I'm identifying new signings.

To summarise:

• I'm managing SD Eibar on FM20.

• We've got the smallest stadium in the league and will massively struggle to compete financially against the rest of LaLiga.

• There's going to be a Scottish flavour, of course.

• Good financial management is high on the agenda to continue the Modelo Eibar.

• As is a player identification approach around La Furia.

¡Aupa Eibar!

---

As soon as I discovered Eskozia La Brava and their links to Scotland, I knew Eibar would be the next club I manage on the game. Thankfully Euan McTear wrote an excellent book, Eibar the Brave, on their first season of struggle in LaLiga which detailed many other aspects of the club too. Big thanks to Euan as well for answering a few more questions I had around the club and the league. I really appreciate Andrew Miller from LaLiga Lowdown helping to confirm a few points too. Oh and the Basque/Athletic Club chapter of that book I always talk about obviously had a big influence on my decision too.

Sempre Vitória - O Fim

That's it. It's over. My FM19 save with Vitória in Portugal has come to an end. What a journey.

I'll go through how season eight finished up first and then round off by looking at my time at the club as a whole. This is going to be emotional.

Season Eight

At the halfway point we were 2nd in the table and trailed Benfica by three points in another two-horse title race. I walked you through a perfect hattrick that Pedro Ferreira scored against Boavista, three of his 31 goals so far at the halfway stage. Would he be able to sustain that form and fire my Vitória side to only our second Primeira Liga title win?

We did it! My time at the club ends with a league win, our second of the save. It was done in style as well, winning every single league match in the second half of the season. Here's a few tales of the tape:

• Primeira Liga record points total - 96 points

• Primeira Liga consecutive wins record - 24 matches

• Most goals scored in a season (during the save) - 102 scored

• Vitória's best defensive record (during the save) - 19 conceded

• Vitória B won LigaPro

• Vitória u23s win their league

• Vitória u19s win their league

• Pedro Ferreira's 41 league goals is the most scored since Jardel's 42 in 2001/02

Ferreira ended up with 53 goals in 51 matches this season, an utterly ridiculous goal tally and one I don't think any striker I've ever managed on any version of the game has reached before. I said in my introductory post that I wanted to produce and develop a player like Armando Marques, a Balon d'Or winning Vitória youth product from my time at Stirling on FM18. Ferreira was the focus of my last post and you'll remember he didn't come through a Vitória youth intake, but he was signed early enough to become a homegrown player, so I'll take that one as a win.

The save ended with a 3-0 win against Estoril. Two from Ferreira but they were the bread inbetween a long range Sigurd Grønli strike on his 258th appearance for the club. He was one of my first signings and has been incredible for me.

Alongside the league, we won the Supertaca at the start of the season and the Taca da Liga in January, that's a treble! If only we hadn't been embarrassingly knocked out of the Taca de Portugal at the first round we entered against lower league opposition way back in October.

One thing I didn't mention in the last post is that we'd topped our Champions League group that contained Napoli, Valencia and Celtic. The furthest we'd gone prior to this season was the 1st knockout round, falling at that stage in the last two seasons. Atletico Madrid knocked us out two seasons ago, but we gained revenge this time round, overcoming a 1-0 away leg defeat to win 2-0 at home. Vitória youth product, Igor Chaves, getting the scoring underway in that one. A lovely sight.

That took us to Turin to face Juventus and another 1-0 away defeat. The Estádio D. Afonso Henriques is a fortress though and we blew them away in the second leg to go through to the semi final of the Champions League, 4-2 on aggregate. One of the best performances I've seen from us throughout the save.

The semi final almost topped it, almost.

Conceded two away goals in the first leg, 3-0 down in the second leg.

Nothing to lose, go attacking, get a goal back.

10mins to go, go very attacking, get another goal back. One more and we're into the CL final on away goals...

FM you're a cruel wee bitch sometimes aren't you. pic.twitter.com/qaAMIWb98j

— FMSamo (@FM_Samo) October 5, 2019

A good performance in the first leg was almost a great one until we conceded a 92nd minute goal to draw 2-2. Those two away goals would be our downfall in the end, but we were so close to bloody doing it. Spurs went on to beat Milan in the final. What could have been. Football Manager, eh.

My Time at Vitória

I didn't know what to expect when I started the save. I always feel like the start of a new save should only have one aim, survival. Once you get through that initial period of uncertainty you can push on. I had an aim to break into Os Três Grandes and in truth we almost instantly overtook Sporting to break into the three, albeit not in total number of trophies won overall. We finished above them in every single season.

Two Supertaca wins, four Taca da Liga wins, three Taca de Portugal wins and two Primeira Liga titles. It's not a bad haul at all. I'm 3rd in the Portuguese nation Hall of Fame behind Rui Vitória and Otto Glória.

I spoke a lot about the development pathway during the save. Portugal is certainly a nation I'd recommend if you're looking for a nation that is prime for youth development. I've had some great players come through our own youth intake, proof of that is in the table below with Luis Miguel, a homegrown central defender, being the record sale of the save.

I was able to snap up some incredible talent early on in their careers from other Portuguese sides too, Pierreganni Robalo being proof of that in the table below. Toni Borevkovic wasn't too bad there either, coming in on a cheap fee from Rio Ave and playing incredibly solidly for six season before moving on to a bigger club and earning the club a big fee.

The links the country has to Brazil meant I had a couple of scouts watching players at all times and while Felix Jorge was the highest fee I paid for a player, a big profit was still made. Then there's the region that you should always be scouting if you're looking for talent, Eastern Europe. Vasiljevic, Gvardiol and Lovro Majer all made the club considerable sums of money. I outlined Brazil and Eastern Europe as key markets for us in my introductory post too so it's great to see it come to fruition throughout the save.

Player	Signed From	Signed For	Sold To	Sold For
Luis Miguel	Homegrown	n/a	Real Madrid	£52m
Felix Jorge	Internacional	£12m	Arsenal	£50m
Pierreganni Robalo	Uniao Sintrense	£1.1m	Atletico Madrid	£50m
Aleksandar Vasiljevic	Partizan	£650k	Man City	£40m
João Cerqueira	Boavista	£600k	Barcelona	£35m
Josko Gvardiol	Dinamo Zagreb	£5.75m	Arsenal	£33m
Rafa Soares	Already at Club	n/a	Spurs	£28m
Edgar Branco	Real	£300k	Real Madrid	£27m
Toni Borevkovic	Rio Ave	£400k	PSG	£27m
Filipe Soares	Estoril	£2m	Gladbach	£24.5m
Lovro Majer	Dinamo Zagreb	£3.2m	Guangzhou	£23m
Fernando Cardozo	Club Olimpia	£600k	RBLeipzig	£17m

There's so many players still at the club who would certainly make it onto this list of players I've sold for £15m+ throughout the save. I've been knocking back bids of £50m+ for Ferreira and Joveljic for a couple of windows now. Igor Chaves might have joined Luis Miguel on the list as being a Vitória homegrown prospect earning us big money. I picked Didier Navarro up for a cool £9m from Toulouse at the beginning of this season and he might just be one of the best playmakers I've ever seen. He would have developed incredibly with even more game time.

There was just over £1m in the balance when I took over the club at the start of the 2018/19 season. As I get ready to leave at the end of the 2025/26 season, there's £280m in the bank. A 27900% increase isn't too bad a legacy at all. The club is just outside the top 20 clubs in the continent. We're now valued at over £1bn the stadium is packed out every fortnight and all of the facilities are completely maxed out.

That's it then. FM19 is over for me. It's been a great save and a great year. Thanks to everyone for following along on here, on Twitter and on Slack too.

My FM19 Tactic: The 3-5-2 Returns

It's very difficult to put the heartache of losing out on winning the league title on the last day of the season followed up by losing a cup final a week later to one side but a new season rolling around goes a long way in helping to forget what had come before.

We ended season six trophyless after a very successful couple of years prior. The aim for season seven is obviously to wrestle at least one of those trophies back into our cabinet. We'll be looking to do it with a new tactical approach.

The 3-5-2 returns

Loyal readers will remember way back to the 4th of November 2018 when I joined Vitória and outlined the tactic I was looking to play. The key aspects of it were the three central defenders, wing-backs that were expected to defend and attack in equal measure and the forward three, who were either two up front and one behind or two behind and one up front. It got us where we needed to be in that first season, a third place finish.

That was back when the game was first released though and there was a few issues with movement up front. In season two I switched to the very successful 4-1-2-3 and the trophies started arriving in Guimarães. I always spoke about moving back to the 3-5-2 though and after writing this piece for the Football Manager site I made the switch ahead of season seven.

One of the big reasons why I wanted to go back to it was to play two up front and pair Dejan Joveljic and Pedro Ferreria together. I always had a tough choice picking between them for the lone striker role in the previous tactic. I reckoned they'd be a danger for any opposition defence and that's been the case so far as they've scored 21 goals between them across the first half of the season. It hasn't all been easy though in terms of the switch back to 3-5-2. It's taken a lot of tweaking to get to the point where the tactic looks like the below.

Despite a positive start to the season I'd spotted a few issues with how I'd initially set this up. Issue one was the attacking midfield role. I'd selected a Shadow Striker, as I'd done in the tactic I'd outlined for the 3-5-2 article on the FM site. This is a role I'd used extensively back on FM17 and had great success with but looking at how it plays out on FM19 it's not quite the same.

My perception from the previous game was that it was all action and moved very fluidly across the front line, making excellent penetrating runs and getting into great positions in and around the box. What I was seeing on FM19 was nothing like this. There was flashes, like Lovro Majer's lovely finish on the break against Estoril or his 90th minute screamer against Academica to snatch the win in the Taca da Liga, but on the whole it was ineffectual.

The below screenshot is an example from the 0-0 against bottom of the table Tondela. Majer was getting on the ball but just continually playing it out wide, presumably to our wing backs who were constantly in space. Crosses are a big aspect of our play and I don't mind us attempting a lot of them but there was very little central danger.

I've shifted the role to being an Advanced Playmaker on Attack. Ensuring he attracts the ball, plays a little bit deeper but is constantly looking for options ahead of him has seen his influence on matches increase. Passes, key passes and chances created are all up versus the previous role. When analysing the AM role it also led me to look into issue two, the forward roles.

I really struggled to settle on the roles for the strike duo. Complete Forward on Attack did so well as the lone striker in the previous formation that I wondered whether I should incorporate it into the new duo? I knew I wanted one being the out ball and one linking with the midfield. A Poacher doesn't move into channels so I stuck with that for a good portion of the season but there would be matches that would just pass him by. A Deep Lying Forward on Support would certainly drop in and contribute to our approach play but would it encroach into the space the AM is operating in?

