Getting the Best Out of Your Tactics

We all want to win in Football Manager but much more than that we want to do it by playing our football. At least that’s how I want to do it.

If you’ve ever read any of my articles on this platform, you’d notice that I’m a big advocate of building a club and to do that, you have to change the philosophy, identity, and mentality of the club, even if it's a lower league club.

I have mentioned in my YouTube video that in FM 23 and 24, every manager has an identity, even you as a manager. This identity does also impact your chance of getting a big new job.

What’s interesting is, if you’ve been the kind of manager that sticks to his philosophy and style of play, what you’d notice in the game is that the club begins to change their expectation especially when it comes to playing style / tactical style.

That is how important the game has shifted towards building a club. Rather than just winning, you get sustained wins/club building. Now, I’m not saying this is the only way to do this but this might be an enriching and exciting way… maybe…

I have seen a lot of people complain about their tactics and while there may be problems, at least for some, ultimately, football IRL, is risk versus reward, something FM24 has adopted very well.

However, one thing people haven’t considered is the importance of training to tactics and playing style. Training has always been seen as a way to improve players ability and that is true but more than that, it is intended to improve how you play.

IRL every manager uses the training to improve how they play, not only getting players used to their philosophy and playing style but also preparing for the next game. There is an interesting video from The Coaches Book that explains how training is done in real life.

I’m going to try not to tell you what to do but give you reasons to rethink certain things when it comes to training in FM 24.

Tactical Style Vs Training Schedule

One thing I talked about in FM 23 regarding training was how to incorporate your tenets of play into your training schedule and see how your player adopts that into the game itself. However, that doesn’t necessarily work in FM 24.

I say necessarily because it might just have been me not thinking about the strain my tactical setup and style of play have on my players and incorporating that in my training schedule.

Nevertheless, the one thing that caught my eye during my research into training and what sessions correlated to what I wanted to see my team exhibit was my tactical style.

It was quite fascinating to realise that the game has an interpretation of my tactical setup based on the combinations of player roles and duty (something that has always been there but I made nothing of it) and its proposed training schedule for every tactical style.

Notice in the first image, the playing style is empty? Because that’s for you to decide.

For example, I’ve been playing through the middle with a 433 to 325 when in possession. The game read that particular tactic as tiki-taka. Thus, I tweaked my training based on the game’s idea of a tiki-taka training session. We indeed played tiki-taka and were able to keep up with the intensity such play required.

That said, I also made sure the tenets of my play i.e what I wanted my players to do on the pitch, was also added to the session. However, to test this out, I switched my play to a 433 to 316 when in position but I also wanted to play through the middle.

The game read the changes to my tactics and determined that my tactical style was wing play and I kid you not, my team began to play more to the wings than the centre, even when I added the instruction "play through the centre".

Unless I added "Be disciplined" to the instruction, they went through the wings. My wingers were easily doubled up on and we weren’t doing as good as we were. We were still winning though but not as smartly as I was before.



Then I incorporated what the game says I needed to be training based on my tactical style. Yes, I also incorporated my tenets to it though but the foundation of the schedule was based on what the game says is ideal for a wing play tactical style. We are now back on form.


Now, I cannot say for certain that it is the reason why because I figured out how to stop the opposition from playing using Arsenal’s real-life pressing set-up in the 23-24 season. Don’t worry, I will be making a video for that. But one thing I can tell you is that on the ball, we were much better than before I switched the training schedule. I hope I still have the footage for the before though.

How Does This Work?

Well, I’ve basically given you everything I know. You just look at your tactical style and see what the game thinks of a training schedule that fits that style.

Begin with the “No Match” schedule to get a full idea of what the training should look like. It gives you an idea of the tenets of that tactical style (how the game classifies your tactics).



The spaces are where you want to put in the tenets of your playing style (what you desire from your team’s play). If I may, the tactical style from the game is just a template, how you arrange what you see is up to you. For example, I don’t have Match Tactics or Match Practice on my schedules but I have “General Trainings” like “Outfield” and “Overall”. Like I said, find a way to incorporate sessions that facilitate your philosophy / playing style into your schedule. Side note, make your final session 1 before the game be the set-piece routine. Something I learned from The Coaches Book.
By the way, I apologise for the lack of content both here and on YouTube. One of the reasons is because some of these ideas/experiments take time.