Chelsea Tactic - Occupying The Important Areas Of The Pitch for FM15

Firstly, I'd like to point out that it should not be too difficult to create a tactic for a top team. My intention was not to do so, just panned out this way whilst doing some software testing.

In my eyes there are far too many people obsessed with possession stats in Football Manager and my only primary concern for this tactic was to have my players play in a certain area of the pitch for the majority of the game. If they then have possession in those areas then it stands to reason that you should see better results.

I would like to point out that I am a software tester by trade so I came at this tactic from possibly a completely different angle than most would. I had ideas of how I wanted to play the game but I treated this as a computer programme and carried out tests accordingly. Not very romantic, but that was the approach.

I didn't want to create an all singing, all dancing tactic, there is no fun in that if you then can't take a good base line and improve it yourself, and that is what I have tried to achieve here.

A good baseline for people to improve on and try with different teams and settings to make this your own. I suspect you will need good quality players for this to work to it's optimum as it is all about pressing high, win the ball, and take advantage of the possession in the correct areas of the pitch.

All in all, this is just a logical approach to a piece of software.

Let's get started !

My whole entire ethos behind this tactic was that I want to occupy the areas of the pitch where most default player positions are available. Take a look at the image below and you will see that 20 out of the default 25 positions are obviously in two thirds of the pitch. This is obviously just basic common sense.



Now, by default, I wanted any defensive line that I decided on to be having average positions during a game around the half way line. If I disregard the 3 attacking positions for now then this means there are just 15 positions on the pitch which become the most dominant.



The box in the image above is where I wanted to be having possession, and I am not concerned about volumes of it. I could quite easily add 10% possession by having my back line deeper and passing it around but possession there is not going to hurt anyway, and it is just a statistic for statistics sake.

With the above image in mind all I concentrated on was looking at the average playing positions of players in games. This is what determined my final player positions. I wanted my average player positions to all be in the areas highlighted in the image above. or as close to it as possible.

Here is an example of average player positions for the areas I wanted to be occupying.

Average Player Positions

Once I had played around with various player positions to obtain the above I then went about specifying my formation. This is the formation I settled on.


Once the formation was decided I then applied individual roles to the players to suit and played around and tested different team instructions.

Here are the team instructions

Video Explaining all of the above

The season is still on going with my Youtube walkthrough but here are screen shots of the results to date.

I have not set any training routines, nothing at all other than what you see in the video. I have literally tried to leave it as bare as possibly so you can apply your own settings and customise to suit your team/ethos/style.





You can see how it all turns out by following the future videos as yet to finish the season.