Eventually I settled on the Attack version of the DLF partnered with an Advanced Forward. The DLF is still linking well with the rest of the side but finds himself getting on the end of chances too due to his position higher up the pitch. The AF does move into channels which goes against one of my ideas for the tactic but paired with a DLF who does the same, more often than not one will make that move and the other will stay central, and vice versa.

Issue three was the balance in central midfield. I knew I wanted to keep a Mezzala after how well the role had performed previously but partnered with what other role? With the back three providing more than enough defensive cover, my initial thought with the second CM role was a ball winner. I've eventually settled on the Carrilero, similarly to my initial 3-5-2 attempt. He'll provide support for the LWB bombing forward and link well. I tried out a Ball Winning Midfielder and just a standard Central Midfielder, both on Support, too, but I'm finding the balance of the side overall much better with the Carrilero there. Plus it means I'm playing a Carrilero and a Mezzala together. I'm so hipster.

Results

Has our new style led to positive results?

Things have been really positive on the whole. We started the season excellently as new formation bounce took hold before new formation fatigue set in at the beginning of October. A couple of poor results, including our only domestic defeat of the season so far, saw me tweak a few roles and instructions. It wasn't until the 1-1 draw with Gil Vicente followed by the drab 0-0 with Tondela though that I took the time to properly analyse how we were set up and looked into tweaking how we would look going forward.

The best time for reflection is when you're on top.

With me going through those issues previously you might have been thinking we were languishing low down in the table. We're top at the half way point, albeit Benfica have games in hand that will take them level with us if they win them. Defences win titles and ours have been rock solid so far. Absolutely no issues at the back at all in the new tactic. As is customary, we've also made it through to the Taca da Liga semi final and Taca de Portugal 6th round.

We were drawn against Real Madrid, Lyon and Mainz in the Champions League group stage. Would you look at these results and think we would qualify for the knockout round?

Because we did. Somehow.

Despite Mainz being Germany's new powerhouse after consecutive top four Bundesliga finishes I hoped we could take at least four points from them, we only got one. We took four points from Lyon in last season's group stage and none this season as they topped the group. Despite Real battering us for 180 minutes home and away, we managed to steal six points from them and finish 2nd on the head-to-head record. I don't see us doing the same to Man City in the first knockout round.

After around six seasons playing the same way I'd slipped into an FM comfort zone. Stepping out of that by changing the tactic has woken me up and, at a time when it looks as though interest in FM19 is waning for so many other people, kept me keen to keep coming back to Vitória. Bring on the second half of the season.

The Mezzala on FM - Mez Que Un Role

Football Manager 2018 saw the Mezzala role introduced to the game. It had gained some traction in the non-FM world due to the performances of Ángel di María for Real Madrid in what was dubbed as the central winger role but when researching I found that it's been part of the Italian football vernacular for years.

When the role appeared alongside the Carrilero and Segundo Volante I vowed never to use them. Never heard of them. Far too hipster for me. FM doesn't really need them. Fast forward to FM19 and I've now crossed two of them off the list. The Carrilero appeared in my first tactical attempt and now the Mezzala is key to how we play. So important that it's merited it's own blog post analysing the role in my system.

Why the Mezzala?

When I initially changed to the 4-1-2-3 setup I went with my trusted roles of a CM(A) and a CM(S). I've had some great success with the standard CM role over the past few editions of the game, to the point where it's probably been my favourite role. It's so customisable that it can play a variety of different ways in similar tactical setups.

However in the set up above I was finding that they were slightly too static and perhaps I was being slightly too cautious, especially so with that CM(S). I was looking for something a little more dynamic. A role that would play on the front foot and drag the side further up the pitch. Enter the Mez.

The description for the Mezzala role makes reference to the central winger like I mentioned in the introduction and also says they operate in the half-spaces. Control the half-space and you'll have quite a good handle on controlling the match. I didn't just change the CM(S) to a Mez(S) though. I went the whole hog and double Mezzed it. We're controlling the whole of the half-space now.

The Mez(S) does his fair share of defensive work in addition to attempting to influence play going forward whereas the Mez(A) is deemed much more of an offensive threat and leaves the defending to teammates. However, defending from the front is just as vital and one of the tweaks I've made to both roles is asking them to close down more. I want them harassing opposition midfielders into making mistakes and winning the ball back for us higher up the pitch.

I tend not to like handing out instructions to the entire team. I'm much more likely to make a tweak or two to certain individuals and another of those on both Mezzalas is asking them be more direct in their passing. I see this as giving them a bit more licence to attempt to unlock opposition defences. If they don't manage to do that and they make a mistake or lose the ball, there's plenty behind them to win it back.

Along that same line of thinking I've also added take more risks onto the Mez(S). Here's how those tweaks look to both roles. Proof that I'm all but playing two Mez(A)s aside from the hardcoded behaviours under the match engine hood.

Combination Play

Here's the current entire setup and how the Mezzalas fit into it all.

I find that it's important to think about the combinations of the roles you're picking and then how it fits into the overall team setup. Here's some examples of the combos within my setup:

• The two central defenders and the DLP provide stability for the rest of the side to create and play

• The Mezzalas receive the ball short from the DLP

• They spray it out left to the rampaging oncoming full back, usually in acres of space

• They play a short pass forward for the IF(A), who's asked to sit narrower

• The W(S) has room to run into on the right and is often found by the Mezzalas

• A direct pass in behind the defence for the striker to run onto, especially with passes into space being encouraged

• When play progresses, the Mezzalas quick to get up and support attacks

• They're often open in space on the edge of the box for a long shot too, if the opportunity for one is there they should take it

• Coupled with our counter press, with the Mezzalas being asked to close down more they work hard and often chase to win the ball back in midfield

That, in a nutshell, is how we play. Here's some images and GIFs of that in action.

Examples

Supporting Attacks

In the below example, we've just won the ball back from a corner. Joveljic has received it and is holding it up. As the Mez(A), Grønli is absolutely busting a gut to get up there and support the attack.

When he eventually receives the ball just inside the penalty area before he fires it home, our winger, inside forward and support Mezzala are all up there too.

Defensive Work

Tyler Boyd has picked up the ball in his own half. You can see Reisinho, number 25, quite close by in that first image. Boyd decides to dribble with the ball and heads for the right wing.

In the second image, Boyd still has the ball but he's in our half now. Reisinho is still tracking him and has been joined by Pedro Ferreira, playing DLP, to chase him down. The centre of midfield has been vacated and left largely open by these two pulling out of position to win the ball back, but if they do win it back, that's fine. In the third image, Mez(S) Reisinho tackles Boyd and the ball goes out for a throw.

Diagonal Balls

This won't just be a Mezzala role only thing, but I love the cross field diagonal balls they play to the wings.

We've won the ball back from a long goal kick. A few short passes later, my DLP keeps the ball moving on to the Mez(S) then bang, straight away we're on the front foot again. Mário Ferreira bombs down the wing to put a cross in and create a chance at the back post for Majer our IF(A).

It's not all beautiful 50-yarders. They keep the ball moving and the pass into space instruction for the entire team helps that too.

Grønli in the Mez(A) role here picks up a loose ball after a throw in and gets the ball moving out over to the oncoming full back on the left. A few quick passes recyling possession and Ferreira's got a tap in at the back post.

Incisive Assists

The positioning and movement of both Mezzalas sees them being in the right place at the right time more often than not to carve out openings and create chances for us to score.

Picking up the second ball again here, Grønli, playing in the Mez(S) role in this match, isn't closed down well enough giving him time and space to thread the ball in behind for Joveljic to slot past the keeper. I'd say this is us controlling the half space pretty well.

Long Shot Klaxons

Like I said, if the opportunity is open to shoot, why wouldn't you?

Shoooooooot. Similarly to the assist above, Reisinho has acres of space and plenty of time to take a touch and pick his spot to score. He chose a lovely finish into the bottom left by the way.

Where to improve?

Right now, I'm not actually sure. Some of the football we're playing is glorious. We're dangerous going forward, expansive in our passing and defend well from the front. I haven't seen any weaknesses from either Mezzala, or indeed any aspect of our play, that I really want to change.

Have you got any suggestions? If so, let me know! What's your experience of the Mezzala role too? I'd love to hear about it.

My FM19 Training Approach

FM19 being released was accompanied by massive changes to training. It had been often suggested, hugely debated and highly anticipated. Gone was the handful of options available for us to pick that we'd have to have on for at least three months for them to make an impact on player development but that we'd do once and just leave for the entirety of our saves. In their place came a whole host of options to pick and the ability to slot them into three sessions per day, rather than for the entire week as before.

Fast forward to now and a lot of what I'm seeing on Twitter and Slack is people saying they're leaving it to their assistant, either completely, or tweaking from the suggestions made to them. Everyone is entitled to play the game however the hell they want to of course, but I wonder why, after all that expectation, that it's not being utilised as much.

I don't know the answer to that at all, mainly because I'm absolutely loving it. It's one of my most visited screens in my save so far. As with everything else on the game, I don't claim to know the ins and outs of how it works or how it's supposed to work. All I can do is outline how I've been approaching it so far and the shift in my approach in my third season at Vitória.

For the first two seasons of my time at the club I was tweaking it almost on a weekly basis, depending on how I wanted to approach the upcoming match plus the general aspects I wanted to train the players in. This covered the majority of all of the new options available to us to pick from, but without much thought behind it. From this season, season three, I've started to adopt some of the principles of tactical periodisation in my approach.

Tactical Periodisation

The concept was developed at the University of Porto by the mind of lecturer, Vítor Frade. The simple explanation of the methodology is that everything in training should be related to in-game scenarios. These can be explained under defensive and offensive organisation, and the transition from defence to attack and vice versa. If you want to play a certain way in game situations, these must be done first on the training field.

The periodisation aspect stems from its repetition. Training follows a cyclical plan and each day of training is designed to follow those four in-game scenarios mentioned above. Football is unpredictable, but the repeated training of these actions is creating habits and eventually predictability is created.

I mentioned the methodology in my introductory post for the save. Two of its most well known adopters are José Mourinho and André Villas-Boas, and although both have suffered a bit of damage to their reputations in recent years, they have both successfully implemented its workings at various clubs across their careers. Brendan Rodgers and England rugby coach, Eddie Jones, are also known to adhere to the concept. How have I implemented it on FM19 though?

