Download My Football Manager 2011 Tactic

Those of you who have been following my stories during the last year surely are familiar with the Notts County 4-4-2 tactic that has served me (and quite a few others) so well in FM 2010. But since there is an impressive amount of new people coming to the website lately searching for a Football Manager 2011 tactic I thought that it would be helpful to put the tactic that I’m currently using in the game up for download.

First, a quick description of the formation and the philosophy. I am a fan of the 4-4-2 set ups, that’s no secret, so I tried to re-create such a tactic in Football Manager. The formation is a standard 4-4-2 with a high defensive line.An important thing is that you should have pacey defenders, otherwise the opponents will always exploit the space behind your defense. Having a good quick goalkeeper also helps because the goalie’s role is set to «sweeper keeper», that means he has to rush out and intercept when needed. Here are the player roles:

Goalkeeper — Sweeper Keeper (defend)

Full Backs — Full Back (defend)

Centre Backs — Limited defender (defend)

Wingers — Defensive wiger (attack)

Right Central Midfielder — Deep Lying Playmaker (defend) — this one is the team’s playmaker, you should have a midfielder with good passing and creativity for this role. He should have good defensive attributes too.

Left Central Midfielder — Central Midfielder (support)

Right Striker — Complete forward (support) — this forward often tracks back to give a hand in midfield but also links up play when attacking.

Left Striker — Defensive forward (attack)

The philosophy that I chose is fluid, giving players more freedom to create and express themselves on the pitch. As you can see I want the team to be aggressive and attacking, the team should press the opponents when we don’t have the ball and pass it shortly when we do. This can produce a rather spectacular style of play with short passes and quite a few scoring chances created every game. Normally the tactic will give you better ball possession than your opponent. Go to the next page to read more details and download the tactic.

Go to the next page to read more details and download the tactic.

One of the most important things in modern football is to keep the team compact on the pitch, the lines should be close to one another without big gaps between them. The opponents will always look to exploit the gaps between the defensive line and the midfield line so keeping that short is very important in my view. I can illustrate that with what my Vauxhall team did in the friendly game against Tranmere, as you can notice from the average positions of the players the team was rather «short» on the pitch. I changed almost all the players at half time and while the whole team pushed higher up the pitch after the break, the distances between the lines were kept almost intact. Of course, that requires a lot of effort from the players so I always look to bring in footballers with good work rate and physical attributes (stamina, pace, acceleration).

Interceptions are an important part of the game with this tactic, as you press the opponents constantly chances are that they will give the ball away. As you can see from the match analysis we managed to make quite a few interceptions in the opposition half and in midfield but there could me much more with better players. When you intercept the ball in midfield or in the opposition half you have a much better chance of creating a goal scoring opportunity because most likely the opponent’s defense will be caught unprepared.

You can download the tactic by clicking on the picture below and after downloading you have to copy or move the file into the My Documents>Sports Interactive>Football Manager 2011>tactics folder. Then start your game, go to the tactics screen and select this tactic from the «archived tactics» section.

That’s about it, I’m looking forward to any feedback or questions regarding this tactic, I hope you will find it helpful. I would also like to invite you to share your own tactics here, there will be lots of people that would love to test them and provide feedback, including myself :)