The Football Manager Playbook by Cleon

View From The Touchline presents Cleon Hobson - The Football Manager Playbook Part 1.

This book is the first of hopefully many that Cleon and his team have planned over the next few months and years.

So what is this book about?

Cleon decided to start at the beginning and tackle the difficult subject of how to create a tactic.

The book has 13 actual Football Manager chapters in it along with an intro and credits section.

Each chapter of the Football Manager book follows from the next and Cleon felt it was important to tell the story that he wanted to tell.

It is more than a guide but essentially, he wanted to create something that felt like a step-by-step story/guide.

The book covers all the steps needed to translate your ideas into Football Manager and helps you create a tactic even if you perhaps don’t have an idea initially.

Over time this might become some kind of starting/reference point for people when creating a tactic on Football Manager.

It might also make people strip back to the basics in their thinking and allows them to play in complex ways by keeping it all simple.

The key to that is not overthinking stuff and if we use a player role, duty or any kind of tactical setting on Football Manager, you understand what it actually does.

Cleon tries and gives you meaning for why you select something and understand why something does or doesn’t work.

The Playbook Chapters

1. Intro

2. How you Want to Play - You need some kind of plan of action, in this chapter, we take a look at the very beginning of tactical creation as we look to create a starting point.

3. The Shape - Whatever shape you use, it will have strengths and weaknesses. This chapter is a few words about actually understanding the shape and what it means.

4. Playing Styles - After identifying the shape you will use it’s time to start focusing on the playing style you want to create. We delve into all the different playstyles, and the implications and try to understand the attribute side of the game too.

5. Understand the roles, duties and team instructions - This topic covers how to bring all the roles, duties and instructions together to create the style of play we are wanting. Focusing on the different phases of play and talking about the impact all of this has on the tactic.

6. Mentality - In this section, we break down mentality and I give an insight into how I select what I’ll use. Less is more.

7. AM vs MC - I explain why I decided to go with central midfielders instead of attacking midfielders. I talk about the pros and cons of both variations and why I selected what I did.

8. Training The Eye - Lots of people struggle with knowing what to look out for when trying to find faults and issues with their systems. In this chapter, I try and break down how I focus on things and simplify the game for myself by developing a system to help with the identifying issues part.

9. Have Options - Games strategies! That’s basically what this section is. Whether it’s a tactical change, substitution, role change, settings change etc. We have it all covered in here.

10. Don't panic - A chapter dedicated to understanding the context of what you actually see happening.

11. The Next Steps - Once you’ve got a tactic and playstyle, what you do next is covered under this section. I take a deep dive and talk you through what I do.

12. General Observations - Is the system/players/settings all playing/doing what you expected? Again I break it all down in this section as we put everything we learned in the other 11 chapters into motion.

13. Further Refining - I talk about how we can use other tools available in the game to help us with really honing down our tactics and playing style.

14. Piecing it all Together - The finished product can take a while to achieve and is something that can take seasons to perfect. In this section, I talk through all the settings, roles and instructions and give a real breakdown of how it all links together.

15. Credits

---

No matter how experienced you are in the game and confident in your own set-ups, this will give you some food for thought with the above throughout the book.

As with everything though, remember this is just Cleon's way of playing the game and building tactics along with maintaining them. It isn't a hard and fast rule.

If you download it please leave feedback below after reading it and let us know how it felt.

It is free of charge and can be downloaded at the following links.

Download Links

PDF version
Google Drive Mediafire

Epub version
Mega Mediafire

Hope you all enjoy the book.