On Football Manager 2019

I felt it'd be good to try and base my training schedule on the game around tactical periodisation because it starts with the question of "how do you want your team to play?" It's the million dollar question really. Who doesn't want their side to be strong in defence, dangerous going forward and transitioning seamlessly between the two?

My attempt at Tactical Periodisation involves introducing a lot of the new module options that are available for us to pick now. I've tried to narrow in on ones I think are relevant to not just now I want us to play the game, but that will also aid player development. It's important to keep in mind what each module does by checking out its description. Below is a typical example of a Tactical Periodisation training cycle.

And here's how mine stacks up on the game in comparison. Instead of repeating the same cycle week after week, I've gone for a two week cycle that repeats throughout the season.

The "attacking" cycle

The "defensive" cycle

You'll see straight away that there's one difference in that there's no days off for my players, however the post-match recovery days and pre-match "activation" days are less strenuous than the rest. The other thing to note is that with our participation in continental competition along with, at the time of writing, still being in both domestic cup competitions, this cycle is the ideal one. Very rarely does it actually play out like this week-on-week.

I did say I was just basing it around Tactical Periodisation rather than completely replicating because you can see the cycles both start off with sessions that aren't based on a specific game moment. The overall session is almost a continuation of our recovery, just getting the players in, moving around and putting a little bit of work into every aspect of their games. Session two is a physical one, as that fits in to my overall managerial approach. I love players who have strong physical attributes.

Tuesday to Thursday is all about working on the key aspects of our game. Of course, in FM terms (looking at the descriptions of the modules) very few of these sessions have any impact at all on the upcoming match. However in non-FM terms I think it makes sense. I want us to be good at attacking down the wings, directly and to be patient when attacking, so I focus on those areas throughout the week. Similarly to defending. We need to be solid in defending wide areas and when our opponents have the ball on the deck. Both the offensive and defensive schedules train pressing, while we're working on creating and taking chances one week, and restricting the oppositions chances in the other.

Looking through both the attacking and defensive cycles, I think, I've got all key aspects covered in terms of the breadth and focus on players training attributes. This is obviously key if we want our players to be working on improving and being the best they can be, in conjunction with the quality of our coaching staff and training facilities.

Going against the principles again, our pre-match prep isn't the same in each cycle. I'll vary this depending on our opponent and what I want to be working on. If it's a tough away match coming up I'll focus on our defensive shape while if it's a home match we should be winning against a side who'll sit in I want us to have a bit more of an attacking impetus.

Set pieces are a vital part of football nowadays. I don't think it'll be long before SI bring in set piece specific coaches like a few clubs have on their books now. When you have someone in your squad with the ability to deliver a set piece like we do, it would be stupid not to focus specific sessions on it. These sessions provide a potential boost for your upcoming match as well as generally training players on taking, and attributes related to being in the box. One oversight is that I'm not currently focusing on free kicks, only corners. That will change going forward.

The impact

The beauty of Football Manager means I'm not entirely sure! I've set up this way because I was interested in the Tactical Periodisation methodology after reading about it in the European Game and wanted to see how could be applied on the game. I'm hoping it'll work well for us. Someone else playing the game might be setting up training in a completely different way and be finding much more success than me. I said at the beginning that some aren't even paying attention to training and are still very successful.

As with anything, you get out what you put in. I'm absolutely loving the changes to how it's set up this year, it's probably one of my favourite parts of the game now. I spend a lot of time on the screens ensuring that everything is set up correctly for the month ahead. If you haven't given it a shot yet, have a bash. You might enjoy it too.

Further reading

If you want to know more about Tactical Periodisation then here's some links off to more content to read. There's much more to it than I've outlined in the piece.

Tactical Periodisation: MOURINHO’S BEST-KEPT SECRET?

Training Ground Guru

NY Times' piece on Vítor Frade

The Porto chapter of the European Game book.

My FM19 Tactic: 4-1-2-3

The start to competitive football in season two hasn't been positive. We've struggled for consistency and really struggled to create meaningful goalscoring chances. At the time of starting to write this post, at the end of October 2019 in-game, we're languishing in the bottom half of the league on nine points from eight matches. 

In season one, the vast majority of our play came down the flanks. Our wing backs seemed to always be open and had all the time in the world to pick their spot in the penalty area, despite our cross completion not being amongst the best in the league. So far this season we seem to have been "found out". We're too one dimensional. With us attempting 80 crosses in a recent defeat away to Midtjylland in the Europa League a prime example. It's time to take a look at what was wrong, and try to stop the rot.

Then

After the last tactical tweak, when I moved an extra man up front, this is how it looked. I couldn't settle on any of the roles for that midfield trio at all and so much of our play was geared down mainly the left hand side. That Midtjylland match is the one I'll be looking at when outlining why we needed a change.

Over-reliance on crosses

FCM also set up in a formation with wing backs, but theirs only attempted a grand total of 11 crosses. That's even with what looked like two inside forwards cutting inside and creating the space out wide for them to bomb on. Both Soares and García attempted 34 crosses each of our overall 80. Don't get me wrong, I love a cross. As I always say when I get asked in press conferences, if we keep getting the ball into the box there's a good chance we'll connect with at least one of them. But this just looks a little bit ridiculous, doesn't it?

Despite moving to two up front to give our crossers more options to aim at in the centre, quite often it was still just that AF waiting in the middle. The DLF(S) and AM(A) couldn't get into the area to support quick enough, especially with crosses from the left hand side, as you can see by the screenshot below.

We're chasing the game in this screenshot, 3-1 down in the 90th minute, but it illustrates probably an error on my part. #19 has just sprayed a long ball out to Soares in the WB(A) role. He's got acres of space to run into and gets into a great position to cross the ball, getting ahead of FCM's right back. All he's got to aim at is our AF. #9 is our DLF(S), who the play just seems to have totally passed by. #19 and #22 are our AM(S) and BBM, while #2 is the RWB(S). FCM easily deal with the cross and it's cleared. This happened time and time again, not just throughout this match.

Centrally impotent

Maybe I'm expecting too much here. Maybe I've just completely got it wrong tactically, but I would expect a lot more of our play to come through the centre.

Here's our touches and heat map, again from that FCM match. So much of the play was skewed down that left hand side with the LWB combining with our DLP in the defensive third and then likely with the DLF/AM in the attacking third. Our central midfield pairing played a combined 141 passes between them, only three of these were key, and only one of them was into the box. The players playing in the AM role during the match played 48 passes, with none of these going into the box. Our strikers only received the ball to their feet in the FCM box a handful of times throughout the match.

I feel disappointed that I've already strayed away from my initial tactical idea, but it just wasn't working. Did I give up too quickly? Maybe, but I felt the change needed to happen. It's still there to potentially move back to and work on some more, but here's how it looks now. It's a brand new approach.

Now

I'd never been a fan of a three man central defence until the previous tactic, always preferring a more familiar to me four at the back. This is a return to that. Rafa Soares on the left hand side still gets up to support attacks but his influence on our overall attacking play is taken down a couple of notches. Wakaso in that DLP(D) role actually does drop in to form a three centrally quite often, but mainly to show for the ball from the keeper or the two CBs. The right sided full back is on a support duty to provide more defensive solidity, but with that DLP dropping in, there is occasionally licence to switch that role to a wing back and/or duty to attacking.

The current central midfield pairing is just that, two central midfielders. The right hand side is on attack, with the left on support. The CM(A) was one of my favourite roles on FM18 as part of my 4-4-2, so I'm keen to see how well it gets up to support our attacking players. The CM(S) is in there to provide balance to the side and support at either end of the pitch. The roles aren't set in stone yet, but early indications are okay.

The attacking trio is an IF(A), W(S) and CF(A). The inside forward has been an important part of the turnaround so far, which I'll go into in a second, while those latter two roles are still up for debate. The winger on support has a few subtle differences to the winger on attack, the starting position being one of them. While I feel we do have the players behind the role to be able to cover it being on an attack duty, it starting on support sees the link up being much easier with the players supporting the role, mainly the CM(A) and FB(S) behind him. I do love a winger bombing on and crossing it from the byline but I want to leave it up to the player to make the right decision on what's needed in the moment.

Right now I'm still a bit unconvinced by my CF but looking at the role description it's exactly what I want so I'm sticking with it. I want him to link play like a DLF, I want him to be our spearhead like a poacher and I want him to hold it up like a target man. Too often in season one in the previous tactic our main striker just seemed to be a decoy to occupy opposition defenders. Maybe I'm being greedy that I also want my striker to be doing that too alongside all those other qualities.

Inside forward key

The use of wide players further up the pitch now stretches the backline of our opposition, whereas before they seemed willing to concede the wide areas to our wing backs bombing on. It was originally on support duty, but as pointed out by FMPressure on my channel on FMSlack, who would be well positioned to get up to support the lone striker if the IF wasn't on attack? The switch has been a key one so far. Despite losing 4-2 against them earlier on this season, from a winning position no less, across November we managed to beat Maritimo twice, scoring eight and conceding two.

When Luiz Phellype wins and brings down a long kick out from our keeper, drawing out one of Maritimo's CBs in the process, there's only one thing on Arabidze's mind as our IF on attack. He doesn't stay out wide, he drives into that open space in behind his opposing full back. This draws the second CB over and Davidson, our winger on support, has an easy tap in at the back post to round off a 5-2 Taca de Portugal 4th round win.

Defensive solidity

We'd only kept two clean sheets between August and October. We kept three in November alone, including two excellent 1-0 victories in the Europa League against PAOK and the return match against Midtjylland. From conceding three goals against them in Denmark to only allowing them four shots on goal in total just a few weeks later. Here's how.

Counter-pressing was part of our previous tactic too, but teams found it easier to attack us with no players immediately engaging their oncoming full backs. The introduction of our advanced wide men stops that now, and FCM's wing backs and central midfield pairing struggled to get into the match. Their wing backs, specifically, had pass completion percentages of 55% and 52% as we pressured them into making rushed passes or long clearances which were easily dealt with.

Another bit of a difference can be seen below.

Before, our wing backs were pushed much higher up, so we basically only had a defensive base of the back three. Now I'd say we've got a defensive base of five. Mabil has made what the game classes as a "dribble", running from well inside his own half with the ball at his feet. He's evaded the attempted tackle from our DLP #8 who'd been tracking him, and it looks as though it's just a simple cross into the box for their #19 to score. Luckily, my RB #2 is covering and manages to block the cross. We drastically outnumber FCM, with six back there up against their three most advanced players.

Change of player

André André has arguably been our talisman so far this season. Prior to the tactical switch my captain had scored six goals, albeit three of those were penalties and another was a rebound from a missed penalty. However from switching things up a bit in the hunt for results, Sigurd Grønli has emerged as a contender for the CM(A) slot. The 19-year-old Norwegian scored the below equaliser against Boavista and is a set piece magician too which just adds an extra threat for us.

Previously I'd been shoehorning natural wide players into roles behind or as strikers. Mário Ferreira is another who's going to benefit from the tactical switch, moving out to the left hand side and being unleashed in his natural inside forward role. He scored the winning goal in that 1-0 win over Midtjylland with some classic inside forward play.

I'm trying to be much more fluid tactically on FM19, but I didn't expect to be shifting my entire system around this early on in my save. Results are certainly much more positive since the change though. Things are looking up for the rest of my second season with Vitória. If you've got any other pointers you want to share about my tactic or if you fancy giving it a shot yourself then just let me know in the comments or on Twitter. Thanks for reading, as ever.

Sempre Vitória!

My FM19 Tactic: 3-5-2

My time as Vitória manager on Football Manager 2019 has begun. It's my first day in the job. Before I even click continue I'm going to go through a series of steps to evaluate the essential aspects of the club. This post will go through how I'm aiming to set us up on the pitch and how I arrived at the thinking behind it.

Jumping straight in to talk tactics might be slightly unconventional, but if I'm going to judge the quality of the players already at the club (which will be the next post), I need to know how well they'll fit in to my preferred system. 

I'm quite a tactically stubborn manager. When I find something that suits my players and gets results on the pitch, I don't tend to stray from it. When the RBLeipzig narrow 4-2-3-1 got going it was beautiful and the Stirling 4-4-2 took the club to the next level. I didn't actually play those ways for the entirety of my time with either club, but they were the tactical setups that stuck for numerous seasons. I don't want to take that approach with Vitória, I want to be more tactically fluid. Shift the system about, change roles, be more adventurous or pragmatic when the time calls for it. I do have a way of setting the team up in mind to start off with though.

Tactics aren't really what I find most interesting in football or in Football Manager, but they're so important, of course. My FM inspiration usually comes from reading stories about clubs, their communities, their players, the way they approach things off the pitch, it came from somewhere a little bit different for this. I've watched the amateur team I used to play for a couple of times this season and the way they're setting up led me to wanting to see if it would translate well onto the game. This isn't a tactical recreation of Brazil 1970 or Arsenal's Invincibles. This is me recreating the tactic of a team that barely anyone watches play in the lower rungs of the Lothian and Edinburgh Amateur Football Association.

The Tactic

The thinking behind it

They had three central defenders forming a solid base for the rest of the side. The wide support was provided by wing backs. They were expected to be prepared to bomb on and provide support going forward at any opportunity, while also remaining aware of their defensive duties. On the game, it sets itself up fairly simply.

The midfield has been slightly trickier for me to set up in-game. The midfield roles are quite hard to determine when watching the side. When one drove forward, the other sat and covered and vice versa. Both were expected to be capable in covering in front of the defence but also getting forward to give the attack a bit of additional support. I've gone for a DLP on support to give us a playmaker in there, able to link the defence and attack, competent in the tackle but able to create chances too. On the left hand side, I've chosen a carrilero. A role I haven't used at all since it was introduced last year, and one I didn't really ever have any intention of using, until it slotted nicely into this tactic. That left wing back bombs forward and vacates a fair bit of space in behind. The carrilero will just shuttle across to cover in and in an attacking sense, is just expected to provide a bit of support to link the units on the pitch.

The attacking options have also been tricky for me to set roles for. The three are usually quite interchangeable, almost having free roles to just cause panic, confusion and chaos. Of course, that's only slightly transferable onto the game with the ability to only swap players in two positions, rather than being able to set them to continually switch around. The treq just does his own thing, expected to dribble, take risks and roam around. It's probably quite a good role for what's expected. I used the shadow striker role to incredible effect at RBLeipzig and I think it should work quite well here too. Again, it's about encouraging movement but with the player expected to get on the end of goalscoring chances as well as creating them. I've instructed both the treq and SS to run wide with the ball to see whether it disrupts the opposition any further, with the SS also being set to roam from position too.

The forward role is the one I'm most unsure of right now. During my time on the beta I tried it out the DLF on support before settling on starting here with it on attack. I've loved that base role on the last two games and in theory it should work well again here. Dropping deep and linking play, but also getting into the box and on the end of crosses or through balls. To add to the hopeful chaos, I've set the DLF up with a PI of roam from position.

Alternative front three

How would those two behind the striker work coming inside from the wings? Just something else I'll be trying out during pre-season and one to keep in mind when looking through the squad. Wingers won't be forced out, they'll very much have a role to play whether it's the treq/SS or this alternative. I said on the recent One More Game podcast episode that I'm very much about fitting the players into roles I want them to play, rather than shaping my tactic around their preferred roles.

This isn't a tactical post...

So I'm not going to go through the additional team instructions just yet. I haven't even played a match yet. It's just me showcasing how we'll be lining up so I can judge the quality of my new players up against it. I'll be analysing the tactic and how it plays eventually though, so keep an eye out for that coming once the season is underway.

Sempre Vitória!

Sempre Vitória

I'm heading to Portugal to join Vitória Sport Clube, or as I'll be referring to them throughout the save, Vitória. 

The club is based in the northern city of Guimarães and competes in the Primeira Liga, the top tier of Portuguese football. Similarly to the majority of Portuguese football clubs, they've never won the title as it's been dominated by the "Big Three", Benfica, Sporting and Porto. Other than a couple of cup wins there isn't much history of note to take you through, which is good because I wasn't going to anyway. It's all about the future with me taking the reigns.

Why Vitória?

An important factor in me settling on Vitória was that point I just made. The club hasn't had much success in the past. It's open for me to take them over and hopefully add to the, currently quite bare, trophy cabinet. I'll be able to shape the club in the way that I want to, and playing in Portugal will also help with that too. The relatively free restrictions on transfers in the country is something I'm hoping to use to my advantage in the same way that so many other clubs in the country have done in the past. Financial Investment in Potential Growth (FIPG) is a strategy Benfica and Porto, in particular, have used to great effect. You don't need me to give you an exhaustive list but the sales of James Rodriguez, Falcao, Hulk, Axel Witsel and Ederson from those two clubs have contributed to huge sums of money being made by Portuguese clubs in the transfer market over the last 10 years. I want to ensure Vitória has a similar level of attractiveness for players to decide they want to join the club to better themselves and further their career. No nationality is off-limits for this, if they've got potential then they'll be more than welcome to join the club. This is similar to the way I played with Stirling in the latter half of my time on FM18. It's just what I naturally gravitate towards and how I enjoy managing.

I've spoken about it a lot since I finished reading it a while ago now, but The European Game book also inspired my move to Portugal. There's chapters in the book on each of the Big Three, and it highlighted just how much they, and the country in general, have been at the forefront of player and coach development in recent times. The Porto chapter is about the tactical innovators developed at the club. The likes of José Mourinho and André Villas-Boas delivered unprecedented success to the Dragões with their meticulous approach to tactical periodisation, developed by one of their mentors, Vitór Frade. The Sporting chapter details what went in to creating Cristiano (they are the only club to have developed two Ballon d'Or winners), and the spine of Portugal's 2016 European Championship winning squad (10 of the 14 players used in the final had been in Sporting's youth system). The Benfica chapter focuses on Caixa, the club's state-of-the-art training facility that overlooks the city they represent across the River Tagus. The Lisbon club are by far the most popular in the country, and across the former African colonies too. The Benfica LAB is at the forefront of football development and is investing more so now than ever before into developing and retaining youngsters, rather than selling them on. The stretch target at Vitória will be to change the Big Three to the Big Four, competing at the top level of Portuguese football.

The links are somewhat tenuous, but Portugal has been the destination for a few Scots moving abroad in recent years too. Ian Cathro first met Nuno Espírito Santo when he and the now Wolves manager were studying for their coaching badges at the Scottish FA's famed Largs course. Cathro joined Nuno at Rio Ave for a couple of seasons, before they moved on to Valencia together. Cathro also has links to the Scot that is currently plying his trade in the country, Ryan Gauld. They worked closely together at Cathro's coaching school before both joining Dundee United. Cathro has been derided after his disastrous managerial tenure at Hearts and Gauld hasn't exactly been able to make the breakthrough at Sporting since his move there in 2014, I'm hoping to buck the trend at Vitória.

Another of the big reasons for choosing Vitória is that I had a few dealings with them during my time at Stirling. Dinis Pinto and Ença Sambú came from the club. Both players were signed for paltry fees of £425k each, had great stints in Stirling shirts and went on to be sold for a combined £30m. With me in charge at Vitória, I'm hoping players like that realise their potential by staying with us, rather than being sold early on in their careers. I wouldn't argue with getting £30m for eventually selling two players though, every player has their price when managed by me. Talking players, another that I'd spotted entering the youth system at Vitória during my time at Stirling was Armando Marques.

Unfortunately when my scouts actually reported back on him he didn't have much interest in joining as a very promising 17-year-old. After scoring five goals in just seven first team matches for Vitória, he was bought by Sporting for £9.25m. His stay in Lisbon only lasted for a season and a half, but he still managed to score 34 goals in that time before being snapped up by the mighty Real Madrid for £40m.

Aged 22, he won the Ballon d'Or after scoring 30 goals in 43 appearances across 2032. In my eyes, he was the best forward in the world throughout my time at Stirling. He scored 210 competitive goals across the three clubs he played for, and as you can see in the screenshot below, fired in 79 goals in 76 caps for Portugal too. A ridiculous return.

You can't predict what's going to happen, but if I'm lucky enough to get a player half as good as Marques through the youth setup then I'll be delighted.

In summary

Other than one Taça de Portugal and one Supertaça the club has no other major achievements of note, leaving it completely open for me to shape the way forward for the club. I'm hoping to be Os Conquistadores of Benfica, Sporting and Porto with the target being to start the shift from Os Três Grandes to it being Os Quatro Grandes in Portugal.

I want to entice talented players to the city of Guimarães, acting as a gateway club to bigger things for players from the likes of South America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

I'll be aiming to use my youth academy to bring through the next Armando Marques (and hopefully more like him). Ensuring our facilities are the best they can be, building a first-class coaching setup to help our players fulfill their potential, but most importantly, not undervaluing or underselling homegrown Vitória players.

They'll be a mix of Scottish steel with Portuguese guile. I have an initial shape in mind, but I won't be as tactically stubborn as I have been in the past. My Vitória team will be strong at the back, unpredictable going forward and be meticulously coached in how to approach each game in isolation.

Over the next couple of posts I'll be doing an internal review of the entire club, from the playing and coaching staff to setting up how I want us to play initially and the training that'll help us to do so. Thanks for reading. I can't wait to get my FM19 career started, I hope some of you will join me and follow along.

Sempre Vitória!

Samo's Stirling - Season Fourteen - Game Over

With the treble treble secured last season (that's three consecutive seasons of the SPL, Scottish Cup and Scottish Supercup being won, all three available domestic trophies), it's safe to say we're dominating domestic football. Going in to each new season I'm confident we would consistently be able to do what was required to win the league title. I'm bias, but results do show we've got the strongest squad in the country, while the data shows that we're league leaders in determination and physical attributes, two areas I look to excel in and value above all else.

Would these facts see us go on to secure a quadruple treble? 

Domestic Cups

We cruised past last season's league runners up, St Johnstone, in the Scottish Supercup season opener. That's our fourth consecutive win in that competition now after failing to win it in our first couple of appearances.

We then proceeded to cruise into our fifth consecutive Scottish Cup final, and seventh overall. Aberdeen looked our toughest test on paper in the 4th round, but Stirling youth product, Alex McGrandles, got us on our way to a comfortable 3-0 win with an own goal. Bigger Kawaya and European Golden Boy, Jack Beaton, demolished Queen of the South in the semi-final to set up a final clash with Hibs.

Who would win their first Scottish Cup since 2015/16. A really disappointing result, but at the end of the day we weren't good enough to win the game and didn't deserve to. Hibs had the better of the chances, with our only clear cut chance coming from Griffiths' missed penalty just before half time. If we'd scored that, I believe it would have put us in the driving seat, despite Hibs missing a penalty of their own at 1-1 earlier on in the first half. It looked as though Barkaia's goal and Sato's sending off for Hibs had swung the match in our favour going in to extra time, but Gary Shinnie got his second as we were restricted to long shots and kept at bay by the Hibees.

No domestic treble this season. No quadruple treble.

SPL

Hibs' Scottish Cup win wouldn't be a sign of things to come in the league too, would it?

There's plenty of green dots across the first half of the season, but the two results that really stick out are those two 3-2 defeats in a row on matchday three and four against Celtic (getting one over us for the first time in three seasons) and my boyhood club, Greenock Morton. No excuses for the defeats, it was our strongest eleven in both matches, we didn't do enough to win. We were especially second rate in the Morton defeat. Hibs were the other club to take points off us in the first half of the season, but our consistency across the other fourteen matchdays saw us topping the table at the halfway stage.

Morton! Wtf! It's really difficult to put personal feelings aside and be raging at my club for taking six points from us this season. It was 1-1 going into the last 10 minutes and I went for the win and pushed men forward. They hit us on the break and sent us back to Stirling with our tails between our legs. Hibs also inflicted a defeat on us to make it a miserable season against Paul Lambert's men. Celtic took another point off us too to go undefeated against us this season too. What was going on? Surely these dropped points wouldn't see us give up our grip on the SPL?

Nah, we still won it by 10 points in the end. But it was our worst season since 2025/26, the first SPL title winning season. It was the most we've conceded since that season, the least number of goals scored since that season and the four defeats is the most we've had in a season since the season prior to our league win, 2024/25. What happened?

As I mentioned in my transfers post, I felt it was time to blood more homegrown youngsters into the squad and I predominantly chose to do this in domestic matches. Shaun Greene aside, all of my young Scots played over 1,000 minutes this season across the league and Scottish Cup, with Hendry and Carr actually being my first choice CB pairing domestically. It was a conscious choice, but one that maybe led to performances not being as good as they could have been across each of the 34 matches.

The forward pairing of Sambu and Griffiths was fairly settled this season, but I heavily rotated the midfield four behind them. This was mainly due to me not really settling on what my strongest four was, but also because I'm a tinkerer. I want to give players gametime and also see how they'll do in match situations. Competing on multiple fronts, it's also necessary at times. I do tend to go on a bit more about the negatives, but the most important time to reflect and act is when you're on top.

Champions League

We did really well qualifying out of our group containing PSG and Chelsea last season in the CL, luck wasn't on our side in this season's competition though.

United's record against us now stands at played six, won six. I can't get the better of Mourinho. They knocked us out in the 1st knockout round last season and they've all but done it again this season, by drawing and losing against Atletico while we won and drew against the La Liga side. We could've made it a bit easier for ourselves too by beating CSKA at home, but had to play the majority of the match with 10 men after Daniel Christensen was sent off early in the first half.

That 3rd place finish means we drop into the Europa League for the first time since 2025/26. We reached the semi final that season, could we go one better this time?

Europa League

We dealt with a long away trip to Russia rather well in the 1st knockout round, dismantling Krasnodar 5-0 before hitting six past them in the home leg to sail through to face Athletic Club. After scoring six again in the home leg I felt confident, but those three we conceded set up a really nervy second leg in Spain and we only just made it through by the skin of our teeth in the end. The Basque club battered us in Bilbao, but couldn't convert their chances into shots on target or goals.

We'd already faced my former FM17 club, RBLeipzig, back in that 2025/26 Europa League campaign, eventually going through on away goals after another nervy 2nd leg. This time round it was a little bit more comfortable, a 4-1 aggregate victory. I was happy to avoid Spurs and Crystal Palace in the semi final draw, English clubs are always tough to play against, especially with the 14 seasons of financial power behind them now. Braga gained control of the tie in the 1st leg, but we'd played well enough without creating many opportunities to score an away goal. When the Big Man Kawaya scored before half time in the 2nd leg I didn't think it would take until the 119th minute of the match to secure the win and take us through to the Europa League final, but it was fist pumps all round when it did eventually come!

Crystal Palace overcame Spurs in the other semi to set up what I dubbed on Twitter as the worst Europa League final ever.

An uninspiring effort going forward but a solid one at the back brought home the Europa League trophy for little old Stirling Albion! From the 3rd tier of Scottish football when I took over to Europa League winners in 14 seasons, I don't think that's too bad at all. Past winners of the trophy over the last 14 seasons include Real Madrid, Man City, Arsenal, Dortmund and Liverpool. Stirling Albion is now engraved on the trophy too. Here's that winning goal from Daniel Christensen, who joined us on a free transfer four seasons ago, not bad value.

He intercepts a loose ball on the edge of our own penalty area and runs the length of the pitch to eventually get on the end of Griffiths' cross in the opposition six yard box to bring the trophy to Stirling.

Star men

Ença Sambú

The main man across the season was Sambuuu. He'd scored 26 goals in each of the last three seasons, but he really benefited from there not being as much rotation up front this season as he fired in 39 goals across all competitions. This included seven in Europe, as he managed to win the Europa League Player of the Season. He set a new record in the SPL too, scoring 30 goals in 32 appearances, earning him the Players' Player of the Year and Football Writers Player of the Year awards. As a reminder, he joined for £425k from Guimarães. Not bad value at all across the four seasons he's been at the club.

Gogita Barkaia

This was the breakout season for Barkaia playing in the CM(A) position. He's ridiculously gifted, a wonderkid, and could be the Horvat replacement we've been waiting for for a couple of seasons now. His output wasn't incredible, five assists and seven goals, but the importance of that role on the pitch for us is much more than pure goals and assists. So often the hockey pass or just keeping things ticking over. A product of that Circle of Transfers approach and how good our scouting set up is, just a £450k signing from Lokomotivi Tbilisi last season, he's had to bide his time before cementing down his starting spot.

Club growth

Thanks to some positive overall performances in Europe for our clubs over the last couple of seasons, culminating in our Europa League win, Scotland has moved up to 7th in the Nation Club Coefficients table. It's still a long way to go to overhaul Germany and reach that coveted 6th spot which would bring two automatic Champions League group stage spots and a third spot in the qualifiers for the league. That being said, in the fourteen seasons I've been charge, Scotland has come a long way from the 23rd spot it was languishing in back in 2017/18.

Stirling wasn't even on the map in terms of European football when I took over, but now we're Europa League winners and up to 15th in the club coefficient table. Not a bad rise at all. There's still a long way to go with our continental reputation though. We still can't compete with the likes of United, Barcelona, Real Madrid or PSG. We're also still behind clubs we've competed well with in recent seasons, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Athletic Club and even Crystal Palace. We've made huge progress, but there's still a way to go yet.

There was just over £150k in the club balance when I took over, that now stands at over £320m with player sales totaling £119m this season. Here's the usual line graph for season ticket holders and league average attendance.

Some really promising numbers versus the 2029/30 season. Season ticket sales were up 24% to 8,760 overall. This is a whopping 3404% increase versus my first season in charge. Our league average attendance grew by 19% which meant it has grown 2852% since the 2017/18 season. Both of these, along with gate receipts growing 8391%, have been huge parts of the save in line with growing the club as a whole. Moving from Forthbank to the Samo Stadium, and then expanding the capacity on two separate occasions, has enabled the club to become the most well run and reputable in the country.

The Europa League win feels like an appropriate time to end the save ahead of FM19 coming very soon. What a save it's been. FM is telling me it's been a while since I've had any human contact after putting in over 37 days of gametime into this save. I'll be summarising it all in my usual post of the game that I've done for the past two editions now, plus I quite fancied putting together a best XI type post, but we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

I say it's coming to an end, I can't bring myself to take an FM break like others do. What else would I do with my spare time? Probably make human contact but that's beside the point. I'm going to be "moving upstairs" for season fifteen, and act as a Director of Football/Sporting Director. My assistant for the last five seasons, the great Walter Samuel, is going to "take over" as Head Coach. I'll still be in charge of my favourite things to do in-game, building the squad, buying and selling players. Walter is going to be setting the tactic (I'll shift the 4-4-2 to his preferred 4-2-3-1), picking the team and managing the matches (I'll be instant resulting). Something a little bit different to how the save has gone so far, and a little bit different to the norm too.

Morale Manager

Over the last couple of editions of Football Manager there's been talk across the FM Twittersphere of the game becoming more like Morale Manager. In my opinion, SI have got this pretty spot on. FM reflects the IRL football world with players not getting on with you or each other, complaining about training or about not playing enough, requesting a transfer and more.

I'm going to take you through some of my ways of managing morale across my players in this piece. These are ways I've found work for me, they might work for you too or you might have completely different ways of approaching it and still get results and win trophies galore. That is the beauty of this game we all know and love.

Manager profile

The first thing is to think about how you set up your manager profile and the attributes you give yourself. If you've set yourself as an former non-league footballer and you decide to take over a top six English club, you've got an uphill struggle on your hands to win the respect of those players. Starting at a club with lower expectations or lower down the leagues, and setting your reputation to be the standard for that level gives you a good chance at fostering a good relationship early on. If you want to take a bit of an easier road, stick your reputation up a notch for the level you choose to start your save in.

When I'm doing my own attributes before my save starts, the one I'm looking to put higher than the rest is my motivating attribute, "the mental ability of a staff member to motivate their players."

You can see I've made some serious gainz across the board in my save so far, but that when I started out in my first season, my motivating attribute was at 18, my highest attribute. This was in the hope that I'd be able to get the players behind me and invest in me as a manager before, during and after matches, building a positive relationship and team spirit.

Team spirit

Relationships

I'm a big believer in players having positive relationships with their manager and their teammates will lead to positive performances on the pitch. Out of my 28 man first team squad (I like rotating), 23 of them have me in their favoured personnel. These lads will run through brick walls for me.

Significantly fewer of them have one of their current teammates in their favoured personnel, but that doesn't mean they don't like them. I pointed it out before in my 4-4-2 tactical piece but I'm a fan of the new "relationships" feature on your tactic. Having the players connected on the pitch fosters a cohesive team, one that knows each other inside out.

Spine of the team

Every player has their price in my team, but I like to keep a good chunk of my players together from season to season, especially the spine of my team. Keeper, Birk Kleven, is entering into his fourth season at the club now, with 55 clean sheets to show for it across 107 matches so far. Captain, leader, legend, Ryan Porteous, has now played under me for 308 matches and is in his ninth season at the club. Edvin Horvat appears in most summary posts as one of the standout stars each season and this is his sixth season at the club now. These players know the club inside out and ensure the rest of the squad is moving in the same direction.

There's been a fair bit of change around this spine over the last few seasons, none more so than upfront. Where we had the dynamic duo of #Rog and Ryan Hardie together up top for five seasons, the front line has been much less settled since they fell out of favour and ultimately left the club. You saw the Pharaoh and Radovanovic leaving last season, Keaton Lockett has followed them out of the club this summer. If Sambu has a similar full season to the form he showed in his initial half season of first choice striker, he won't be with us for very long either. This makes it much more difficult to get a positive relationship between my front two, #Rog and Hardie had each other in their favoured personnel, they knew each other inside out.

Personalities

My approach to personalities on the game is taken from the All Blacks, after having read Legacy by James Kerr, "no dickheads". In FM terms, this means no negative personalities. Stirling players are determined to succeed (we have the highest average determination attribute in the league and our collective squad personality is determined) and just like the All Blacks they need to put the team before themselves. Having players with similar personalities only enhances the potential of them all getting along and reduces the risk of fallouts. If you can't change the player, change the player. Every player has a price, remember.

Dynamics

This FM18 addition should be something I look at much more than I do when it comes to this kind of topic. A quick glance at it for the purpose of writing this piece shows me that Porteous, Kleven and Horvat are my team leaders, that makes sense given that they form the spine of the team, and that our dressing room atmosphere is excellent.

Apparently it can be said that we've got too many team leaders though, I don't see this as a negative. All players at the club should custodians of the Stirling culture. Right now, having morale as a column on my squad view makes me feel like I don't need to visit the dynamics tab. I wonder if or how SI will switch it up for future games and surface it a bit more than those summary emails we occasionally get, maybe it doesn't need to be?

Communication

Teamtalks and press conferences

This is certainly an area where I know I play the game differently to others. I do every single teamtalk and every single press conference because I believe they can have a really positive effect on creating a positive relationship with the players. My approach is just to be honest with the players. If I think we can win, I tell them that. If I think that we're maybe going to struggle up against a better team in Europe, I don't put any pressure on them to come out with a result, I won't be annoyed if we don't win. A bit of the hairdryer treatment isn't off limits, but that's mainly used at half time to stick a few rockets up their arses if I don't see them performing well enough. The objective, as I'm sure it is for most others, is greens across the board. Getting the players delighted and/or motivated.

The players are listening, so when the opportunity arises in a press conference to praise the team or an individual player, and of course it makes sense to do so, I do it. This will only strengthen the relationship they have with me.

Praising performances

This isn't something I dish out on a regular basis, but it's another tool that can be used to reinforce positive relationships with players.

Chang-Min scored a double from right wing in our last match against Ross County. He's a new addition to the club having joined in the summer, and is also an 18-year-old Korean, so is just a young lad in a completely new country and culture. A little bit of praise for his last performance is just like throwing a metaphorical arm over him and letting him know he's doing well. It could really go a long way to him keeping that form up.

He's also just picked up both the player and young player of the month awards for October, congratulating him on those wins will only further help.

Contracts and transfers

I would say that contracts and transfers come into managing player morale too. When you're signing a new player, it's important to not just promise them that they'll be an integral member of your squad if you know they'll struggle to break in to your current first team. It might be an obvious one to some, but it'll save that player coming to you a few months down the line to moan about a lack of first team football, which in turn might also save some of his teammates coming out in support of him and that positive atmosphere in the dressing room going down.

Like I said already, everyone has a price. If a player comes to me asking to leave I'm very unlikely to stand in their way, as long as we get fairly compensated. There's no use keeping an unhappy player around the squad, potentially risking the happiness of the rest of my squad. It's often possible to try and win the unhappy player round, continue playing him in matches to see if he'll change his mind, but this isn't something I'd recommend to do all the time. Think realistically about it, taking the club you are into account. If your reputation isn't quite up there with the best yet, then it's probably worthwhile cashing in and allowing the player angling for a move to a bigger club to leave.

Matches

Playing time

I've called this out a few times before but one of the first things I do on the new game is pull minutes played into my default squad screen views. This helps me monitor how much game time my players are getting, and feeds in to how much I rotate (which is often with my 28 man first team squad!). It also feeds in to ensuring that certain players don't become unhappy. If players with a back up or rotational status aren't seeing those promises be met, or key players or first teamers aren't playing regularly, then it might be time to either start them or stick them on the bench for some potential first team minutes.

It also helps if your team is playing well when a player raises a concern about their lack of playing time. The option to tell them that player X in their position is playing well and it'd be a struggle to drop him right now usually works quite well in seeing them drop their issue.

Pre-match training

Not a big one to finish off, but I have my match preparation training set to teamwork permanently and do this for a day and a half before a matchday. These are known to give a little boost to whatever you pick pre-match, whether it's attacking movement or defending set pieces. Teamwork focuses on improving team familiarity and understanding.

For me, this just adds to the players feeling as one and knowing where to be and how to work together on the pitch. Ultimately, this leads to us winning matches which leads to happy players. Simple.

Obviously there are a lot of factors that go into keeping your players happy. I said at the beginning that there's FMers out there that won't do any of these things and they're still able to find success. I feel like the things I've outlined work well for me, that's not to say that they actually do all factor in to how morale works in the back end of the game.

If you feel like you've picked up something you're going to take into your own save from reading this let me know! Plus, if you do any of these things differently, or have completely different techniques altogether then let me know too! I'd be happy to hear about them.

If you've liked this post you might also fancy having a read of how I monitor and manage my players fitness over the course of the season. Spoiler alert, it wasn't through the medical centre.

A Strategy for Stirling

In my saves on previous editions of Football Manager I've tended to set out quite structured aims and targets at the beginning of the save. This time round with Stirling we started out in the third tier and I knew I eventually wanted to grow the club and take it to the next level but one of the main initial aims I had was survival. We were part-time and forward-planning is a bit of a dirty word at that level like I said in my initial introductory post. Fast forward to the beginning of the 2026/27 season and we'll be starting season ten with the aim of retaining the SPL crown after the clubs first ever top tier title win last season. Who'd have thought it?

The club has obviously come a long way in that time, and the restructured Scottish football leagues seem to have enabled clubs in the country to go from strength to strength. With all of these things in mind, plus the fact that Stewart Brown, our long-standing chairman in-game, stepped aside after the title win to be replaced by Graeme Mackay, I felt it was time to get some aims written down. I'll be looking to keep these things front of mind over the next part of the save. Here's my Strategy for Stirling.

Stirling Success

A culture of success needs to be created. This includes retaining the Scottish Premier League trophy, winning the Scottish Cup and securing our first Scottish Supercup. The first aim will be to secure the clubs first double, winning the SPL and the Scottish Cup in the same season with the aim then becoming to secure a treble. From there, winning domestic trophies needs to be maintained season-on-season.

The club punched well above its weight last season in Europe, reaching the Europa League semi final. Lifting a European trophy isn't something a club from Scotland has done since 1983 so saying I'm setting out to win the Champions or Europa League is a bit too much of a stretch target. The minimum aim will be to qualify for the Champions League group stage each season, with the next step being to progress from it into the knockout phase.

Both of the above aspects will also lead to improving the club, the league and the country's position on the continent. The club's current position in the European Club Rankings is 42nd, the short-term aim is to be the highest ranked Scottish club (meaning we overtake Celtic who're currently 26th), with the eventual long-term hope to break into the top 15 highest ranked clubs on the continent. The SPL has certainly benefited from the restructure and now sits in 9th place in the continents most reputable leagues, with the country sitting 9th in the European coefficient points too. This translates to the champions directly qualifying for the Champions League group stage, and a further team going in at the best placed 3rd qualifying round. The team in 3rd place qualifies for the Europa League group stage, with another two teams going into the early qualifying rounds. The immediate aim is to get the nation up to 6th in order to gain an extra qualifying place for the Champions League group stage, but this can't be done solely on our own. We need Celtic, Rangers and whoever else qualifies for Europe to have positive seasons in order to build the nations coefficient points and overtake Belgium, Holland and Portugal.

Success isn't just expected from the senior side. Stirling's Futures (u21 side) have won the league two seasons running now, and secured their first domestic cup win last year too. The aim is for Scott Robertson to continue the winning feeling at youth level. Alongside trophy wins it's also essential to continue developing players to make the move into the first team. Kevin "Cairnseh" Cairns is the shining light of the Stirling youth system so far. Young players coming into the club need to get inspired by his journey from young prospect in the third tier to making 204 appearances to date, earning a Scotland cap and playing in the Europa League semi final.

Underpinning the success and enabling the player development will be an elite coaching culture. Over the past few seasons, the club has massively improved the number and quality of coaches, and the backroom staff in general. There's no comparison between the club I took over ahead of the 2017/18 season and now as I move into my tenth season in charge, with well-known international names Walter Samuel and Jaap Stam complemented by well-known domestic names such as John Kennedy and Gordon Durie. The aim will be to continue to maximise the number of backroom staff allowed by the board and to have the best quality of staff in the league on hand to aid our players to become the best they can be.

Stirling System

The way we play has been well documented here, and is often cited by other FMers (on Twitter and Slack) as a recommended way to set up. The side has been playing this way now for five seasons with zero changes to the way it was set up initially.

The style of play ties into the success category too. Stirling sides are solid and combative but the goal is always to win no matter what. There's no desire to get a specific amount of possession or passes per match. There's no pressing triggers or set ways players need to move into half-spaces. If we make a lot of passes or I see my players pressing the opposition into making mistakes, and we win, great. If we have an off day, don't play well and lose, fine. We dust ourselves off and try to win the next match.

The system is less about the formation and roles, and more about the players. Nobody embodies an ideal Stirling player more than Edvin Horvat.

Aggressive, determined, hard-working and physical. Filling my Stirling side with athletes, who of course have a little bit of technical ability too, stands us in good stead over our domestic opponents. We lead the league in pace, stamina, aggression and teamwork, which is nice to see already. That needs to be maintained along with improving our collective determination from 3rd to 1st, work rate from 5th to 1st and acceleration and strength from 2nd to 1st.

A Strong Stirling

The club has grown considerably over the last nine seasons. That growth needs to continue though in order for the club to remain in it's very strong position domestically, and to give us the best possible platform to do well in Europe. Coupled with the success we're aiming for, the prize money that comes alongside that will help to enable the first growth aim, having £100m in the club balance. This also ties in strongly with another success aim, as developing, buying and selling on players, like we've seen in recent seasons with Rees, Gale and Freeman, will help add to the club finances. The club is currently valued at £114m and we'll aim to continually improve that in the coming seasons too.

As we grow our reputation by being domestically dominant and competing on the continent, the commercial revenues the club brings in should grow too. £1.5m was brought in from sponsors at the beginning of season ten, and I'd like to see this double in the next couple of years with renewals and additional ones brought on board. The merchandising revenues will also increase. The amount we earned from sales of the kit last season was relatively small at just over £100k, but again as we grow in stature, it'll increase. A way to bolster this amount is to sign up affiliate clubs from overseas. Ahead of the new season, a partnership with Newcastle Jets in Australia was announced, which will see us head over there for a friendly each season and grow the Stirling image abroad. Based on its success, similar tie ins will be explored with additional clubs over the next few seasons.

The 14,031 capacity Samo Stadium opened at the beginning of season nine, with the league average attendance in our first season of playing there being just under 10k. As soon as it opened though thoughts immediately moved to thinking about when it could be expanded further. It's currently the ninth biggest stadium in the country, that's in use by a club side anyway. It'd be great to get it to 20k and be on a par with Tynecaste Park, Easter Road and Pittodrie. The impact that would have on our revenues can't be played down either, especially considering the season-on-season increase of 198% in gate receipts from the old to the new stadium.

The final aim is to have best in class facilities for our elite coaching culture to operate in. Significant improvements have already been made on this front since I joined the club, as you can see below, but with more still to be done. Our training facilities are still average and our youth recruitment could be improved too to ensure we've got every chance of attracting promising young players to the club and developing them to be the best they can be.

Summary

Want the too long; didn't read version of the strategy in image form? 

That first SPL title win last season doesn't signal the end of my time at Stirling. It just signals the start of another phase on the way to becoming one of Scotland's biggest and best football clubs. I hope you'll keep joining me as I document the progress on delivering the strategy aims and my attempts at building a dominating dynasty. Who the hell finds success boring?

Samo's Stirling - Opening the Samo Stadium

Having successfully established Stirling as one of the best clubs in Scotland on the pitch, it was time to do this off the pitch too. We'd quickly outgrown our 3,808 capacity Forthbank home, we were unable to play our home European matches there (because home European matches are a thing now for the club!), and halfway through my seventh season in charge the board sanctioned a request to have a new stadium built. Just in time for the beginning of my ninth season in charge of Stirling, we'll move into our brand spanking new 14k capacity home.

Nobody wants to be playing in the Stirling Albion Stadium. It's uninspiring and the game needs to get better on things like this. So I went out and bought the in-game editor purely to change the name of our new stadium. Pure mad mental? Aye, probably. But fuck it. Welcome to the Samo Stadium.

It's customary to open a new stadium with fanfare, fireworks and a fancy friendly match. You'll have read what happened when I took my Stirling side to Argentina to face Bastardo's Estudiantes side to celebrate the 75th anniversary of our club forming. Having kept in touch in the years since, including his recommendation to Walter Samuel to join as my new assistant manager last season, I felt it was only right to invite Bastardo's bastards to Stirling to crack open the champagne bottle on the side of the Samo Stadium. Oh, and to play some football too of course.

Scotland and Argentina

FMGrasshopper gave a perfect summary of Scotsmen, the Watson Hutton's, and their influence on bringing football to Argentina. With Alexander being the founding father of the AFA, and also father to Arnold, who starred up front for the Albicelestes in the early 1900s. Being a keen student of football, I have of course read that copy of Angels with Dirty Faces that Bastardo kindly gifted to me when we locked horns previously so I'm well versed on the origins and history of Argentine football myself. Since Neil McBain left La Plata to return to Ayr in 1951, Scottish and Argentine football have only flirted with each other again on a couple of occasions.

In 1978, Scotland was on the march with Ally's Army. Before they flew out to compete in Argentina the squad paraded around Hampden to bid farewell to fans, and thousands more lined the streets en route to the airport. Manager, Ally MacLeod, had declared that the squad, containing Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Joe Jordan and Archie Gemmill, would come home with a medal and they were classed as contenders by the likes of Rinus Michels. Royal Mail even designed and produced commemorative stamps!

Glorious failure ensued, as we've got used to by now. After gaining a solitary point from the first two group stage matches in Cordoba against Peru and Iran, Archie Gemmill served up one of the greatest moments in Scottish football history in Mendoza against the Netherlands. It secured a 3-2 win for us against the eventual tournament runners up, but we needed to win by three clear goals. Out we went on goal difference and MacLeod resigned later than year with his tale between his legs.

Fast forwarding to the late 1990s/early 2000s and we had an influx of Argentines joining Scottish football. Journeyman Italian, Ivano Bonetti, joined Dundee as player/manager and set about trying to establish them as challengers at the top end of Scottish football. Beto Carranza, Pascual Garrido, Walter del Río, Juan Sara, Fabián Caballero and Julián Speroni were joined by ex-Argentine World Cup star, Claudio Caniggia. Scorer of two goals at the 1994 World Cup, he only ended up being with the Dees for a short time but very quickly became a fans favourite. Remarkably after a move to Rangers, where he also became a hit with the fans, he was called up by Bielsa for Argentina's squad for the 2002 World Cup. He didn't end up making an appearance, but he'd certainly cemented himself as a cult hero amongst Scottish football fans.

That period of Scottish football was rife with clubs spending beyond their means, with Dundee eventually going into administration and getting relegated. Scottish football ahead of the 2025/26 season though is in rude health, with the opening of the Samo Stadium highlighting that. How would we fare against Bastardo this time round after our 4-2 defeat in La Plata previously?

Match Action

A few years on and there's still some survivors in the Stirling side. Ryan Porteous continues to captain the side, alongside LB Owen Hughes, Deep Lying Destroyer Aaron Bolger and star striker #Rog. Wonderkids, Ahmed el Sayed aka the Pharaoh and Edvin Horvat are accommodated in the same starting 11, with Horvat being pushed out left and homegrown Stirling lad, Cairnseh, dropping to the bench. Those of you with good memories will be happy to see that David Jablonsky is no longer at the club, with his horror show in La Plata signalling the end of his Stirling career. Similarly to that match in La Plata, I set out in the Samo 4-4-2. As I said back then, "we’ll set up in the way we like to play and see what happens."

There would be no Lattanzio for Estudiantes this time round, who terrorised us with a hattrick in the last match, as he'd been given the boot by Bastardo. The dangermen to watch were promising young striker, Renzo Taborda, midfield controller, Raúl Rolón and the returning wide man, Fernando Zuqui.

Bastardo's men were more than capable of dishing out another defeat against us here, and the opening minutes proved it.

An initial cross from the right hand side is dealt with, but that second ball isn't closed down quick enough. Aparicio's cross looks like it's overhit and going out, but Jesus Medina is alert and somehow picks out Zuqui. Owen Hughes isn't great in the air, and he's easily beaten for Estudiantes' opening goal after just two minutes and 17 seconds. A full 52 seconds before the opening Estudiantes goal in the previous match. Why don't we start well against Bastardo's men?

Things went from bad to worse in the eleventh minute. Ryan Porteous does well to deal with an incoming Medina corner, but the ball falls right to Reynoso's feet.

Usually I see my players blasting it over the bar or wide of the post from these second ball wins on the edge of the box from a corner. Reynoso is given time (what is Aaron Bolger, #22, doing?) and space to do whatever he wants with it. His strong decision making attribute, coupled with excellent vision and passing sees him pick out Remedi, #7. With our zonal marking on defensive corners spectacularly failing here as six of my players in the box are nowhere near any of the opposing players, Remedi slots it easily past Robby McCrorie in goals. 2-0 Estudiantes.

We kick off, play a couple of passes in midfield before a slack one out left to Horvat from Bolger is pounced on by Zuqui. The away side play keep ball just inside our half, before Reynoso tries to find Zuqui with a lofted pass out right.

Hughes wins that aerial battle, but the loose ball falls to Remedi who finds Zuqui's feet this time. Hughes doesn't get tight or close down well enough, giving Zuqui time and space to cross. Taborda beats Nicholl to the ball in the box and hits the back of the net with a fine finish to make it three. It's a shocking start to life in the Samo Stadium as we're second to every ball and looking abject. That's how the score stays until half time, with McCrorie tipping a fierce shot from Taborda onto the post in the only other chance of the half.

Remarkably, that's how the score stayed for the remainder of the match. Stirling 0-3 Estudiantes. A (pretend, because we played on FMTouch) bollocking in the halftime teamtalk reminded the Stirling players that this was the grand opening of our new stadium, and we could do with not being embarrassed any further. The match was played in good spirits, but I couldn't help feeling disappointed we couldn't at least score for the newly increased capacity crowd of 14k that turned up. #Rog did have a glorious clear cut opening with 20minutes to go, but couldn't find a way past Axel Werner in the Estudiantes goal. We'd have to put up a much better fight if we want to challenge at the top of the SPL again this season.

Post-Match

I shouldn't have been surprised really, Bastardo hails from a country that is renowned for its tactical expertise and will to win. When he spoke to the waiting press after the match, he underlined this. "I envisaged possession to be an issue today, and perhaps needed to tone down our risk to ensure we keep the ball for longer periods. I told Reynoso not to play the ball so riskily, and asked Rolón to mark Stirling's forward dropping into the hole tightly. I wanted to negate the threat of their two up top."

"Remedi is a tough tackling midfielder and he was instructed to stick tight to Stirling's Pharaoh. I didn't know much about him prior to today, but had heard it was worth going in hard to keep him from threatening. Horvat's quality is wasted out on the left hand side, plus he's very one footed so I asked the players to show him onto his right. The game was won early on, but we shut it down completely with 10 minutes to go. Stirling, unfortunately for their fans, offered no threat today." Brutal honesty from the Argentine, as per usual.

Scotland has struggled internationally, continentally and even domestically in recent times. We have been accused of not moving with the times, not progressing our game. The reintroduction of the SPL ahead of the 2017/18 along with restructuring the leagues and incorporating all of Scotland's football clubs into one big pyramid attracted increased levels of income from sponsorship and television money. It gave our game the jolt it needed. My Stirling side might have been outfoxed and outplayed by Bastardo and his Estudiantes side twice now, but luckily for us these were only exhibition matches. Our aim is to compete domestically, to keep growing the club and the opening of the Samo Stadium is a huge part of that. Thanks to Bastardo for agreeing to travel to Scotland and play against us on this historic day for Stirling Albion. Hopefully they'll actually be some Stirling goals for the 14k fans to cheer in the near future...

My FM18 Tactic: 4-4-2

I grew up watching football at a time when 4-4-2 was the standard across Scottish and English football. Beckham and Giggs on the flanks, Keane and Scholes centrally and Yorke and Cole up top are my most vivid memories of the formation. Even now, on terraces across Scottish football you'll still hear some rage when teams aren't playing "two up top".

The rise of 4-2-3-1 and Barca's 4-3-3 saw the use of 4-4-2 fall away in-game, certainly for me anyway, and in the non-FM world too. However, in recent years, it's had a bit of a revival. I don't need to go on about Leicester's that won them the Premier League, but it was interesting to see Monaco using a version to great effect on their way to pipping PSG to the French league title and progressing in the Champions League. I've always had the thought in the back of my mind to get a 4-4-2 set up on FM again and working the way I want it to. Strong in defence, a creative midfield that's able to support a front two that work in harmony together. More importantly though, I want it to be simple.

With all tactical posts on this site there's a disclaimer. When I've found success with a tactic over the last couple of editions of the game, it's been purely by accident. I'm not a tactical expert, so if you're looking for a pro talking about pro things, you might want to head elsewhere just now. If you're like me and feel like you're more of an amateur talking about amateur things, read on!

Formation, Roles and Player Instructions

Defence

Nothing fancy here. My defence is tasked with defending first and foremost.

My keeper has a few specific instructions. Passing it shorter, taking short kicks and playing it out to my full backs, plus playing less risky passes too. We aren't a team that wants possession for possession's sake, but I like to keep the ball and play it out from the back. Simply put, if we've got the ball the opposition have less of a chance of scoring. My central defenders aren't asked to do anything extra at all. Just defend. Intercept, win the ball, head it clear, get opposition crosses into row Z. They aren't the most gifted so when the ball is at their feet, it's a bit of a worry. That's why my keeper plays it out wide to my full backs.

Those full backs are set to be on support. Anything more than this, and I feel they'll get dragged way out of position, leaving us wide open. When we've got the ball, they'll support the attacks from deep and provide an outlet for us to keep possession and be patient. I ask them both to cross more often too. We've got two up top so when the opportunity arises I'm happy for them to try and swing the ball into the box.

Midfield

Continuing on the defensive theme I've gone for a DLP, or as I've renamed it, my Deep Lying Destroyer (DLD). No changes to the set DLP role here, so why pick this role instead of a central midfielder with a defend duty? Positioning on the pitch and that hardcoded player instruction of closes down more, that's why. The DLP shoots less often and holds position, in comparison. That hold position instruction versus the increased closing down for a CM(D) is vital to how I want my DLD to play. A DLP is primarily a creator, but I'm happiest when my DLD is shielding the back four and enabling my remaining five players to have a bit more freedom to create and attack.

The one neutral role in the side is my left winger on support. I don't expect him to bomb down the wing, he'll support the attacking play when we've got the ball going forward but he mainly acts as cover on that side for the central midfielder alongside him to attack.

When we discussed it on the pod, I said my CM with an attack duty could be classed as a number 10 for me. He creates chances from deep and gets up to support the strikers. He seems to ghost into the box undetected at times, getting on the end of quite a few of those crosses from the attacking winger. His role is to attack opposition left backs and get crosses into the box for our front men. He also finds himself getting on the end of a fair few chances from my deep lying forward dropping in to create space.

Attack

I ultimately chose my DLF on support as my main number 10 though. He drops in and creates havoc for opposition defences. Do they follow him? Should they sit in? Panic stations. It's even more prevalent as he's instructed to roam from his position and move into channels. Alongside the advanced forward also moving into channels, we've always got that wide out ball, dragging defences all over the place. There's some lovely interplay between the front two and the winger on the right, at times forming a three man attack almost.

Relationships

This was a new introduction for FM18, and I believe it's a positive one.

Here's how my first choice side shapes up in this respect. There's connections all over the pitch. Some don't pay much attention to the morale side of the game and can still find success. That's fine, good on them.

If we're talking marginal gains though, doing everything possible to add that little bit of extra chance of winning a football match, then the players having a great understanding amongst each other (team cohesion training for the first three months of the season helps, along with pre-match teamwork training), being encouraged (talked up in press conferences, individually spoken to when they've played a blinder or won an award) and feeling like they'll run through brick walls for their manager (keeping a core together for a good few seasons and checking how well you're supported by the players on the dynamics tab) goes a long way to turning a draw or defeat into a win.

Team Instructions

I said I wanted to keep it simple. My base tactic has no set team instructions and no changes to the mentality or shape. I've seen numerous examples of tactics with a whole boatload of instructions, pretty much every option available being activated in some way. It doesn't need to be like that. Picking all the team instructions under the sun isn't a prerequisite to winning on FM. Sure, you certainly might want your team to play high tempo, direct football, with a high line and closing down opposition players to the max. Pick those instructions in those cases, if you've got the players to play that way. I like to let my players decide when to play it short or long or when to close down and when to not. Their chosen roles and individual attributes do a lot of the work here, negating my need to add numerous team instructions.

A couple of tweaks I occasionally like to make are shifting the shape to structured and telling the players to dribble less. I've got to admit that shape on FM still does confuse me slightly no matter how much I read about it. However, I take it as structured means that our players will just focus on their key roles that little bit more, so the defenders will become even less concerned with getting forward, while the attacking players will look get forward that little bit more.

We aren't blessed with the best dribblers in the world. There's no players that'll run rings round opponents, so by telling them to dribble less it gets them passing the ball that little bit more rather than potentially running into trouble and losing the ball.

Match Action

At The Back

My DLD is probably my favourite aspect of my defensive play. The players I rotate between in this role aren't necessarily the most adept at passing, or even tackling. They are both incredibly hard working, determined and aggressive though, plus have speed and stamina in abundance too. All of those qualities make them ideal for the role I want this player to play. Shielding the back four, intercepting the ball and laying it off to our more dangerous offensive players. In a 4-0 away win at Easter Road against Hibs, Aaron Bolger, who's my main choice for the role, played perfectly.

While his tackling attribute isn't up there with the best, it doesn't mean he doesn't get stuck in about our opposition.

Hibs' AMC manages to get round him here, but Bolger's work rate sees him get back in and make a decisive tackle on the next phase of the attack, as Romulo looks like he could lay it back to Talysson to get a shot away. One of my CB's aside, the DLD make the highest number of tackles, with Bolger ending up third in the league for tackles per match, but with much more minutes played that both first and second place. Both CB's aside, Bolger made the most interceptions in this Hibs match and comparing his interceptions total with midfielders from our league rivals, was up there near the top for the season.

Going Forward

When we're attacking it's all about the four forces of my CM(A), W(A), DLF(S) and AF, or as they've been over the last couple of seasons, Puigmal, Vaughan, #Rog and Hardie.

This equaliser against Rangers is a great example of the four roles in action. #19 is my CB winning the ball from the Rangers keepers goal kick. #9 is my DLF, Hardie in this instance, dropping deep to collect the second ball. Bolger, #23, does his primary role by showing for the pass and laying it inside to Puigmal, #8. Hardie's received the ball again and plays a defence splitting pass to the AF, #17, who finds himself through on goal. Remarkably, he doesn't shoot and has spotted the run of Vaughan, #10, my attacking winger who I said gets up to form a three pronged attack at times. He finishes into an empty net and ended up scoring 18 over the course of this season, with 12 man of the match awards under his belt too.

If you've read my last two season update posts (season five and six), you'll know that #Rog and Hardie love a goal. The deadly duo scored 124 goals between them over those two seasons, firing us to consecutive Europa League group campaigns when we had no right to even qualify. If they're given an inch of the space in the opposition penalty area, it usually leads to a Stirling goal. With two men up top, I said I was more than happy to fire crosses into the danger area, it's a big part of our play.

Hardie struggled with a couple of injuries this season which kept him out for months at a time. It took #Rog a little while to adjust to playing with Arsenal loanee newgen, Will Sealy, but they combined to devastating effect for this goal. It was #Rog's second on his way to hattrick away at Dynamo Kiev in the Europa League group stage.

It's a great example of the DLF's extra player instructions of roaming more and moving into channels. Sealy peels wide, dragging a Dynamo CB with him, Vaughan finding him down the right. #Rog's movement in the box is brilliant, coming across the other CB and leaving him and the RB for dead. Simple, effective, deadly. Notice Puigmal, #8, arriving late into the box as the central midfielder on attack too. I could watch goals like this all day.

Summary

The thing to bear in mind when reading anything tactical is that usually the author has moulded their recruitment around that tactic and has integrated it to the point where the players are at one with it, so they definitely shouldn't be classed as something you can plug in to your side on FM and instantly win.

However, since moving to this tactic we've gone from a team that only just stayed clear of relegation in our first season in the top tier of Scottish football, to one that's consistently punching above it's weight by qualifying for European football in each of the three seasons since, culminating in pipping Rangers to finish second behind Celtic in my most recent season to qualify for the Champions League for the first time.